It’s fun, like all his films, and when it gets heavy at the end, it feels earned, and you feel like the characters have really been changed by the events. The quietness of summer-boredom, and the lethargy of the students, the everyday day-to-day life of school, emphasised by the humming of cicadas (something anime fans will know well), long cuts of classrooms, playing three-person catch, and Hosoda’s favourite cloud formations (we’ve done the research, he uses the same cloud formation in almost all of his films, you can check, we’re not crazy), and punctuated by the silliness of our main character, a high-schooler goofing around with time travel. This is where Hosoda’s best traits start shining through. It is loosely based on a 1967 novel of the same name, but only in premise. Now we’re getting into the proper bulk of Hosoda’s oeuvre, where the director finally got to come into his own! The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is considered a modern classic by those who know it, and it’s not hard to see why. People were impressed by the use of CG to create cool-looking creatures, something Hosoda seems to be a fan of. The art style was divisive again, and featured more of the same from Digimon. Toei let him use his own signature animation style for this film, and while it is very nicely animated, there’s not much to say about the film as a whole. The second film he worked on was One Piece Film 6: Baron Omatsuri And The Secret Island. The stories are crazy, but the art style makes them look so mundane and, ‘of our world,’ that you can’t help but laugh at the expert juxtaposition. All these things serve to give the works a more realistic and grounded feel. He uses washed-out colours, and never uses shiny highlights. His art style has a lot of characters with simple features, and round, “blobby” faces, that lends itself well to being animated really easily. His characters are always bouncing around, making really expressive faces, and they’re always just doing something in every scene. People couldn’t appreciate the simple designs, and confused his animation-friendly style for “bad art.” In reality, the film has gorgeously animated fight scenes, and even the talking heads scenes don’t shy away from meticulous detail.
DAYLIFE THE GIRL WHO LEAPT THROUGH TIME TV
This was the first time Hosoda’s divisive art style was introduced in a mainstream way, and it didn’t go over well with many people, especially since it looked nothing like the TV show. The family roots were still there, particularly in the way Tai and the DigiDestined care about their Digimon, but it’s mostly just a goofy comedy with some great action and surprisingly nice animation. They’re two fun and hilarious shorts, and serve as excellent supplementary pieces to the Digimon TV show, but it’s clear that Hosoda had more potential to be tapped after these. In reality, two of Hosoda’s short films made up the majority of the film. Hosoda’s directorial film debut was Digimon: The Movie, kinda, if you count the Saban mash-up of three different Digimon short films into one “feature film” (can you tell they were trying really hard to compete with certain ‘Pocket Monsters?’). He shows us not only how important our family is, and how we have to cherish them, but that our family is also what you make of it, and it can extend well beyond blood relatives.
Now comedy/drama is a very popular genre in anime films, but most of the popular ones, particularly Makoto Shinkai’s films like Your Name, and Garden Of Words, focus on young romantic relationships, whereas Hosoda likes to look at the family dynamic, and a how family can lift people up, change them for the better, and bring people together. Hosoda’s preferred style of is definitely family-comedy/drama.
Before his latest film releases and blows us all away, we’d like to look at his previous works and see what makes Mamoru Hosoda so great. That being said, his newest film, Mirai Of The Future, is coming to cinemas this month. Hosoda has plenty of great films, but not really a Your Name, Ghost In The Shell or Perfect Blue. Now, if you really like anime, you’re no doubt familiar with his work, but he hasn’t really achieved the same status (yet) as some of the other directors named above. Their work has been able to break past the difficult stigma anime sometimes has against it, a problem many of us will be aware of if you’ve ever tried to introduce someone to an anime you like… One director who deserves to be noted up there with these other titans of the medium is Mamoru Hosoda. Hayao Miyazaki, Makoto Shinkai, Mamoru Oiishi, Satoshi Kon these are a handful of prolific anime directors whose names and reputations are acknowledged well beyond the “hardcore anime fan” demographic.
0 kommentar(er)
