“Actually our work depends on how much we can appropriate from other people’s work! Painting, music, films, literature … it’s all grist for the mill. We think of our work not as individual creativity but like a lifelong baton relay. Your work passes through your body and your life; you transform it into something, and then you pass it on to the next generation.” Hiyao Miyazaki interviewed by Roger Ebert for The Chicago Sun Times, October 1999

My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
Written by Hayao Miyazaki
Produced by Toru Hara
86 minutes

Picking a film produced by Studio Ghibli is like tasting sushi when you’ve been raised on a diet of meat and potatoes animation from Walt Disney or Hanna-Barbera your whole life. The world of Hayao Miyazaki is one without heroes to cheer, villains to hiss at or talking animals to cue laughter. There are families and houses. Children learn to deal with change and to assume greater responsibility. In addition, the unseen surrounds them. As the story begins, there’s a slight feeling of unease, as well as fascination as the invisible world reveals itself. No film from Miyazaki exemplifies these sublime characteristics like the first to bring him an international audience, My Neighbor Totoro. 10-year-old Satsuki Kusakabe and her bratty 4-year-old sister Mei settle into life in the countryside, where their professor father has moved them to be closer to their mother, who recuperates from a long illness at a local hospital.

The Kusakabes are both excited and disquieted to discover their new house is inhabited by soot sprites, harmless creatures which scatter from light and whisper in the rafters. While Satsuki attends school, Mei explores the yard. There, Mei encounters two forest spirits, overstuffed rabbits which lead her into a magnificent camphor tree where the girl finds an even bigger forest spirit snoozing. Offering the name “Totoro”, the spirit vanishes before Satsuzki can meet him. She gets her chance while waiting for her father’s bus in a downpour and makes an impression on Totoro by introducing him to an umbrella. The spirits return the generosity of the Kusakabes by sprouting their garden to enormous heights. The spirits are unable to heal the girls’ mother and after losing her temper with her sister, Satsuki blames herself when Mei disappears. When search efforts by the townspeople falter, Totoro and his friends step in.

For his fourth feature film, animator Hayao Miyazaki sought a return to his childhood in Sayama Hills, which was farmland in the 1950s before it became suburban Tokyo. Miyazaki’s mother spent many years under bed rest with spinal tuberculosis, a detail that worked its way into the story. Executives at Tokuma Shoten Publishing Co. didn’t feel that sketches of Miyazaki’s nature spirits looked promising, so producer Toshio Suzuki proposed that Totoro be made in tandem with an adaptation of the novel Grave of the Fireflies and released as a double feature. A modest box office success in Japan, Miyazaki’s output began attracting comparisons to Walt Disney. Reaching an agreement with Tokuma for worldwide video distribution of Miyazaki’s films, The Walt Disney Company produced an English language dub of My Neighbor Totoro in 2005 featuring the voices of Dakota Fanning, Elle Fanning and Tim Daly as the Kusakabes.

Miyazaki’s compositions have fantastic depth of field, basking light on the old farmhouses, lush forests and rice fields the characters move past. To those who grew up on Josie and the Pussycats, the novelty of My Neighbor Totoro isn’t just the animation, but its spiritual depth. Respect for the natural world and an open mind toward the unseen course through the story, not as teaching points, but as an alternative to the lifestyle the Kusakabes are retreating from. My Neighbor Totoro is a bounty of both joy and imagination, as if Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are had been adapted for an Eastern audience. The girls are stricken early on with a giddiness that doesn’t cross over very well, something Miyazaki would change with his Oscar winning Spirited Away in 2001, but the pure enjoyment of the film is how different it is. Instead of catering to what the we expect, this magic carpet takes us somewhere different.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 75,711 users: 94% for My Neighbor Totoro

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: N/A

What do you say?

Whoever said that talking about politics, religion or sex on a blind date was a bad idea could just have easily applied that rule to movies. Or maybe like Peter Venkman said, it’s more of a guideline than a rule. I caught two movies recently that were the flip side of the same coin: independently financed romantic dramas ripe with political intrigue, both written and directed by women under the age of 40. Let’s see Blockbuster Video devote a shelf to that genre.

Night Catches Us (2010)
Directed by Tanya Hamilton
Written by Tanya Hamilton
Produced by Ron Simons, Sean Costello, Jason Orans
88 minutes

Tanya Hamilton was born in Jamaica and arrived in the United States with her mother at the age of 8, growing up in Maryland. A young painter for many years, she started making short films as an undergrad at The Cooper Union in New York. When it came to ideas for a feature film, Hamilton was inspired by a close friend of her mother’s, who had once organized a sit-in at the Johnson White House to protest racial violence in Selma and received a 1-year prison sentence as a result. Struck by how you could spend the rest of your life paying for a single decision, Hamilton workshopped a script at the 1999 Sundance Film Lab Institute. She assumed that like classmates Darren Aronofsky (Pi) and Debra Granik (Down to the Bone), getting a feature film off the ground might take her two years at most.

