10 Years With Hayao Miyazaki

Well we didn't end on a bad note, I'll say that at least.

This is a strange review for me, for the first time in almost a decade of writing these things never have I ever watched something in full on Facebook. Yeah it was kind of a bitch to find this whole 4 part mini-series documentary and to be honest I was having a hard time sitting through it all the way to write this thing. A curious enigma about this is the fact that it comes from NHK basically the japanese version of the BBC, and yet it's narrated in english, it has english subtitles, and there's no evidence to suggest it was created any other way before hand and they just slapped an english dub on top of the narration. I'm not saying it's impossible for japanese audiences to watch something in english but I've never really seen examples of it. Curiosities out of the way, let's get to the review. 4 parts, approximately 50 minutes apeice, chronicle stints of Miyazaki's career with the first two parts alone focusing on the making of Ponyo, then working in tandem with his son Goro on From Up On Poppy Hill, and finally ending with The Wind Rises. I have to get this out of the way right now and then we'll move on to positives but this english narration was terrible, a complete 180° from Never-Ending Man that feels completely unnecessary, slightly biased and putting way too much of an impression on the events rather than simply letting the audience view it, and truthfully has the writing style of a first grader trying to write their first story. It took so much away from it for me that it's easily going to be the lowest score of the week. And that pisses me off because seeing bits of new making of behind the scenes stuff for Ponyo and Poppy Hill was really neat despite it not going in that much detail which is strange considering the run time for each respective episode. Seeing Miyazaki's inspiration for the character of Ponyo, his tribulations with the animation, seeing the relationship with his son, further hammering the point home how hard it truly is to be creative with a deadline, all that stuff adds onto the experience of the previous documentaries I watched this week. Though admittedly if you've seen Never-Ending Man you can flat out skip episode four, I mean there is legit reused shots from that documentary here and everything. It has some interesting stuff at times, the score once again is actually really friggin' good, seeing Goro on his own project was a welcome change of pace, the addressing of the 2011 earthquake that struck Japan and how that affected production on Poppy Hill, it's not all a waste. However whether it's slight fatigue or the overall production and captured footage didn't do that much for me personally, this is an okay documentary that I think I can only recommend to die hard Miyazaki or Studio Ghibli fans. I knew Never-Ending Man wasn't gonna be beaten this week but I didn't expect it to go out on more of a whimper. I give it 2.5 stars, 7/10, and we got a little anime new release coming up very soon so all is not said and done yet.