![]() ![]() ![]() The tale is in the answering of those questions, though you get no points for guessing ahead of time that Taku falls a bit for the mystery girl, but doesn't allow himself to acknowledge that fact since he knows it would hurt Yutaka. The arrival of this new face is the center of everyone's universe for a while, all the more so since her background is a mystery: why did her mother take her from Tokyo? why is she so shy? does she have a crush on anyone? and so on. In other words, Kōchi is the sticks, which isn't a fact that really hits home with Taku, nor his very good friend Matsuno Yutaka (Seki Toshihiko), nor apparently anybody else in their school, until the arrival of a transfer student from Tokyo, Muto Rikako (Sakamoto Yoko). And yet even the superficial differences between the two make it clear that Ocean Waves is very much its own thing: it takes place in high school, it has a male protagonist (a distinct rarity in the Ghibli canon at the time, though less so now), and the tone is much less one of nostalgia and more one of in-your-face immediacy about the frequently hellish awkwardness of adolescence.Īfter opening with a scene that won't make sense until the very end, the film introduces us to Morisaki Taku (Tobita Nobuo), a high school student living in Kōchi, the capital city of Kōchi Prefecture, and one of the biggest cities on Shikoku, the smallest and most (relatively) rural of Japan's four islands. That's not much, but it's enough to link the two films as a loose pair within the context of the studio's overall output. The seventh Ghibli film - the third not directed by Miyazaki, for those keeping score at home - is superficially similar to the company's 1991 Only Yesterday: both are set in a remarkably unexceptional world that looks a lot like what you could see by poking your head out the window (and unlike Only Yesterday, Ocean Waves doesn't even have the fig leaf of taking place several years before the movie was produced), they're both fairly mature love stories, both look at school days from the perspective of sometime in the future (though we never learn from exactly what point in time the narrator of Ocean Waves is looking back). Tellingly, Ghibli never again tried to make a cheap TV movie afterwards I suppose the experience taught the powers that be that the company was just too damn invested in making honest-to-God art for that kind of thing. The subsequent film, known variously as I Can Hear the Sea (the literal translation) or Ocean Waves (the title officially given to it by Ghibli years after the fact, after English-speaking fans had gotten used to the other one), did end up meeting some of its most important goals: it did showcase the talents of Ghibli's younger members and it did premiere on TV in 1993, all of 72 minutes long, without blowing up to a theatrical feature. Thus did the inexpensive 45-minute movie turn into a 103-minute feature produced with all the resources Ghibli had to offer.Ī few years later, the company tried again: this was to be a television movie adapted from Himuro Saeko's novel Umi ga kikoeru, inexpensively made by the younger staffers at Ghibli, and helmed by a young director: in this case, the executives went outside the company to find Mochizuki Tomomi, a 33-year-old who had hopped from one studio to another directing episodes of series here and there over the preceding ten years. That this was an undesirable state of affairs was known for indeed the fourth of these films, Kiki's Delivery Service, was initially conceived as an inexpensive 45-minute project that would showcase the skills of the studio's younger generation: this fell apart once the film entered pre-production, and Miyazaki found that he couldn't stop himself from taking an increasingly hands-on interest in the story's development, and eventually he took it over himself. This situation was even worse, once upon a time of the first four Ghibli features, Miyazaki directed three of them. Which does, yes, mean that he's the company's primary artist, but it also means that somebody else directed exactly half - soon to be more than half - of Ghibli's estimable output. That's not fair at all, of course: as of this writing, Ghibli has released 16 films * ( lucky number 17 is on the way), and exactly half of them were directed by Miyazaki. Even today, Studio Ghibli has the reputation (in the United States, anyway) of being the company that makes Miyazaki Hayao's films - oh, and these others ones, over here.
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