Hamilton’s script — which she began writing at age 31 — was set in Philadelphia 1976 amid the ashes of the once potent Black Panther Party. A 10-year-old named Iris begins to piece together events that led to the murder of her father, a Panther shot by the FBI on information furbished by Marcus, an ex-Panther who returns to Philly to bury his father. Marcus rekindles his relationship with Iris’ mother Patty, now an attorney. A Black Panther project without guns, an adult romance as opposed to a shoot ‘em up, Hamilton spent years listening to financiers tell her “no” until her fiction writing husband urged her to look for private investment from the black community. In June 2009, Night Catches Us finally began shooting in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia.

Playing DVDs on my MacBook, I’ve noticed a link between the quality of a movie and whether I finish it in one sitting or not. If I can make it to the end credits without ever hitting the pause button, that’s worth a 5-star rating. It’s in there with The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three as far as I’m concerned. Taking a break to jump on the world wide web and listen to music or watch Australian backyard rasslin’ on YouTube means something is awry; I lop off one star each time I hop on the web. Taking multiple nights to finish a movie indicates systematic failure by the filmmaker and if I send it back to Netflix unfinished? The ship done sunk. Night Catches Us is not Casablanca, but it’s more than seaworthy; credit Tanya Hamilton and her painter’s aesthetic to keeping my fickle senses peeled to her debut film.

With lush strokes, Germantown PA circa 1976 stands apart from any community I can remember seeing in a film. Pinned between the idealism of the ’60s and the realities of the next decade, uniformly black, the ghetto I was expecting seems overwhelmed instead by nature; trees, creeks, empty space. This gulf carries over into the lives of the characters, who struggle to find a common ground while holding onto the secrets they carry. Vintage R&B platters make cameos on the soundtrack while Philly’s own The Roots provide the low key musical score. It’s such a short, simple story that Wendell Pierce seems under nourished in his role as a crooked cop, but Anthony Mackie and Kerry Washington are credible as the fated ’70s lovers. Tanya Hamilton demonstrates a fantastic eye and ear for adapting her world to film.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 964 users: 60% for Night Catches Us

Metacritic “Metascore” average among 18 leading critics: 65 for Night Catches Us

What do you say?

“Portmanteau” is French for “coat rack”. Lewis Carroll appropriated the word in 1871 for Through The Looking Glass to explain two words merged into one; “chortle” is a portmanteau Carroll invented, while “Internet”, “blog” and “sexploitation” are three he did not. In the month of January, I’ll take a look at portmanteau films, where we find different coats hanging in the same closet, whether tailored by one filmmaker or the collaborative effort of several.

Fantasia (1940)
Directed by Samuel Armstrong (segments: Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, The Nutcracker Suite), James Algar (segment: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice), Bill Roberts & Paul Satterfield (segment: The Rite of Spring), David D. Hand (segment: Meet the Soundtrack), Hamilton Luske, Jim Handley & Ford Beebe (segment: The Pastoral Symphony), T. Hee & Norm Ferguson (segment: Dance of the Hours), Wilfred Jackson (segment: Night on Bald Mountain/ Ave Maria)
Written by Lee Blair, Elmer Plummer, Phil Dike (segment: Toccata and Fugue in D Minor), Sylvia Moberly-Holland, Norman Wright, Albert Heath, Bianca Majolie, Graham Heid (segment: The Nutcracker Suite), Perce Pearce, Carl Fallberg (segment: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice), William Martin, Leo Thiele, Robert Sterner, John Fraser McLeish (segment: The Rite of Spring), Otto Englander, Webb Smith, Erdman Penner, Joseph Sabo, Bill Peet, Vernon Stallings (segment: The Pastoral Symphony), Campbell Grant, Arthur Heinemann, Phil Dike (segment: Night on Bald Mountain/ Ave Maria)
Produced by Walt Disney, Ben Sharpsteen
125 minutes (roadshow version)/ 88 minutes (general release version)/ 124 minutes (DVD version)

Like piano lessons or spinach, Fantasia wavers between arduous and unpalatable, at least for those kiddies notified that the program will be good for them. Revisiting the film as an adult is a revelation. In late 1937, flush from the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Walt Disney hit on the idea of an animated short that would interpret a piece of classical music through the medium Disney’s studio was pioneering: motion picture animation. Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was selected, but the project grew from a short to a feature length portmanteau film, which Disney insisted be recorded stereophonically to mimic the acoustics of a concert hall. His engineers developed a stereo sound system dubbed “Fantasound”, but most exhibitors refused to pony up for its installation. Upon its U.S. release in November 1940, Fantasia was screened in only 14 theaters before being drastically recut for a general release.

