I’m not sure what to make of the fact that the Barbie movie isn’t scheduled to be released on DVD, etc. until March. I know it’s coming up on two months since it was released in theaters, but I’m seeing other movies like Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse that hit DVD stage in about three months from initial release. It’s going to be 6.5 months for Barbie.
You make that delay sound like a bad thing…
It’s just unusual these days. The big push to get everything on a 45 day theatrical window meant movies hit streaming and cable services faster, and then home media faster. Barbie is going to be double what most other movies are these days.
To address the Barbie delay, it actually came out on the usual schedule. I think I was seeing some kind of placeholder date.
If you liked Ghostbusters: Afterlife, then get ready for Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. Most of the cast from the original film joins Paul Rudd’s group for this one.
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Hayao Miyazaki, known for over a dozen very famous animated films like My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle, announced in 2013 he was retiring because of his age. Then while working on the short film Boro the Caterpillar, he decided he wasn’t and proceeded with making a new full-length animated film. It just premiered and I thought, “I better go see this because it may be the last one he makes, and then I probably should get around to watching his previous films because I bought some of them on DVD and haven’t seen them yet.” I may have seen pieces of them but not watched any of them from start to finish.
I remembered this was being released soon when I was talking with a person at work last week and the conversation turned to animated films. She didn’t know about it, so we checked the movie times and found a theater that’s close to her house and has the screening she wanted to see.
There will be at least one more by Miyazaki. He goes into the office every day to work on developing it. Production will come later. Toshio Suzuki, the co-founder and president of Studio Ghibli, says he can no longer convince Miyazaki to retire. Maybe there will be more than one, and when the time comes, maybe his son Goro can continue the family legacy. He’s already directed three films.
For this review, I am using Wikipedia as a reference, but I’m trying to keep the review part based on what I remember from last night.
The current film is called The Boy and the Heron in the US, but the Japanese title is 君たちはどう生きるか (Kimitachi wa Dō Ikiru ka: “How Do You Live?”) and it premiered there on July 14. There is a 1937 novel by that name and the book appears in this movie, but it’s unrelated to the book other than the book being a plot point for the movie.
The film opens with air raid sirens sounding and a fire at a hospital. Shoichi Maki, an air munitions factory owner, tells his son Mahito to stay put while he goes help fight the fire where his wife Hisako was.
Wikipedia states this is during 1943 in the Pacific War. I’m not sure how that year was pinned down, unless it was extrapolated from the hospital being really close to the kind of military locations that would have been the targets of the small-scale raids the US conducted starting in mid-1943. Like many buildings at the time, the hospital was constructed from wood, which means it didn’t survive. Like many kids, Mahito couldn’t just stay home when his mother was in danger, but no joy, only sorrow.
Not long after, Shoichi’s on the rebound with Hisako’s younger sister, Natsuko, and they marry. (Seriously, Wikipedia? “Remarries” the younger sister? Where’d you get that? I know they were doing the horizontal tango, but there was nothing in the movie to even infer they were married before. I just chalked it up to him thinking “My wife’s dead and she’s got a sister that looks like a lot like her. I wonder if the sister’s busy…”)
Ah, phoo. I gotta stop for a second and figure this out. If your aunt is going to have a baby, that makes the kid your cousin. But if your aunt becomes your step-mother, then the baby will be your step-brother or step-sister. Nope, that’s not right. Shoichi’s the father, so the baby will be Mahito’s half-brother or half-sister.
Okay. Got it. Moving on.
The war’s still going on and Shoichi decides they need to move out of the city. They pack up, but Shoichi has a lot of work to do at the factory, so Mahito and new mom Natsuko head back to her country estate. Once they get there, a heron starts acting conspicuous around Mahito, which she says is strange but doesn’t think much about it.
The heron isn’t the only thing that’s strange. The staff at the estate are a group of old, wizened women and one old, wizened man, all shorter than four feet tall. As I said, I haven’t seen a Miyazaki movie in its entirety, but I’ve seen enough of them to recognize the character design and to spot that they don’t match the design of all other human characters in this film. Not to say that they aren’t human. Just hunched over, shorter people that miss tobacco among the other wartime rationed goods. Or are they?
The heron keeps acting more and more strange and leads Mahito to an abandoned building somewhere on the estate grounds. He’s still grieving, the kids at school are bullying and attacking him, the heron’s getting annoying and the building has its own strange, forbidden history. But when Natsuko just wanders off for some strange reason, Mahito helps look for her, which leads him to learn the secret of the heron, the building and his family’s history.
There were a few points where I thought the movie might slip into familiar territory, but I’m glad they avoided that particular trope. It put me in mind of another famous fantasy movie that I also have only seen most of, but not all. I need to remedy that, too. I even bought some recent graphic novels based on it and haven’t read them, either. Note to self: get busy getting caught up on the good stuff you already have.
If you want to The Boy and the Heron, you have a choice of watching it in Japanese with English subtitles, or in English with occasional on-screen text that translates an important sign. The song that plays during the credits in the English version is in Japanese and has subtitles to translate it for you.
There’s quite a few famous actors doing voices for the English version: Robert Pattinson, Gemma Chan, Christian Bale, Mark Hamill, Florence Pugh, Willem Dafoe and Dave Bautista are the ones I recognize from the cast list.
