Ocean Waves

Year of Release: 1993
Director:  Tomomi Mochizuki
Screenplay:  Kaori Nakamura, based on the novel I Can Hear the Sea by Saeko Himuro
Starring:  Nobuo Tobita, Toshihiko Seki, Yoko Sakamoto
Running Time:  72 minutes
Genre:  Anime, drama, slice-of-life, romance

This film was produced by the legendary animation company Studio Ghibli and premiered on Japanese television on May 5 1993.

It opens with a young man, Taku Morisaki (voiced by Tobita) waiting at a train station in Tokyo, where he glimpses a familiar woman.  This takes him back two years to when he was a high school student in the small town of Kochi, and a love triangle that springs up between him, his best friend, Yutaka Matsuno (voiced by Seki) and a transfer student from Tokyo, Rikako Muto (voiced by Sakamoto).  Yutaka is immediately infatuated with the beautiful Rikako, while Taku, despite being very attracted to her, is put off by her difficult personality.  However, Taku grows increasingly close to Rikako during a class trip to Hawaii, and an impromptu trip to Tokyo.  However, as we all know very well, these things are rarely simple.

This was originally intended as a way for Studio Ghibli to allow their younger staff members to make a quick, low budget film, even though it ran over schedule and over budget.  It's a lesser Ghibli work, and the animation is not as impressive as usual, however it is still a good movie, with some beautiful visuals.   This is a straightforward contemporary romantic drama with no fantasy elements whatsoever, in fact it is interesting that it was done as an animation and not live action.  However the animation does work well for the material.  It's a quiet, graceful film that should appeal to fans of more "realistic" slice-of-life anime. 

Taku and Rikako in Ocean Waves        

Pom Poko

Year of Release:  1994
Director:  Isao Takahata
Screenplay:  Isao Takahata
Starring:  Konkontei Schinchou, Makoto Nonomura, Yuriko Ishida
Running Time:  114 minutes
Genre: Animation, fantasy, comedy  

In the Tama Hills, in the outskirts of Tokyo, a group of tanuki (Japanese raccoon dogs) find their homes threatened by human developers.  The lazy and capricious tanuki take a break from their favorite pastimes of partying, eating and fighting to use their considerable shape-shifting powers to fight against the developers.

This is one of the lesser known entries in the back catalogue of Japan's great Studio Ghibli .  The storyline suggests a fairly conventional plot of cute animals fighting to save their homes from greedy developers, but the film is far weirder and darker than that suggests.  Writer and director Iasao Takahata (who also made Grave of the Fireflies (1988), Only Yesterday (1991), My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999) and the Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013)) specialised in films inspired by and based around Japanese history and folklore and this is the case here.  The film uses a variety of animation styles, from realistic depictions of landscapes and animals, to more traditional cute animation, to images based on traditional Japanese art, one sequence even animates the action as video game graphics.  The film uses a documentary-style voice over and moves from goofy, slapstick comedy (true to the folklore the tanuki have massive testicles which they use in their shape-shifting), to surprisingly dark and violent.  It's funny and entertaining, but it's very inconsistent in tone and certainly too long.  Some of the sequences used when the tanuki terrify people with grotesque monsters and demons are genuinely nightmarish, and they are far from averse to straight up killing people, so it might be worth checking it out yourself before showing it to young children.  The films' tonal inconsistencies and the donwbeat ending really threw me when I first saw it, but I enjoyed it much more on a second viewing        

Tanuki in Pom Poko