Produced for roughly $2.2 million, Fantasia returned only $361,800 in its initial theatrical run, with World War II cutting off most of the international market. Despite winning two special Academy Awards, the picture was regarded as a failure by Disney himself. In 1969, the studio urged exhibitors to market the reissue the same way they would Easy Rider, “a special kind of trip”. Baby Boomers embraced it and today, the film is regarded as one of Disney’s milestone achievements. In essence, Fantasia is one of the boldest experiments (re: head-trips) Hollywood has ever produced. Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite is the most dazzling segment, in both the playful mystery of the music and its singular visual interpretation, with sprites putting on a fireworks display for the unseen world. The more open the imagination — or the more inebriated the cerebellum — the more stimulating the film proves to be.

Joining the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra in front of an immense canvas draped in blue light, emcee Deems Taylor introduces the first of eight classical music compositions conducted by Leopold Stokowski and interpreted by the artists of Walt Disney Studios. Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue In D Minor is a thundering trip through rays of light, cloud forms and geometric shapes. Nature is explored through Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite, with sugarplum faeries animating inanimate objects of the natural world. Paul Duka’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice tells the familiar story of magic and mischief with a mute Mickey Mouse as the star. Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is set to the biggest story in the universe, the evolution of life on earth, from its creation in the seas to its near extinction in the age of dinosaurs.

Returning after a brief intermission, our emcee employs the unsung hero of the Fantasia program — The Soundtrack — to appear and introduce several of the instruments of a symphony orchestra. Next up is Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, The Pastoral Symphony, with unicorns, fawns, centaurs and the creatures of Greek myth enjoying a bacchanal, which is threatened by the appearance of Zeus and a lightning storm brought down by Vulcan. Andre Ponchielli’s Dance of the Hours from the opera La Gioconda finds a ballet dancing hippo wooed by a hungry crocodile. The final segment combines two contrasting pieces; Modeste Moussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain opens with Satan conducting the armies of darkness in a booming nocturnal festival, which is defeated by dawn and the bells of Franz Schubert’s reverent Ave Maria.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 104,499 users: 77% for Fantasia

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

What do you say?

“Portmanteau” is French for “coat rack”. Lewis Carroll appropriated the word in 1871 for Through The Looking Glass to explain two words merged into one; “chortle” is a portmanteau Carroll invented, while “Internet”, “blog” and “sexploitation” are three he did not. In the month of January, I’ll take a look at portmanteau films, where we find different coats hanging in the same closet, whether tailored by one filmmaker or the collaborative effort of several.

Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983)
Directed by Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam (segment: The Crimson Permanent Assurance)
Written by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin
Produced by John Goldstone
106 minutes

Proving that a glimmer from Monty Python is a supernova compared to what constitutes comedy in other galaxies, The Meaning of Life is a greater portmanteau film, even if it ranks as lesser Python. The group was born in the undergraduate revues of Cambridge, where Graham Chapman, John Cleese and Eric Idle were students, and Oxford, where Terry Jones and Michael Palin met. While touring New York, Cleese met an American illustrator named Terry Gilliam. Through writing and performing satirical sketches on British stage, radio and television in the late 1960s, the six formed a comedy troupe. After four hugely influential TV series and two ridiculously profitable feature films, the group ventured to Jamaica — where they’d written Life of Brian (1979) — unable to agree on their next movie. Python hit on the idea of stitching together material by using the meaning of life as glue.

As with Life of Brian, Terry Jones would direct and Terry Gilliam would provide the animation, as well as a fantastic short film titled The Crimson Permanent Assurance that grew into a 16-minute segment. Awarded the Grand Jury Prize at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival, The Meaning of Life would be the last time all six members of Python worked together, with Graham Chapman dying of cancer in 1989. Gilliam’s whimsical short, with rousing music by John Du Prez and delightful model work, is the #1 reason to see the film, which peaks at the 1-hour mark with a sketch so flagrant it transcends flagrance. Even with longer pauses between the belly laughs, the hand craftsmanship and relentless social satire of Python is all here, cutting down performers they’ve influenced — namely veterans of Saturday Night Live who’ve given the movies a try — with a thousand arrows.

In a “short feature presentation”, aging accountants in London mutiny against their corporate masters, raising anchor on the Crimson Permanent Assurance and sailing the building to pillage the financial world. As the feature presentation begins, six goldfish (Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin) in a restaurant aquarium ponder what life is all about. In the first of twelve sketches, surgeons (Chapman, Cleese) get to the business of delivering a baby. The patriarch (Palin) of a Roman Catholic family in the slums of Yorkshire explains the predicament of contraception to his several dozen of children in a song titled “Every Sperm Is Sacred”. A public schoolteacher (Cleese) instructs a class on sex education with the help of his wife. Sent to fight in the Great War, a sergeant (Jones) is distracted from a mission when his men insist on showering him with presents.

