If I'd known then...

This blog post is for me – just me – it probably won’t mean much to the rest of you anyway, unless you are fans of cartoons – animation, as it’s poshly called.

I was lucky enough to be born after the second world war, when it became possible for the children of working class families – girls as well as boys – to benefit from higher education. We were pushed to go to university at my school. So I did. I didn’t know any better. Neither did my teachers, most of whom I think were first generation graduates themselves. I studied French and drama. In the course of my degree I discovered film and wrote my dissertation on the development of the horror movie from the 1920s to the 1960s. Looking back, film is the direction I should have taken.

But back then there was no national film school and I had no idea there could be jobs in film. I’m still very envious of a classmate who walked into the STV studios in Glasgow and blagged his way into first work experience and then an apprenticeship as a cameraman. If I had my time over, I would be a cinematographer. If you want to see what a good cinematographer does, have a look here:

http://listverse.com/2009/09/12/top-10-greatest-cinematographers/

I don’t agree with all the choices here but the list shows if you’re looking for the real creatives in cinema, you need to look at the cinematographers. Not surprisingly, a lot of film directors started out as cinematographers.

My hero is not on the list of top cinematographers. He is Hayao Miyazaki, the main developer of the anime style and chief director of the Japanese production company Studio Ghibli, from which I hear he’s just retired. The studio has made 19 full-length animated feature films, the best known of which are: Spirited Away, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and My Neighbour Totoro. Howl’s Moving Castle and Princess Mononoko are also well known in the west.

Anime films often feature very young and precocious heroes and heroines, the Japanese landscape, fantastical visual effects and limited dialogue. The films are characterised by their slow pace and by attention to detail. Onscreen, the characters have large round eyes – interestingly, the opposite of Japanese eyes. Where the films involve young people, often things are left unexplained: we are shown life from the point of view of the young people and adult matters are not gone into very deeply. For example, in My Neighbour Totoro, the young heroine is mostly alone in the Japanese countryside and it is only quite far into the story that we learn she is living with her father and sister while her mother is in hospital for treatment – though we are not told what for.

I know this is a fairly obscure kind of film-making, but if you’re still with me let me tell you about The Hedgehog (French 2009). This is anime in a European setting.

The heroine Paloma is very young – 11. She is a very bright child, very talented in several ways. She is also quite isolated. Paloma doesn’t have big round eyes, but she does have glasses that make her eyes look bigger, that is when the glasses are not tangled up in her hair.

The story is told through her eyes. Most of the film is not animated but some of it is told through her artwork and through simple animations. We see that her mother is disturbed but are not told why. Her father is what is called in the jargon ‘unavailable’ – too concerned with his job to spend time with the family. The two main characters beside Paloma are Renee the concierge of Paloma’s building and the new (Japanese) neighbour Kakuro Ozu, both mysterious and acting out an adult scenario that Paloma doesn’t understand. The film is slow. There’s not much of a plot but what there is is captured by Paloma on the video camera her dad has given her.

The story ends badly. There’s no moral here, just a study of people and very interesting they are too. I’m glad to say the cast act with restraint, as they would in a real anime film.

I’m sorry Hayao Miyazaki has retired. In his career he has developed a style of cinema that combines people, nature and that element of life that has things happen that we don’t really understand, that make no sense or are just simply weird. It’s been a pleasure to know his films. I hope there are others out there ready to carry on what Miyazaki started.