Latest news with #HayaoMiyazaki
The Hindu
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Review of Hayao Miyazaki's ‘Princess Mononoke'
It was only recently, with the advent of the rising usage of AI, that the 'Ghibli Filter' trend took the internet by storm. Amidst this, arrived the release of the recently remastered 'Princess Mononoke', which reminded the world once again that no matter how much artificial intelligence may try, it can never quite understand the emotional depth and capture the true essence that lies in each perfect hand-crafted frame made by Hayao Miyazaki and the artists at Studio Ghibli. Set in the Muromachi Period of Japan, we are quickly introduced to our protagonist, Prince Ashitaka, who, after killing an evil beast to protect his village, is laid with a curse that sets him out on a journey to find the Forest Spirit that looms in the dangerous forests of the far West. He meets several people along the way and learns about them and the way they look at the world. Miyazaki's film is an adventurous journey that does not wish to reveal everything at once as much as it takes its own time to allow you to connect to the characters and narrative at hand. In doing so, he is able to deliver a powerful message about both: The need to conserve nature as well as human nature. Relevant as ever, Miyazaki's stunning film engulfs you into a world that has characters that feel like they actually exist. There is no clear-cut villain or a hero in this film, a rare sight in the animated film genre (especially for films that cater to a younger audience). In fact, the older one grows, the more they realise that the meaning of the story only deepens. There is a justified reason behind each character's actions and beliefs. Hence, our protagonist remains conflicted on which side to pick throughout the film. He wishes to understand those around him without hatred, and to do so, he observes the world he is surrounded by. Every frame is meticulous, and the image born out of imagination feels truly authentic. Aided to this is the film's sound design and score, which authentically captures the essence of Japan over six hundred years ago. Even in times that lacked concrete buildings and electricity, deforestation was present, in order to obtain minerals from under the soil. It was a banal process that brought with it a blinding greed that saw an endless thirst for power that could never be quenched. The film's third act turns especially brutal, it is a loud cry to prevent the harm of animals and nature. Miyazaki's ability to seep in the elements of fantasy with the real creates images that are not just visually stunning but also a reminder that he is an artist whose genius can never be replicated. To celebrate his art is to celebrate the very essence of life itself. For Miyazaki, life of all kinds is important, and for life to exist, we must coexist. The writer, Rudrangsh Gupta, is a freelance filmmaker and enjoys keeping a keen eye out for moving stories that are shown with a unique lens.
Engadget
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Engadget
One of my favorite Steam early access games is now available on Switch and PS5
After five years of development, one of Steam's coziest games is leaving Steam early access and making the jump to consoles. Starting today, you can purchase The Wandering Village on PC, Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 5. On Steam, the game's developer, Stray Fawn Studio, is offering a 35 percent discount until July 31. In the US, that means you can get the game for just under $20. Switch owners, meanwhile, can get a 10 percent launch discount until August 7. I've been playing The Wandering Village on and off since it entered early access in 2022. It's a lovely game that combines two very different influences. Most obviously, the game wears on its sleeve Stray Fawn's love of Hayao Miyazaki's seminal Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind . The manga and later film is set in a desolate, post-apocalyptic world ravaged by nuclear war. The Wandering Village's other major influence are the titles of Impressions Games. In the late '90s and early 2000s, the now-defunct studio went on a hot streak releasing three games — Caesar III, Pharaoh and Zeus: Master of Olympus — that, to this day, define much of the city-building genre. The Wandering Village marries those influences in a novel way. Rather than building your city on solid ground, you build it on the back of a giant creature called the Onbu. As you can probably guess, the Onbu doesn't stay still. And while there are ways you can influence its behavior, sometimes it can have a mind of its own. All of that leads to some interesting gameplay interactions. For example, the Onbu might wander into a biome that is toxic to your villagers. As of the writing of this article, the game has a "very positive" rating on Steam on nearly 6,000 reviews, with recent reviews tilting toward "overwhelming positive." If you want to grab a physical copy of the game for Switch or PS5, Stray Fawn has partnered with Serenity Forge to offer collectors and premium editions of the game. Pre-orders will ship early next year. Despite the game leaving early access, Stray Fawn has promised to keep working The Wandering Village .
