Don’t
call it a comeback. Sure, legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki announced his retirement
yet again, but everyone hoped he still really didn’t mean it. It turns out we
might just get a little bit more from him after all. Kaku Arakawa captures the auteur
as he comes to grips with the current state of animation and his mortality in Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki, which opens this
Friday in New York and also has two special nation-wide Fathom Events
screenings.
When
Arakawa first visits the master in his retirement, he is clearly bored, but leery
of starting any new projects, due to his age. Rather regrettably, he has recently
attended several funerals for former Ghibli colleagues. The absence of so many past
collaborators contributes to his reluctance. Yet, Miyazaki just can’t stop
himself.
Before
long, he is working on a short for the Ghibli Museum titled Boro the Caterpillar, but the kicker is
this time around he is working with a team of CGI animators. Initially,
Miyazaki is convinced only computer techniques can replicate the movement of a caterpillar,
but he soon falls back only his old working methods. Inevitably, that includes
stressing out his long-time (long-suffering) producer, Toshio Suzuki.
Admittedly,
there is a lot of puttering in Never-Ending
Man, but it eventually evolves into a surprisingly philosophical meditation
on the nature of creativity and maybe even the implications of the singularity.
A key moment comes when a CGI start-up pitches their technology to Miyazaki
using a stunningly poor choice of animation clips. It is an awkward scene in
which the master makes it crystal clear how appalled he is by the grotesqueness
of it, but to Miyazaki, it becomes an example of something no human animator
could stomach if they had to hand illustrate it frame-by-frame. Indeed,
sometimes it takes a cranky humanist like Miyazaki to remind us how process and
technology shapes an artist’s vision and values.
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