Examining middle age, an American couple (Palin, Idle) vacation in a resort with an authentic medieval dungeon, ordering “conversation” about the meaning of life from their waiter (Cleese), who suggests “Live Organ Transplants” as a topic. Two paramedics (Chapman, Cleese) perform a liver removal before the donor is dead; they convince his wife (Jones) to volunteer her liver as well by introducing her to a man (Idle) whose song about the galaxy demonstrates how futile human existence is. Death is explored when the grossly obese Mr. Creosote (Jones) arrives at a French restaurant but is unable to hold down his meal. The Grim Reaper pays a visit to a dinner party, where the guests mistake him for “one of the men from the village”. Wrapping up the sketches, a TV host (Palin) delivers viewers the meaning of life, interjecting her own commentary.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 22,708 users: 83% for Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

What do you say?

“Portmanteau” is French for “coat rack”. Lewis Carroll appropriated the word in 1871 for Through The Looking Glass to explain two words merged into one; “chortle” is a portmanteau Carroll invented, while “Internet”, “blog” and “sexploitation” are three he did not. In the month of January, I’ll take a look at portmanteau films, where we find different coats hanging in the same closet, whether tailored by one filmmaker or the collaborative effort of several.

The Ten (2007)
Directed by David Wain
Written by Ken Marino & David Wain
Produced by Jonathan Stern, Ken Marino, David Wain, Paul Rudd, Morris S. Levy
96 minutes

Few portmanteau films can maintain a steady course throughout, but The Ten is a barrel of monkeys going over Niagara Falls. Ken Marino & David Wain met in 1993 as writers for the MTV sketch comedy series The State, which Wain co-created. The show’s cult following kept it on the air for three short seasons and ultimately, most of the cast formed the core of Reno: 911! on Comedy Central. Marino & Wain continued to write, riffing on the Ten Commandments until they had material to fill the script for a feature film. Producer Jonathan Stern got involved after working with the pair on Diggers, a little seen 2006 drama written by Marino and executive produced by Wain. Their lead actor Paul Rudd also joined as a producer. The Ten got a pass by the major studios, but Danny Fisher of City Lights Media Group and Morris S. Levy of MEGA Films were able to raise roughly $4 million in financing.

Shot in 28 days in Los Angeles, New York and Mexico City, the film was screened for the first time at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, where THINKFilm acquired North American distribution rights and gave it a very limited theatrical release that August in the U.S. The Ten is like a camp for grownups where college humor lives forever. It flounders between obnoxious and tasteless, which would be okay if it were funnier. Using the same blueprint as Wain’s feature film debut Wet Hot American Summer (2001) — the last time Janeane Garafalo was given something to do in a live action movie — The Ten gift wraps Winona Ryder for her best work in decades, maybe ever, with Thou Shalt Not Steal by far the best of the sketches. Augenblick Studios provided the second best piece, an animated one. The rest of the material may bore anybody who’s already declared a major.

Entering stage in front of two giant tablets, Jeff Riegert (Paul Rudd) is harangued by his wife Gretchen (Famke Janssen) as he introduces ten stories inspired by the Ten Commandments. A skydiving mishap confines a man (Adam Brody) to a hole, where celebrity worship goes to his head. A chaste librarian (Gretchen Mol) travels to Mexico, where she takes the Lord’s name in vain by discovering her lover (Justin Theroux) is really Jesus Christ. A doctor (Ken Marino) pays the price for killing a patient as a “goof”. Two black teenagers (Cedric Sanders, Arlen Escapeta) humor their white mother (Kerri Kenney) when she brings home an Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonator (Oliver Platt) to pose as their biological father. Two neighbors (Liev Schreiber, Joe Lo Truglio) covet each other’s goods and compete to acquire the most CAT Scan machines.

Jeff has enough of Gretchen and takes up with a nubile girl (Jessica Alba) he has little in common with. Back to the stories, the imprisoned doctor covets a fellow convict (Rob Corddry) to the chagrin of the cellmate who’s made him his prison bitch. A newlywed (Winona Ryder) becomes so enamored with a ventriloquist’s dummy that she steals it and goes on the run. Dope fiends console the ventriloquist (Michael Zeigfeld) with the tale of a lying rhino bearing false witness to the animals in his neighborhood. Jeff & Gretchen bump into each other and attempt to rekindle their passion, with Jeff’s marriage to Dianne Weist qualifying it as an act of adultery. Finally, a husband (A.D. Miles) rebels against his wife’s desire for him to attend church by starting a club where suburban men can hang out naked and do little else but listen to Roberta Flack on the Sabbath.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 10,291 users: 40% for The Ten

Metacritic “Metascore” average among 22 leading critics: 50 for The Ten

What do you say?

