GsGsarthotegga
December 19, 2024
Recommended
Studio Ponoc has thus far remained in the shadow of Studio Ghibli, with the founder of the former, Yoshiaki Nishimura, having been a long time staff member of the latter. Mary and the Witch's Flower (MatWF), their first feature length film, was constantly deemed ersatz-Ghibli by critics, and even the art books and merchandise were equivalent in design, representing their heftiest profit. Rudger is, in comparison, overlooked and struggling to find an audience amongst Japanese or foreigners. It seems to be something of a flop, probably most enjoying an audience more inclined to something like Pixarified Ghibli or a mild harkening to the darker daysof Disney. A lot of the newer animators on here had staff overlap on a few of the same releases in recent years, like Sousou no Frieren, Bubble, Burn the Witch, Eiga Daisuki Pompo-san, and a few others, so there's a lot of great talent here. There are also many veteran key animators like Takeshi Honda, Shinji Hashimoto, and Atsuko Tanaka also being featured and having contributed to numerous Ghibli films. If you saw clips from MatWF without knowing what it was or any context, you'd probably assume it was a new Ghibli film from Goro Miyazaki or another director rather than a different studio.
Although Rudger owes plenty to Ghibli, the studio looks to be finally forming an identity of its own, with the blending of 2D and 3D elements giving it a unique dimensionality that isn't common to either western or eastern animation conventions. Anime often composites 2D characters or effects animation on 3D backdrops and camera movements, whereas it seems to be somewhat the opposite here, with Ghibli-esque painted backdrops much of the time and a blend of 2D animation and 3D models for the characters, making them look like a high-budget 3D western film with anime reskins, in what might be one of the more fascinating "2.5D" aesthetics in recent years. While I don't really want to make a reference to ugly modernist art styles, like cubism, and this is far removed from the multi-perspective abstraction of that style, there is a similar utilization of more figurative geometry and a rounded, full appearance to the shapes, so the film feels far less "flat" than 2D animation, but has less of that icky "plastic look," while keeping added foreground/middleground/background differentiation that a lot of 3D animation demonstrates more consistently. The two are blended with a lot of care, though there are a few blatant 3D segments with obtrusive and unfortunately dated jaggedness, such as the scene featuring a swarm of bats or the formation and opening of a door in a brick wall immediately after, but, other than a few hiccups, it's a pleasant aesthetic experience, with a great usage of color and shading.
An immediate deficiency of the film is its primacy as an appealing visual but not audiovisual experience; of course, the audio is as complementary as any reasonably well-made high-budget film in terms of its functionality, but the audio lacks the distinct personality and audiovisual synchronization found in the likes of Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Angel's Egg, Tree of Palme, the Monogatari series, Madoka, etc. The score we're saddled with is redolent of a children's Hollywood film or a further watered-down version of Ghibli's Joe Hisaishi's orchestral music. Most modern film classical is a perversion of more authentic classical music, lacking any of the bite, with electronic, ambience, and sound design tending to work as better tools to sculpt an atmosphere. Aside from the more sweeping orchestrations, there's the piano for the subtler moments, the occasional folksy twang of a string instrument, and odd one-time throwaway tracks like the electronic rock of the sleigh scene. It'll do, but I can't imagine anyone spinning the OST outside of watching the film, let alone getting chills because of how a piece of music enhances a scene.
The focus on the imagination is usually conflated with childhood, for the imagination is often retarded to focus solely on bland real-world concerns as one grows older, like paying the bills via some mind-numbing means that the majority of people would rather not do otherwise. Despite how fantastical the settings and scenarios that Amanda cooks up can be, the film comes across a touch darker than average, with the adult concerns of the future feeling more tangible. Nevertheless, I'm sometimes not sure if the creators misfired a bit when they were designing the villain, Mr. Bunting, ostensibly for a children's film, whose big, inflamed schnoze comes rearing around the corner, sniffing for children. Then there are his companions: 1) a ghostly pale Sadako-from-The-Ring-copy girl, coming across as a broken-shell victim of abuse and resembling an obedient slave. 2) a phallic serpent. Mr. Bunting comes across as a... I believe the word is, uh, p-p-podiatrist or, um, ah, maybe a My Little Pony fan? To cut things short, you don't want him anywhere near children. Sure, Mr. Bunting is not interested in the children themselves, preferring to devour the imaginaries derived from the child's imagination, but there is a gross symbolic touch to the notion and an intimacy concerning the contents of one's mind that makes this come across as unsavory in a unique way, which perhaps gives the villain a visceral quality to make up for his simplicity. Even Mr. Bunting's inevitable demise reinforces the latent creepiness of the whole ordeal.
