Another Streaming Labyrinth

So, trying to make the most of the HBOMax subscription I plan to have for only a month, I've been searching for other things to watch. I'm finding the selection pretty disappointing. I had the impression they had rights to most Warner Brothers films but they have almost nothing from the golden age, none of the strings of movies from their famous contract players. No Errol Flynn movies, no Bette Davis movies. Only one James Cagney movie, Public Enemy, and only three Humphrey Bogart movies--The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of Sierra Madre, and Casablanca. On the other hand, their search algorithm is so bad, maybe I'm just not seeing a bunch of movies that are actually on the service. If you do a search for "anime" the first thing to come up is A Time to Kill with Matthew McConaughey, and number two is Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Does it think I'm trying to search for "animosity"? I'm sure lots of people are signing into their HBOMax accounts, hankering specifically for movies about animosity.

I have to scroll way down to the bottom before I see some bona fide anime, a random episode of the old Rurouni Kenshin anime, not even the first episode, but episode 53. Before that there's episodes of Ben10 and South Park and even a Doctor Who Christmas special.

By the way, I'm going to go on a bit of a tangent here. I'm noticing studios are more and more trying to claim the "anime" moniker for American animation series. Why not? You may ask. "Anime" is a French word meaning animation. In fact, here in Japan, the translation for "animation" is often simply "anime". I hear junior high school students talk about Disney anime films like Cinderella and Shirayuki Hime (Snow White). Similarly, "manga" is presented even by the English text books as a direct translation of "comics".

I was kind of mindlessly going along with it until I was sitting with the kyudo sensei in the club dojo and he flatly said, no, manga is not comics. They're two different things. And, duh, of course they are. You go into any American bookstore and they're in two different sections. Manga has a specific style that's different from the more general appellation "comics". Under comics you can find American, British, French, Italian, German publications, etc. Manga is typically smaller, typically black and white. The artwork focuses more on closeups and full body shots, particularly nowadays--there are fewer panels per page and not nearly as much dialogue. And, in Japan, manga is a whole lot cheaper, particularly used manga. People take much better care of their books in Japan so I can go into a used bookshop, easily find a title I want, and buy a nice thick manga for 100 yen (about a dollar) that looks like new. That's one reason manga is thriving in Japan while comics in the U.S. is riding a death spiral.

And anime is different, too. Calling an American production "anime", even if it employs Japanese animators, even if it employs an anime studio, is generally not accurate. For one thing, anime typical starts with the animation and the voice actors record their dialogue to the video, whereas American studios do it the other way around. This accounts for a lot of underlying stylistic difference it's difficult to otherwise put your finger on. But true anime also differs in other respects--there's more emphasis on design and dialogue, less emphasis on movement and continuous action. There's more importance generally placed on beauty in anime series.

Anyway. It's not the same thing.

So, one thing HBOMax definitely has going for it are some big fantasy properties. They have the Harry Potter movies and the Lord of the Rings movies. They also have Labyrinth, and that's what I ended up watching a couple nights ago.

I hadn't watched it since a few years before David Bowie died in 2016. I'd been meaning to but the last time I'd watched it had been disappointing. This time was much better, I don't know why; my mood or the place I'm at in my life. I think it makes a difference for me that I'm looking at it through the eyes of a junior high school teacher. I so want to show this movie to the art club students.

I know they'd totally dig the Brian Froud designs and I think I'd be doing them a big favour introducing them to David Bowie this way.

Last time I wrote a blog entry on Labyrinth--all the way back in 2009--I focused on the sexual chemistry between Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) and Jareth (Bowie) and lamented how boring Sarah is. I completely disagree with that assessment now because I see Jareth and everything as manifestations of Sarah's imagination. Her "you have no power over me" line is much better thought of as directed at herself and it's certainly a worthy lesson for teenagers needing to learn self-control. Jareth is Sarah's idealised man--we see she has a statue of him on her dresser. She's a Jareth otaku. So it makes sense she can't manage to look anything more than blankly stunned in the dance sequence.

If you look at a kid's face while they're watching a favourite movie, that's generally the expression you see. Learning to have expressive expressions is a part of maturation. We think of people who show their emotions very clearly as being like an open book but most of the time expressions are an effort of will designed to communicate something or conceal something else. The real "open books" are people who aren't usually very expressive at all. That's one of the reasons people tend to underestimate the job actors do.

Bowie sure seems to be having a lot of fun in this movie. And I love how full it is, all the various different kinds of puppets and monsters. Movies where the filmmakers make this kind of effort are all too rare.

The Local Toon Motley

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? has been on my mind again lately. It's not well known here in Japan, at least among the younger generation. This is more surprising than you might expect because Betty Boop is popular with the kids and so is Tom and Jerry and Peanuts. And, of course, nothing eclipses Disney. But last week I was explaining to a college student I met at a curry restaurant the variety of things that made Roger Rabbit significant and he didn't have a clue what I was talking about when I said it featured Disney characters interacting with Looney Tunes characters. Like many Japanese people I've met, he'd never heard of Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck. This makes me wonder what the chances are of the new Space Jam movie enjoying in Japan anything like the surprise success it's achieved in America.

I wonder if the success of Space Jam 2 increases the odds of the long gestating sequel to Roger Rabbit finally going into production. There are other forces against it. The film's original director, Robert Zemeckis, said back in 2016, "The current corporate Disney culture has no interest in Roger, and they certainly don't like Jessica at all." Certainly the fundamental concept of Jessica would sit oddly beside the Brie Larson Captain Marvel model or Raya the Last Dragon. We live in a world where "sexualised" is a curse. It's a shame because what got me thinking about Roger Rabbit recently was a girl in the art club of the school where I work. She likes to draw silly characters as well as sexy women with large bosoms. I asked her about the latter and she just shrugged sheepishly and said, "I like big breasts." Immediately I thought Roger Rabbit would be the perfect movie for her. Maybe for a lot of other kids, too.

I wonder if Jessica is the only reason for Disney's current lack of motivation to produce a sequel, though. Watching the film last night, I was struck by how out of place one of its central themes would be--the healthiness of having a sense of humour. Specifically, being able to laugh at yourself. Roger Rabbit's celebration of a kind of cartoon humour based on violence and humiliation seems like it would be out of place in a culture where people are constantly being told they should take themselves very, very seriously all the time.

Anyway, for the time being, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is available on Disney+.