“Portmanteau” is French for “coat rack”. Lewis Carroll appropriated the word in 1871 for Through The Looking Glass to explain two words merged into one; “chortle” is a portmanteau Carroll invented, while “Internet”, “blog” and “sexploitation” are three he did not. In the month of January, I’ll take a look at portmanteau films, where we find different coats hanging in the same closet, whether tailored by one filmmaker or the collaborative effort of several.

Four Rooms (1995)
Directed by Allison Anders (segment: The Missing Ingredient), Alexandre Rockwell (segment: The Wrong Man), Robert Rodriguez (segment: The Misbehavers), Quentin Tarantino (segment: The Man From Hollywood)
Written by Allison Anders (segment: The Missing Ingredient), Alexandre Rockwell (segment: The Wrong Man), Robert Rodriguez (segment: The Misbehavers), Quentin Tarantino (segment: The Man From Hollywood)
Produced by Lawrence Bender
97 minutes

A victory lap by the studio that brought you Pulp Ficton, Four Rooms turns into a demolition derby. Alexandre Rockwell hit upon the idea for a portmanteau film tied together by the hijinks of a bellhop on New Year’s Eve after he befriended Allison Anders and Quentin Tarantino at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, where their career calling cards In The Soup, Gas Food Lodging and Reservoir Dogs were on the bill (Robert Rodriguez joined the club when he met Rockwell and Tarantino at the Toronto Film Festival with his calling card El Mariachi). The role of the bellhop was conceived with Steve Buscemi in mind, but when he declined, Tim Roth took the part. With Miramax Films footing a budget that settled at $4 million, Four Rooms was rushed into production while Tarantino was being crowned master of the universe on the press tour for Pulp Fiction in the fall of 1994.

Author Peter Biskind’s account — in Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film — was that Four Rooms was produced in complete acrimony, with studio co-chairman Harvey Weinstein taking a 160-minute cut and lopping over an hour off, eviscerating segments by Anders and Rockwell, who blamed the toxic end product on the hubris of Tarantino. Officially the worst effort “QT” has yet written and directed, the concept behind Four Rooms is completely (and refreshingly) bug nuts to begin with, as if Jerry Schatzberg, Elaine May, George Lucas & Steven Spielberg agreed to make an anthology film together in 1976. There are excellent ideas at play here, an animated title sequence for instance, but like almost everything else in the movie, it’s indicative of how rushed the whole enterprise appears. Rodriguez’s contribution is far and away the most coherent.

On New Year’s Eve at the once glorious “Hotel Mon Signor” in Los Angeles, the crusty bellhop (Marc Lawrence) passes the torch to his heir apparent, Ted (Tim Roth), advising him to “stay clear of night clerks, hookers, kids and married arguments.” In the first of four misadventures, Ted escorts a coven of witches (Valeria Golino, Madonna, Alicia Witt, Sammi Davis, Lili Taylor) to the honeymoon suite, where their ritual to resurrect a 1950s pinup queen from the afterlife hits a snag and requires the aloof Eva (Ione Skye) to elicit a specimen from Ted. Summoned to refill the ice for a Yuppie party in Room 404, Ted then bumbles into a room where a deranged husband (David Proval) has bound and gagged his wife Angela (Jennifer Beals) and lies in wait with a gun for her supposed lover to join them.

In Room 309, a couple (Antonio Banderas, Tamlyn Tomita) depart for a night on the town. The man offers Ted $300 to check on his children (Danny Verduzco, Lana McKissak) every 30 minutes. Making it $500, the “pain the ass” kids torment Ted by discovering a hypodermic needle and the body of a hooker in the room. On the brink of quitting, Ted phones the apartment of his boss, where a stoner (Marisa Tomei) answers and tries to lift his spirits. The boss (Kathy Griffin) talks Ted into staying long enough to service the penthouse, where movie star Chester Rush (Quentin Tarantino) has requested a block of wood, a bucket of ice and a meat cleaver. Chester’s love for “The Man From Rio” episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents has inspired a wager with his assistant (Paul Calderon) that Ted discovers he has a role in.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 14,449 users: 72% for Four Rooms

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

What do you say?

Logging in to Netflix Instant for a movie to watch is like being hungry and shown to a food replicator. It doesn’t solve my problem — it introduces one thousand new ones. Luckily, I can see which genres are rated higher in nutritional content, in this case, 4 or 4 ½ star ratings out of 5 stars. “Documentary” had a lot of those. So did “Anime & Animation”. In the month of November, I take another trip around the globe to sample recent animated feature films. Next stop: Tokyo, Japan.