A core theme of the film is spelled out early on whenever the villain lifts a book from the shelf of the Shuffleup (the heroine's surname) bookstore and references a revolutionary line from the incorrigible little rascal Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters,” though apparently working in a variation specific to The Imaginary's needs (my subtitles mentioned between light and darkness rather than anything about monsters, though Mr. Bunting would certainly qualify as a monster in this sense). Although the quote has to do with change and ushering in a new world ordure, the old world, in this case, is obviously Amanda's past, when her father was alive and the family bookstore was in business. The new world is... to be determined by fantastical film conventions.
The director has detailed how the three floors of the house, where a majority of scenes take place in the first half of the film, represent different times in Amanda's life. The first floor, the bookstore is the past, which is the most obvious because it was quickly shut down not long after the death of her father. The second floor, where the family live, represents the present. The third floor would be the future, and I can see why this may seem peculiar because the attic is so often depicted as a respite from the drudgery of the outside world, growing pains, and perhaps even a retreat away from familial problems. I've seen the same thing in many films, where a child will spend hours in the attic with stashed toys and objects that might seem to hold a magical appeal in childhood but are mere junk to adults, all of which is portrayed in The Imaginary. In psychology, it's not too uncommon to symbolically look at different components of an object in this manner, for the top floor of a house can easily be envisioned as the head/brain/mind. To better visualize this, there's even an indie horror video game, called Anatomy, that depicts the various rooms of an eerie old house as organs of a body, with the basement being a harbor for deeply locked away subconscious thoughts, the bedroom pertaining to dreams, allusions to teeth and the stomach and the house devouring the protagonist and any other inhabitants, etc.
The primary reason I broach this motif at all is because I think it's easy to misunderstand the whole idea of the imaginary friend, a concept which does not pertain to psychosis or schizophrenia or anything of the sort but rather tends to be a mechanism for coping with loneliness or an outlet for creativity. It seems relatively common for imaginative introverts (or otherwise more isolated individuals) to conjure up an imaginary friend, but it's a phasal process, usually ending as the child matures and responsibilities are foisted upon them. If the attic is a wondrous place, linked to the future, and a stand-in for the mind itself, it's not just a place of escapism. Escapism and imaginary friends may occur in childhood, leading to the flights of fancy we see here, but the imagination is usually "sublimated" as one gets older into everything one does in life. When it comes to the arts, we have references to Beethoven, Shakespeare, Picasso, and a few others (did Hans Bellmer envision the disturbing sexy-legged gramophone with a pair of eyeballs and a massive grin? What kid would think this crap up!?). Since these artists have imaginaries in the film, the suggestion is that they similarly went through ordeals just as Amanda did while they were forming their identity. Imaginaries helped them through the process, then they poured their imagination into their creative work. Of course, even outside of the arts, the imagination is applied in many ways, but certain routines can be stultifying and deaden the imagination. In the case of Amanda, she's not so much escaping anything as much as she is coming to terms with the death of her father, as well as wielding her imagination to enliven her play, as all children do, and who knows what opportunities will be opened up in the future as a result? The attic isn't inherently escapist but has to do with identity formation. By contrast, Mr. Bunting is forever locked away in the attic in the most escapist sense, going a step further by metaphorically jumping into the attic of other children and gobbling up their imaginaries, effectively preventing them from forming a stable identity or rendering them as colorless drones.