Kind of a related note. The person I was talking with said she doesn’t like dubbed animation because they don’t get the voices to match way the mouths are drawn when talking. I didn’t think about it much then and just made a kind of casual comment about guessing that it would depend on whether you wanted accuracy or just something that mostly fits and lets you enjoy the story if you don’t speak the original language.
But after watching the One Piece TV series where a lot of the animation involves mouths that have no articulation except rapid-fire open and close movement like a hand puppet, I realize any dubbed animated TV series or movie will have that same problem. Higher quality animation will draw the mouths to match how the words were spoken by the voice actor, and any translation into a different language will never match the animation. (Trivia: Laika 3D-prints tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of swappable pieces for the mouth positions and facial expressions of their stop motion puppets.)
So I really don’t know how well “I don’t like dubbed because it doesn’t exactly match the lip flaps” stands up. To avoid having that problem, you’d have to animate multiple versions of the same episode or movie just so that the animation precisely matched each language.
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire premieres next week on the 22nd, but most of the theaters in my area will start showing it on the 21st. Regal, a nationwide theater chain, released a video yesterday about the Ghost Trap Popcorn Container they have for the fans.
Normally, you can get special popcorn buckets at the theater if you go see a movie right when it premieres before the inventory sells out. I don’t think the trap container will be because it’s a shape that you can’t stack together like a bucket. Storing them on site will take up a huge amount of room they probably don’t have, unless they do something like use the projection rooms and hallways leading to them for storage.
No problem. Just order it from the Regal Store and bring it with you. They even have a Firehouse Popcorn Tin.
Well, yes, problem. The Firehouse tin is already sold out and the trap container won’t be available until the 22nd. You’re not going to get it until at least a week after the premiere. You don’t know if Priority 1-2 day shipping will be available until it goes on sale, but that’s still Tuesday and beyond after the premiere.
This is really bad planning on Regal’s part. If you’re going to the trouble of making a collector’s item that works (the flaps on the cover open up) and your advertising shows it will be part of the excitement and experience of going to see a movie in a theater, this is something that needs to be in the hands of buyers before the premiere so they can have it in their hands as they walk into the theater on the day of the premiere.
This “you’ll get it some time later” way they’ve got the purchase set up deflates that. With movies like this, people get dressed up for the premiere. They cosplay for the premiere. They don’t wait two or three weeks after the premiere and then get dressed up and/or cosplay.
Regal, seriously. This was not well thought out. This is something I’d expect to have come from the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
Watched “Damsel” on Netflix over the weekend.
For me it was a nice bit of escapism away from the drudgery of daily life. The ending was a bit of a surprise, but it felt good when all was said and done.
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Watched “The International” on Netflix.
Fairly good run-of-the-mill detective story, but the ending is depressing.
The bank still wins and keep on doing business, and peace is not possible, perhaps it is a dark reference to our own reality.
I think the main actress can’t act to save her life, and the story is predictable and weak.
But the world design and the Dragon itself are well done. That is easily one of the best Dragon designs I’ve seen in years. The way the gold highlights the dark plate scales and the glow of the throat and chest pre-breath is clever.
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Making LEGO Movie-style versions of movie trailers seems to be pretty popular. I thought I was going to watch the same one for Deadpool & Wolverine, but I found out that there’s versions by at least two different people. This one’s more accurate and includes the comparison with the actual trailer.
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I saw this yesterday and thought, "Since they did a PGish version of Deadpool 2 (Once Upon A Deadpool), maybe they’d follow through on this idea and make a Lego version next. Hopefully, without Chris Pratt.
Coraline’s 15th anniversary is coming up, so it’s going to be in theaters again on August 15th with a remastered 3D version. I don’t normally watch 3D versions of movies because I don’t like the cliché of filmmakers including something that deliberately makes it looks like it’s going to hit the audience. The closeup of Will Smith’s nostrils in Men in Black III was enough to turn me off of it for good.
This one, I think I will go see it. I know about the movie and I’ve seen parts of it, but haven’t watched it all the way through. I even went to the LAIKA exhibit at MoPOP in Seattle. (I learned there that when the battery on my phone gets low, it will go through the motions but won’t actually take any pictures.)
It should be close enough to not seeing the movie at all to do a fresh review of it.
“Coraline’s Curious Cat Trail” is coming to downtown Portland, OR next month.
I don’t know if this is a plus or a minus for the new Beverly Hills Cop movie, but it exists:
The return of Crazy Frog singing Axel F while Axel F tries to run him over on the highway.
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That’s where dried frog pills comes from…
There’s a recipe for those in Nanny Ogg’s cookbook. No frog in the ingredients.
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Deadpool and Wolverine. I went in with high expectations and, I have to say, the movie exceeded those expectations by about 1000%. I laughed, I cried, I yelled “holy fucking hell” at least a dozen times. 10/10 would recommend. And, oh my god, the cameos!
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I know. There were some parts that I had to rewind and watch a couple of times they were so good.
Don’t make Dogpool sad and don’t make Cassandra Nova mad.
Don’t tell anyone about my cameo.