Paprika (2006)
Directed by Satoshi Kon
Screenplay by Seishi Minakami & Satoshi Kon, based on the novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui
Produced by Jungo Maruta, Masao Takiyama
90 minutes

While Christopher Nolan took nine years to crack his script for Inception, a detective thriller unshackled by the limitations of live action explored the dream world with far less gravity and much more verve. Written by Yasutaka Tsutsui, Paprika was first published as a serial in the Japanese edition of women’s magazine Marie Claire in 1991. With interest from several filmmakers over the years, it was animator Satoshi Kon who impressed the author most. Kon was already a fan of the novel and counting Tsutsui as an influence, had considered adapting Paprika as a follow-up to his critically acclaimed 1998 debut feature Perfect Blue. Kon was finishing his commitment to Madhouse Ltd for the 13-episode TV series Paranoia Agent in 2004 when he learned that the Tokyo based animation studio was searching for its next project. He pitched them Paprika.

With a budget and schedule roughly that of Kon’s third film Tokyo Godfathers ($2.7 million USD), Paprika was completed in time for the 2006 Venice Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Golden Lion. In a genre that usually takes either a compass pencil to map out or multiple viewings to get straight, Paprika is drawn with soft focus and a straight arrow, injecting soulful characterization and a narrative economy more congruent to an American cops ‘n robbers thriller than Japanese anime. Its dynamic protagonist — a psychotherapist who leads a double life as a “dream detective” — not only has the ability to leap into paintings or billboards within the dreams of her patients, but duels with her own doppelgänger, each unsure who is directing the other. Its fantasy sequences blow the hinges off anything seen in a live action movie: enigmatic and whimsical, like a dream.

Detective Kogawa Toshimi (Akio Ôtsuka) scans the crowd of a circus for a suspect but soon finds himself being chased through scenes from adventure, espionage and romantic comedy movies. Guiding the cinema loving cop through this territory is enigmatic 18-year-old Paprika (Megumi Hayashibara), a “dream detective” that his college pal Dr. Shima (Katsunosuke Hori) introduced Kogawa to for help with a recurring nightmare in which the cop investigates his own murder. In the waking world, Paprika is known as Dr. Chiba Atsuko (also Megumi Hayashibara), 29-year-old therapist at the Foundation For Psychiatric Research. Chiba’s colleague — an overweight genius named Dr. Tokita Kohsaku (Tôru Furuya) — has invented a device known as the DC Mini, which allows users to share dreams and can treat mental illness by redirecting bioelectric current through the brain.

When three DC Mini devices are stolen and Dr. Shima nearly kills himself when a dream is planted into his subconscious, the dream program is shut down by the Chairman (Toru Emori), who remains wary of technology being used to manipulate the sanctity of the mind. Assisted by able-bodied researcher Osanai Morio (Kôichi Yamadera), Chiba and Tokita track down a lab assistant believed responsible for the theft and attempted murder. The thief has the ability to jump into the dreams of anyone with prolonged exposure to the DC Mini, like Dr. Chiba. Soon, psychiatric patients and the public are endangered by a collective dream in which a fanciful “parade of everything under the sun” pulls dreamers into a malaise in which they are unable to recover. Dr. Chiba/Paprika enters the dream world to find a cure.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 10,055 users: 87% for Paprika

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 81 for Paprika

What do you say?

Logging in to Netflix Instant for a movie to watch is like being hungry and shown to a food replicator. It doesn’t solve my problem — it introduces one thousand new ones. Luckily, I can see which genres are rated higher in nutritional content, in this case, 4 or 4 ½ star ratings out of 5 stars. “Documentary” had a lot of those. So did “Anime & Animation”. In the month of November, I take another trip around the globe to sample recent animated feature films. Next stop: Melbourne, Australia.

Mary and Max (2009)
Directed by Adam Elliot
Written by Adam Elliot
Produced by Melanie Coombs
92 minutes

With its whimsical design and a sonorous screenplay, Mary and Max soars like a Dr. Seuss fable made for grownups. After winning an Academy Award for Best Animated Short with Harvie Krumpet in 2004, Adam Elliot made the rounds at Disney, Pixar and Fox with pitches that fell on deaf ears. Returning to Australia, he began rereading letters by a New York pen pal he’d been corresponding with since the age of 17. Elliot felt that his long distance friend of 20 years — Jewish, atheist, a sufferer of Aspberger’s Syndrome — had all the makings of a character for his next film. Elliot spent six months storyboarding Mary and Max and another year and a half writing a script while producer Melanie Coombs raised financing. Screen Australia, Adirondack Pictures (a New York based film finance company) and Film Victoria ended up bankrolling Elliot’s first feature film at roughly $8 million AUS.