Yahoo
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Whisper Of The Heart left a lo-fi legacy unique to Studio Ghibli
A sea of bokeh lights emanates from Tokyo. Light pollution paints the night sky. The camera pans down into the suburbs. The artificial light becomes less dense, clustered along highways and trainlines. Olivia Newton-John's pop-country fusion recording of 'Take Me Home, Country Roads' plays, the gospel-like introduction sung by a choir over organ. Whisper Of The Heart opens unlike any other Studio Ghibli film. Thirty years since its release, Whisper Of The Heart remains a unique entry in the legendary anime studio's filmography. It was Ghibli's first feature directed by someone other than Hayao Miyazaki or Isao Takahata and, while the studio has made some non-fantastical films, none are so mundane nor romantic. Neither have any cemented a legacy like the one left by its director's single credit. While Miyazaki's influence as the film's writer and storyboarder is apparent, Yoshifumi Kondō's sole directorial effort remains an overlooked but widely influential film. Both prescient in its subject matter and a direct predecessor to pervasive animation today, Whisper Of The Heart anticipates a current zeitgeist often summed by vague buzzwords: chill vibes and lo-fi aesthetics, Ghibli-esque romantasy, and low-stakes, character-driven plots (all of which are lumped into the expanding anime category of 'slice of life'). Even if you haven't seen moonstruck middle schooler Shizuku Tsukishima fall in love outside of a book for the first time, or follow a cat through the urbanizing expanse of early '90s western Tokyo, you've seen her on YouTube, sitting at a desk overflowing with books, pencil in hand as she writes for hours, lost in the music piped into her wired headphones. Or you've seen this same girl dedicatedly working to improve, sitting at her desk day and night as the seasons change around her, in films like Look Back. Or, as in Sound! Euphonium, you've watched a young girl, overwhelmed by the passion of her first love, burst into tears when she tries to find her own purpose and fails right away. Even Makoto Shinkai's densely packed, tactile background art—popular among anime aesthetes on Instagram—would blend seamlessly into the Tsukishima family's small apartment. But these images, removed from their context like the Lofi Girl and her 'hip hop radio beats to relax/study to,' are just symptoms of a feeling. Whisper Of The Heart offers a prognosis. More than anything else Miyazaki wrote, Whisper Of The Heart is a love story. His most direct adaptation of a source (Aoi Hiiragi's 1989 manga), the film maintains the complex characteristics of his child protagonists and its unmagical world sticks its discordant undertones in its characters' sides like barbs. At the library during summer break, Shizuku notices a recurring name in the checkout cards of the many books she's kept her nose in. She forms an ideal of who this 'Seiji Amasawa' could be, a romantic image thoroughly shattered by the rude-yet-mysterious boy she finds making violins in an antique shop. Their romance is one of constant refusal of the fairytale stories Shizuku reads at the beginning of the film. Their tropey 'school rooftop confession' scene is betrayed by Seiji's news that he's leaving to apprentice at a luthier for two months. If he succeeds, he'll go away again for another 10 years. Through love, Shizuku finds purpose: writing. She grows from lazily reading all day over summer break to staying up till 3 a.m. writing her novel while Seiji is away. Upon his return, both resolve to push each other towards their goals, even if they part for the foreseeable future. At the same time as he details this love story, Miyazaki works through his feelings on urbanization and the consumer tech boom of the late '80s. This comes courtesy of a subplot told almost entirely visually. While Shizuku writes by hand, her mom, working on her masters thesis, writes at a chunky folding word processor. Empty fields run along highways. Nighttime landscape shots emphasize artificial lighting. The library is replacing the checkout cards with barcodes, foreclosing on the kind of romantic daydreams Shizuku formed through encountering Seiji's name. One could even make a drinking game out of how many times people almost get hit by cars. Confessing her disaffection to all this, Shizuku writes a parody of 'Country Roads' for her school choir, titled 'Concrete Roads.' While the film itself is nostalgic, Shizuku is not. She's wary of the future encroaching on her present. This, more than her likeness, is why Shizuku is the Lofi Girl, her analog ideals resisting a current that will make the world less romantic. The cluttered desks and densely packed bookshelves that always accompany her character design—even when detached from Whisper Of The Heart—are the antithesis of a decade of physical minimalism made possible through maximized digital footprints. While all that is communicated nearly wordlessly in the film, it's not easily reducible to an aesthetic. Nor is Ghibli's filmography so reducible as to contain Miyazaki, Takahata, Kondo, and the other directors who have since made films there within a single adjective. At a time when AI image generators attempt to smooth out decades of artistry into a single simplified style, Whisper Of The Heart stands as a resounding refusal of 'Ghiblification.' After Shizuku's finished the marathon of writing her first novel, she has to accept that it isn't very good. She's opened a geode, but the minerals need to be cut and polished. 