Dream House

In an era of computer animation wizardry it's nice to see older technologies like stop-motion animation being reinvigorated and put to use for intelligent visual storytelling. A few months ago we were pleasantly surprised by Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, and just last night we stumbled upon this little gem. Written by Enda Walsh, The House is made up of three narratives supervised by three different directors, with the common thread being the title building and how it embodies both the nightmarish aspects of home ownership and our insistent need for a place to hang our hats. (For reasons I won't go into, we found it uncannily appropriate to our circumstances.)

The first segment begins in folktale fashion with a poor couple who, after an encounter with a mysterious stranger, find themselves in free possession of a rambling mansion in the British countryside, the only requirement being that they surrender the smaller house that is their own. The focus of the segment is on the older of the couple's two young daughters, who, like Chihiro in Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away, is more alert to the dangers of temptation then her parents are. Increasingly creepy as it progresses, it is the only part of the film that features human subjects, here represented by doll-like and delicate figures whose faces convey boundless melancholy.

By the second segment, the rural landscape has become urbanized and contemporary, and the house is in the possession of an ambitious developer (literally, a rat) who has furnished it with the latest mod cons in the hopes of making a killing in the real estate market. When the house is ready for showing everything possible goes wrong, and, what's worse, two sinister creatures — are they rodents, or something unimaginably worse? — take up residence uninvited and show no sign of leaving.

In the final segment, the house has become isolated by rising seas and is now owned by a long-suffering cat named Rosa, who struggles to maintain it and run it as an apartment building with little help from her two tenants, neither of whom pays cash rent. Gentler and more wistful than the other two parts, it ends in a way that is ultimately liberating.

Here and there I sensed affinities with, but rarely overt allusions to, everything from Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, and Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle to the scratchboard artist Thomas Ott and Terhi Ekebom's lovely graphic story Logbook. The trailer below gives a good idea of the film's visual styles, but, inevitably, exaggerates its pace. The film largely avoids the lamentable tendency of contemporary animation to fill every possible second of running time with frenetic activity. When the story is sound to begin with there's little need for all of that.

The Child Ghosts of Prague

Above is one of a series of brief animated shorts entitled Legendy Staré Prahy. This one is called "O neviňátkách z židovského hřbitova"; I don't speak Czech, but the story can be identified with a miracle-working tale associated with the Judah Loew ben Bezalel, a renowned 16th-century rabbi whose name came to be linked, long after his death, with the legend of the Golem.

In the original tale, the Jewish population of Prague has been visited with a terrible plague, leading to the deaths of many of its children. Convinced that this affliction must be a divine punishment of some sort, Rabbi Loew dispatches a young pupil to the Jewish Cemetery to steal a shroud from one of the young ghosts who emerge at midnight to play among the headstones. When the ghost comes to the synagogue to retrieve the shroud, Rabbi Loew demands that the child first reveal what has brought God's wrath upon the community. The child identifies two adulterous couples whose sins have been concealed from view, and once they are confronted and punished the curse is broken. (The film version seems to single out one woman, but perhaps the narration makes this clearer.)

A version of the above legend can be found in The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: A Historical Reader, edited by Wilma Iggers; a very similar one is included in V. V. Tomek's Jewish Stories of Prague. More shorts in the series can be found at the Legendy Staré Prahy website; there is also a companion English-language page with one of the shorts in translation.

Update: There is now an English-language version of the above video.

Whisper of the Heart

I really didn't know what to expect with this one. Whisper of the Heart was the first (and I think only) feature film directed by Yoshifumi Kondo (or Kondou), who died at a relatively young age in 1998, three years after the film was completed. The screenplay, based on a manga by Hiiragi Aoi, is by Hayao Miyazaki, the director of Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, and other animated masterworks. About all I knew when I ordered it was that it was a Studio Ghibli production and it had something to do with a cat.

Which it does, but really not that much. Though it's very much a Studio Ghibli movie, and though the US release is marketed as being “from the creators of Spirited Away,” Whisper is, outside of a few brief fantasy sequences, a much quieter, more naturalistic film than those statements might lead one to expect. It's also very appealing and beautifully made, a true gem.

The Ghibli films are sometimes contrasted with recent American animated features, generally much to the detriment of the latter. That's fair enough, but I think it may not go far enough. Whisper of the Heart has a humanity and integrity, an understanding of and respect for how ordinary people really live and act and feel, that Hollywood just can't seem to manage, even in live-action films. It may sound paradoxical that a “cartoon” could be less stylized, more down-to-earth, than a live-action feature, but in this case it really does seem to be true.

I won't attempt to summarize the story; if you're interested Nausicca.net has a synopsis. It's basically a story of first love, centering on a girl named Shizuku and a boy named Seiji. There's also the cat, of course, in fact there are two, one an ordinary sort and the other a cat statue that has a very sad, romantic story attached to it. (The statue will come briefly to life, at least in the imagination, but the scenes in which that happens, although visually dazzling, are almost dispensable; this is, it should be stressed, not a fantasy film.) The settings and backgrounds are lovingly detailed, even by Ghibli standards, but not more so than the characters themselves. It's refreshing to see filmmakers who care enough about the people they have created to make sure to get them emotionally right. Do try to see it.