Elliot served as his own art director and designed all the characters for what took 50 crew members 57 weeks to shoot inside a Melbourne warehouse. Mary and Max was screened for the first time when it was selected to open the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, a first for a claymation feature. Elliot’s characteristic clay figures border on the grotesque, but the strength of his writing suggests an award winning graphic novel more than a movie script. Mary and Max is the anti-Shrek, brandishing abundant wit and imagination to do more than entertain kids, exploring characters who struggle to get out the door each morning. The result pushes the boundaries of animation. Barry Humphries (aka Dame Edna) provides the Seussian narration, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s vocal transformation as Max is superlative and even the hilarious product labels in the picture are worth a rental.

In the Mount Waverly suburb of Melbourne in 1976, a Narrator (Barry Humphries) begins “Mary Dinkle’s eyes were the color of muddy puddles. Her birthmark, the color of poo.” A painfully awkward child, 8-year-old Mary Daisy Dinkle (Bethany Whitmore) counts a pet rooster named Ethel as her only friend. Her favorite activities include drinking condensed milk and watching a cartoon called The Noblets, diminutive creatures that appeal to Mary because they never lack friends. Her father Noel works in a factory attaching strings to tea bags. Her mother Vera Lorraine Dinkle consumes liberal amounts of the sherry she uses in her recipes. Meanwhile, in New York, 44-year-old Max Jerry Horovitz (Philip Seymour Hoffman) also watches The Noblets. A chronic overeater who worships chocolate, Max has trouble sleeping and keeping pet goldfish alive.

Mary chooses Max’s name at random from a New York City phone book and writes him, including a Cherry Rite chocolate bar. Max is “confuzzled” by human beings and reacts to Mary’s letter by having an anxiety attack. Calming down, he answers Mary’s questions — like where babies come from in America — with candor. He also details his abhorrence of crowds, bright lights, sudden noises and strong smells, admitting that New York has all of these. Basking in Max’s words, Mary adopts a pen pal. She sends him chocolate. He advises her how to handle being teased at school. Max’s tension is diagnosed as Aspberger’s Syndrome, which adult Mary (Toni Collette) hopes to eradicate by studying disorders of the mind. She falls in love with her neighbor Damien (Eric Bana) and marries, but struggles with self-worth while a continent away Max continues to fight his inner demons.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 4,594 users: 89% for Mary and Max

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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Logging in to Netflix Instant for a movie to watch is like being hungry and shown to a food replicator. It doesn’t solve my problem — it introduces one thousand new ones. Luckily, I can see which genres are rated higher in nutritional content, in this case, 4 or 4 ½ star ratings out of 5 stars. “Documentary” had a lot of those. So did “Anime & Animation”. In the month of November, I take another trip around the globe to sample recent animated feature films. Next stop: Manhattan, New York, USA.

Sita Sings the Blues (2009)
Directed by Nina Paley
Written by Nina Paley
Produced by Nina Paley
82 minutes

Like a strange brew coated with aromatic honey, Sita Sings the Blues goes down easy for anyone wary of the letters “DIY” stamped on a movie. Cartoonist and filmmaker Nina Paley was introduced to the Hindu epic The Ramayana in comic book format while living in Trivandum with her then-husband. After their long distance breakup, Paley found solace in the records of jazz singer Annette Hanshaw, whose blues Paley felt echoed the myth of Rama’s long suffering wife, Sita. Over the course of five years, Paley animated and produced Sita Sings the Blues on a Mac in her Manhattan apartment, working primarily in Flash and editing in Final Cut Pro. Lending their expertise were sound designer Greg Sextro, three friends from India who ad-libbed narration and the French band Masala Dosa, who found Paley on the Internet and contributed a song. Her production budget was practically zero.

While Annette Hanshaw’s recordings were public domain, Paley discovered that the publishing rights to the songs she needed would cost her $220,000. She managed to get legal clearances for $70,000 by making sure Sita Sings the Blues wouldn’t reap millions at the box office, giving her movie away for free under a Creative Commons license known as a “copyleft”. Screened at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2008, Sita Sings the Blues played to wide acclaim at every other film festival on the planet before being issued on DVD in July 2009. While the mission statement and means in which Paley produced her film are more fascinating than anything that really ended up on screen, Sita Sings the Blues is lifted by its abundant wit, enterprising mixture of ancient myth with jazz and its equation of modern day struggles with the centuries old mysteries scribbled down in The Ramayana.

In San Francisco, Nina (Nina Paley) and Dave (Sanjiv Jhaveri) have their relationship thrown into upheaval when Dave receives a job offer taking him to India. Three shadow puppets (Aseem Chhabra, Bhavana Nagulapally, Manish Acharya) begin a story from the Hindu holy book The Ramayana, in which Rama (Debargo Sanyal), the virtuous Prince of Ayodhya, is sent into exile on the eve of his coronation. Rama pledges to rid the forests of the raksha demons terrorizing their holy men. In spite of the dangers, his loving wife Sita (Reena Shah), who cannot live without her husband, accompanies Rama on his crusade. Sita expresses her devotion and self-sacrifice through the 1920s jazz recordings of Annette Hanshaw. Back in San Francisco, Dave departs on his journey to India, leaving Nina unsure when she will see him again.