'Now I've written it, I know. Wanting isn't enough. I have to learn more,' she cries after her first failure to extricate something beautiful from within. But Shizuku's first step isn't failing to create, it's succeeding to finally hear the whisper of her heart. Wanting—to be a writer, a luthier, a musician, an animator—isn't enough. But it's a start. Whisper Of The Heart remains singular in part because Yoshifumi Kondō died three years after it was released in Japan. He wouldn't live to see it come to America; Whisper Of The Heart wouldn't even be released in English until 2006, after the studio's global popularity surged in the wake of Miyazaki's successes in the early '00s. It's become a joke how many times Miyazaki has claimed that he would retire, but his first 'final film' was Princess Mononoke, Kondō's last credit as an animation director. Miyazaki had hoped to pass the studio to Kondō, and even held a farewell party after he left Ghibli on January 14, 1998. Kondō died exactly one week later. Two years after Kondō's death, Miyazaki came out of retirement for the first time, to make the film that would become Spirited Away. His death, and the films audiences didn't see from him after Whisper Of The Heart, is perhaps why the aesthetic endures. Kondō never produced his own filmography full of bicycles and folk instruments and cities mid-change. Those that experienced his work wanted more; it wasn't enough. Unlike the flattening faux-style of Ghiblification, what animators have done with Whisper Of The Heart in the subsequent decades instead looks forward, like Shizuku herself. In her translation of 'Country Roads' (back to English), she ditches the rosy images of Appalachia with a feeling more complicated than nostalgia—yearning for something lost, and moving on: Country road, this old road Could go right to my home town I won't go there, I can't go there Can't go down that country road Country road, when tomorrow comes I'll be like I always am Want to go back there Can't go back there Fare thee well, country roads More from A.V. Club Ari Aster is just asking questions, like "How the hell do we get off this thing?" Whisper Of The Heart left a lo-fi legacy unique to Studio Ghibli Senate holds late-night vote to cut funding to NPR and PBS Solve the daily Crossword
Time Out
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
You can get free tickets to this weekend's Studio Ghibli film fest in L.A.—here's how
If the Venn diagram of your tastes has an overlap between Los Angeles, animation legend Hayao Miyazaki and UNIQLO clothes, it's your lucky week. "My Dear," the third collaboration between UNIQLO and Studio Ghibli, dropped Thursday, July 10 with 14 new designs expressing 'emblematic Ghibli works, along with works by Thai artist Kanyada Phatan and Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki,' according to a press release. Hardcore L.A. fans looking to grab an item from "My Dear" and willing to make the trek to the UNIQLO store at Century City or Glendale today, July 10 or tomorrow, July 11 have an additional opportunity to enjoy Studio Ghibli films: Their purchase of two items will include an exclusive free ticket (with a plus one included!) to a Studio Ghibli movie screening at Brain Dead Studios in the Fairfax District. (Note: Customers can get up to two sets of tickets each, equaling four tickets total.) The screenings begin at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, July 12 with Spirited Away, followed by Kiki's Delivery Service at 3:15 p.m., and Howl's Moving Castle at 5:30 p.m. Disappointingly, no word on whether wearing your new swag will score a discount on concessions. View this post on Instagram A post shared by UNIQLO UT (@ The entire collection is now available online and in stores, featuring adults and kids T-shirts and sweatshirts with art inspired by eight Studio Ghibli films: Howl's Moving Castle, My Neighbor Tortoro, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Kiki's Delivery Service, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, The Boy and the Heron, and Pom Poko. The previous collaborations came out in 2022 and 2023, making "My Dear" the first drop since The Boy and the Heron won the Oscar for Best Animated Film at the 2024 Academy Awards. Founded in 1985 by filmmakers Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli has produced 25 animated feature films, including three of Japan's highest-grossing films of all time: Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle and Ponyo. In 2001, the studio opened the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Tokyo, designed by Hayao Miyazaki himself.
GMA Network
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- GMA Network
SB19's Justin is giving 'Spirited Away' vibes in Jiufen Old Street photos
SB19 member Justin took to social media to share dreamy photos taken at Jiufen Old Street in Taiwan, a location that has long drawn comparisons to the enchanting world of Studio Ghibli's 'Spirited Away.' In the photos he shared on Instagram, Justin could be seen exploring the picturesque alleyways and staircases of Jiufen surrounded by red lanterns. Another photo he uploaded shows himself gazing out from the window of a charming teahouse cloaked in vines and red lanterns. According to an article by National Geographic, while Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki has denied that Jiufen was an inspiration for 'Spirited Away,' many have still drawn a connection to it through its resemblance to the settings in the movie. SB19 just had a sold-out show in Taipei. After their successful concert, the P-pop Kings went around Taiwan, looking like stars of 'Meteor Garden.' SB19 dropped their "Simula at Wakas" EP in April. It includes the songs "DAM" and "DUNGKA!" —Carby Rose Basina/JCB, GMA Integrated News