One of my problems with the film is how random many of the imaginative scenes can be. The opening scene has a small connection to Amanda's personal life because the beast of burden she rides with Rudger is named after the beer her widowed mother drinks to quell hard times, but everything else about the frozen environment, the elves, Christmas ornaments, and a yeti with a banjo seems like oddball imaginings from a child. If you want to get into the mind of a child, perhaps this is realistic enough to envision the process of what they might imagine, but when crafting a film, the better bet is to connect the imaginative elements to something within the story, and the screenplay fails to do so. As a result, certain scenes can appear flashy and without much substance. A better approach would have been to weave more of the father's lingering influence into the fantasy elements by connecting him to a story that he read to Amanda years before, lending more cohesiveness to the imaginative realm of the film; an adaptation of this sort is sorely needed because the film is a clusterfuck of disconnected ideas and imagery, especially with the often bloated and meandering middle section. Such a device wouldn't have to be spelled out immediately, but later revelations would have everything clicking into place and creating more emotional resonance rather than quickly dissolving Ponoc eyecandy.
It might seem a bold or even questionable decision to separate Amanda from Rudger so early on in the film, shrouding her fate in obscurity. A film like the anime version of Metropolis is oftentimes criticized for not building a strong enough relationship between the human boy and the android girl, even in spite of a strongly emotional finale. A core part of The Imaginary is the chemistry and interaction between the two as well, but Amanda is always there, for an imaginary is nothing but a compartmentalized component of the self, divided to serve a function. The idea of following an imaginary may even seem tantamount to a reveal that everything is in the main character's head, "it was just a dream," or any other series of copouts acting as a rip in a tire and deflating the whole project. Yet Rudger is a distinct character just as much as any other we might find in a story, but he is Amanda's construction... That's why the scenes between Rudger and the mother are far more poignant than they might otherwise be in other films with similar scenes involving an invisible figure who is attempting to be noticed: Rudger is, at his essence, a part of Amanda that her mother cannot see. The sex-swap scene toward the end is probably meant to hint and reaffirm this connection rather than just being unexpected, humorous, or typical Japanese fetish fuel.
Another problem with the fantasy is the prosaic, even bureaucratic nature of the film. Instead of being magical and wondrous, once we get to the overflowing collective imagination that is the library, we're hit over the head with a litany of rules, explaining so many details and wasting the runtime. Minutia about the mechanics of imaginaries being forgotten, how the library works, and so on... This information would be better conveyed through suggestion and "show, don't tell," (or just cut out completely, as would be appropriate with a number of ideas) and the great irony here is how the film should have left these details to the imagination. After all, the telling is humdrum and the world lacks sufficient complexity to warrant the pedantry. This is not a film in need of world building because the world it builds is a phantom house of cards, collapsing as the main character and other children grow up, ready to rise again, perhaps, as happens with a few adults in the story. The whole aspect of being forgotten should have been handled in broad, emotional strokes, and the "structure" of the imaginary society should have remained obscure. After all, the imaginaries are only sort of real, symbols of the inner self, and they're not real real, so this level of detail doesn't matter in the slightest. Unfortunately, this over-detailed tendency of the film wastes time to the point of feeling rushed and giving less time for the things that matter most.
Despite the wonderful visuals, many strong scenes, and as fitting of a conclusion as one would expect, the fantasy world could be described as one of those Frankensteined block towers one would construct during a game of Jenga, where the players stack a tower of questionable build and then strategically pull away blocks to attain an advantage over other players (stacking on another irony, one could also compare this messy world to the metaphor of the collapsing stone tower in Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron, which aired the same year). There is a lack of harmony to the slipshod arrangement of the various set pieces and characters this film has. While the core cast is fairly simple, many of the support characters are stitched together and lack charm and are either there to be quirky or as wacky as possible, act as a plot device, or deliver exposition dumps or elaborate upon the stuffy and ever-expanding rule book of the imaginaries' world. There is one tragic death, but the irony was how they must grapple with forgetting about those who fade away, yet the imaginaries are often so unmemorable as to be forgotten not long after finishing the film.