Ravana, king of the island Lanka, seeks revenge against Rama by ordering his minion Maricha to transform into a golden deer, distracting Rama on a hunt long enough for the treacherous monarch to abduct Sita. Refusing to force himself on his captive, Ravana lets Sita decide whether she wants to become his. She remains loyal to her husband, but once rescued, Rama questions his wife’s purity. These doubts spread throughout the kingdom and Rama decides to send Sita into exile, even though she is pregnant with his twin sons. Once in India, Dave develops similar doubts about Nina. He remains distant when she arrives for a visit and when Nina travels to New York for a job, Dave breaks up with her via email. Nina finds solace in Sita, whose long and lonely exile ends when she offers to prove her purity to Rama.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 574 users: 87% for Sita Sings the Blues

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 94 for Sita Sings the Blues

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Logging in to Netflix Instant for a movie to watch is like being hungry and shown to a food replicator. It doesn’t solve my problem — it introduces one thousand new ones. Luckily, I can see which genres are rated higher in nutritional content, in this case, 4 or 4 ½ star ratings out of 5 stars. “Documentary” had a lot of those. So did “Anime & Animation”. In the month of November, I take another trip around the globe to sample recent animated feature films. Next stop: Paris, France.

Persépolis (2007)
Directed by Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud
Screenplay by Vincent Paronnaud, based on the graphic novels by Marjane Satrapi
Produced by Marc-Antoine Robert, Xavier Rigault
96 minutes

Instead of racing on the cutting edge of technology, Persépolis looks backwards for its inspiration and proves as potent as anything requiring 3-D goggles to enjoy. Chronicling her coming of age during the Islamic Revolution, Paris based cartoonist Marjane Satrapi saw her graphic novel Persépolis published to critical acclaim in 2000. Marc-Antoine Robert of upstart French production company 2.4.7. Films convinced Satrapi that her story should be adapted into an animated feature film. To co-write a script and co-direct, Satrapi contacted her friend Vincent Paronnaud, a comic book artist and filmmaker. So uncomfortable with tech that Satrapi & Paronnaud wrote their script in pencil, financiers in France, Germany and the U.K. responded to the project and co-financed a budget of roughly $8 million. An animation unit of one hundred went to work at a studio in the Tenth District of Paris.

Persépolis would share the Grand Jury Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Film. Pulling back a curtain to reveal to Western audiences the darkness of 20^th century Iran, the strength of the film is its hand drawn charm, which pokes and prods the imagination in ways a live action melodrama of this material never could. Instead of feeling familiar, this story of innocence and uncertainty, family ties and loss, is never at a loss to enthrall. The simplicity Satrapi & Paronnaud bring to a story that is anything but black & white is remarkable, while the wit and visual panache of the cartoonists proves a perfect compliment to film. Once Catherine Deneuve was cast as the mother, the actress’s then 33-year-old daughter Chiara Mastroianni lobbied to play the voice of Marjane.

Arriving at Paris-Orly Airport, 22-year-old Marjane Satrapi (Chiara Mastroianni) handles a severe case of culture shock by lighting a cigarette and reminiscing on her childhood in Tehran. As a child in 1978, “Marji” (Gabrielle Lopes Benites) obsesses over French fries with ketchup, Bruce Lee and Adidas sneakers. Her educated parents (Catherine Deneuve, Simon Abkarian) embrace the revolution that sweeps away the brutal regime of the Shah. Her beloved uncle Abouche (François Jerosme) — a Marxist-Leninist who spent nine years in prison — gains his freedom and predicts that justice will flourish in their country at long last. But when the new Islamic order begins to purge the country of dissidents, Abouche is taken into custody and executed. By 1982, Marji is matching his defiance, mocking the nationalistic rhetoric of her teachers and buying a contraband Iron Maiden tape on the black market.

Through air raids inflicted by Saddam Hussein and domestic crackdowns by the Guard Corps, Marji remains close to her grandmother (Danielle Darrieux), who tries to instill integrity in her granddaughter through uncertain times. Marji’s parents make the decision to send her to school in Vienna. She is accepted by a small group of punk teenagers fascinated by her tales of revolution, but Marji rebels against her Catholic benefactors as instinctively as she did her Islamic teachers. Longing for Iran, Marji returns home, where the streets have been renamed after war martyrs and her father admits times are more brutal than ever. Nearly succumbing to depression, Marji rededicates herself to school and even falls in love. Agreeing to a marriage of convenience at the age of 21, Marji believes she has life almost figured out.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 23,619 users: 92% for Persépolis

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 90 for Persépolis

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