#no movie will actually ever compare to this one in terms of storytelling and nuanced characterisations

[earthtooz]

i don’t think i can ever genuinely express how meaningful ‘everything everywhere all at once’ sweeping the oscars meant to the asian community. but since i don’t want to be too emotional on main bc this entire day has kept me on the edge of my seat like no other, i just want to say one thing that might make the movie a little sweeter:

the english subtitles of the iconic taxes and laundry line that waymond delivers say ‘in another life, i would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you’

BUT, in mandarin, what the raw line is: ‘in another life, i still would have chosen to be with you doing laundry and taxes’.

and i think that piece of dialogue truly is so special because waymond would still CHOOSE this supposed ‘miserable’ life of running a laundromat so long as he was still with evelyn and UGH I’M- IF ONLY THIS WAS TRANSLATED PROPERLY BC IT HURTS ME THIS LINE HURRRRRTS ME 😭😭

[abadzone]

A Weekly Song: Episode 8 - Joe Hisaishi

A Weekly Song: Episode 8

Joe Hisaishi – Procession of the Gods

“When’s he going to do a movie composer?”

“He’s always going on about film soundtracks.”

It’s true, I am, I do. The reason is this – I listen to a hell of a lot of them. I’m an aficionado. When you’re writing and drawing all day and night, whether it’s writing articles for magazines or scripts for other artists, or just drawing your own comics and illustrations, you listen to a lot of music.

About five years ago, other than corporate work, I changed my professional emphasis from both writing and drawing to predominantly writing (largely because I make more money from writing than from doing both. Making comics and graphic novels is slow, hard work where you do about ten jobs for the price of one. Plus, anyone in comics publishing will tell you how little most artists make, but that is not the purpose of this essay so I’ll leave that story and observations on same for another time).

I’ve always found that I can’t listen to music with lyrics or indeed a human voice of any kind while writing – I find it distracting. This leaves instrumental music – Jazz and Classical, sure, Ambient definitely, but most often – soundtracks. Film and TV scores.

Perhaps the reason for this is that the part of my brain that I use to create stories and voices of characters is also the part that listens to and processes speech and singing. I don’t know that for sure, but whatever the reason, because most of my time is now spent writing, there’s much less time to listen to listen to podcasts, talk radio and the like.

When I was doing the more “automatic” tasks in the creation of a page of comics, like lettering, inking or colouring, I always found myself listening to something with a human voice – a play, a podcast, radio documentaries. My inking was actually better, both looser and slicker, if I was slightly distracted by listening to radio plays or discussion of some kind. (Hi, BBC Radio 4, NPR and Big Finish. I miss you.)

Correspondingly, my appetite for soundtracks has increased, but they’ve always been an important – nay, essential part of my creative process. They are both mood setters and emotional emollient, both starting points and helpful compositional markers in the creation of a story.

It goes something like this: you think of a scene, what the purpose of it is, how you want it to play, what the characters are saying and doing and you choose a piece of music that sets the temperature of that set of incidents. I think every book and every comic I’ve ever written has had a temp-track of sorts, a tracklisting that serves as a guide for the mood and atmosphere I’m looking for.

In many cases, this temp-track evolves and changes as the story does, with some pieces of music being dropped in favour of others as the shape of the narrative develops. I imagine it’s a similar process in an editing suite; as you revise and modify the focus of different elements of a story, the linguistic accompaniments necessarily change too. In film or TV, it might be the Foley sounds, a change of emphasis in lighting via colour grading; in comics it might be the layout, the way the guttering of a page affects the pace at which a reader scans it, and where their eye is led; the tempo at which it subtextually guides a reader to the turn of the page and an emotional turning point, all the while preserving a sense of immersion. Every small detail the author employs affects everything else, and everything has to be right and constantly rejigged to create the illusion of the real world within the story.

This is the kind of constant balancing act common to all forms of visual storytelling. While comics don’t have the luxury of sound and motion, it is still a supremely nuanced and sophisticated language in its own right. What I always liked about comics as both art form and means of expression is how accessible they are and that they can be created relatively cheaply in comparison to film or TV. Anyone can make a comic; you really can be a sole creator, whereas film and TV are collaborative media. A graphic novel really can be one person’s creative vision, unlike a film, which although it may be steered by one overall captain, the authorship really is shared by many (despite what the director’s credit would have you believe: “A Film By…”)

I digress. The point is, one art form and means of cultural expression runs into the next; none of them stand alone. Everything influences everything else and in my case, I’d go so far as to say, these days, music probably influences me more in terms of the kinds of stories I like to tell than many other comics do. Storytelling is a free-flowing activity that inhabits every possible mode of human expression.

Obviously, all this means I have a lot of favourite soundtracks and film composers. How to pick one, and just one track from so many, for this week’s song?

Well, first time around, I’m gonna do the easy thing. I’m going straight to someone who supplies music for one of the greats in a related field: animation. The greatest living animator, in my humble opinion, is Hayao Miyazaki. One of Miyazaki’s constant and most consistent collaborators is Mamoru Fujisawa AKA Joe Hisaishi, who has composed scores for every Miyazaki movie but one. Not to compare Miyazaki to a Spielberg or a Lucas, but Hisashi is Miyazaki’s John Williams.

It’s really difficult to pick a favourite Miyazaki film, and equally difficult to pick a Hisaishi score. He is, predictably, a composer who can match the depth, vision and moods of Miyazaki, one who seems as comfortable with experimental electronica as he is with the orchestra.

My admiration for Hisaishi is a fairly usual reaction to his music; sometimes it’s interesting to look at exactly why a composer is beloved. His association with one of the best storytellers in the world is partially the reason, but composers are of course storytellers in their own right. There is a line of thinking that viewers shouldn’t really notice movie music – that it’s a subtextual support to the emotion and action of the story being told onscreen. While there’s an element of truth in that, there are just as many examples to the opposite. What I think a good film score should do is complement and highlight the story, help make it an immersive emotional experience; be textural as opposed to specific. It should help you, the viewer, get caught up in the characters and story without necessarily calling attention to itself, which calls for a lot of nuance and is a very neat balancing act. You can still notice it – I sometimes do, but what’s fascinating about it is that, when it’s working well, I often don’t do it consciously. The opposite is true also – I notice it when it’s intrusive or overly sentimental, signposting emotions rather than being an integral part of them.

Something that interests me is that Hisaishi is on record as thinking many modern Hollywood soundtracks don’t have enough “space” or silence in them – that quiet is as much a tool of the composer as loud is. This is a man whose comprehension of emotional colour and silence as a tone in his palette is second to none. I love his work in film and beyond it (which is why I’m also going to cheat a bit and also recommend his Minima Rhythm series, the first of which you can listen to here).

That’s not today’s pick though, which I agonised over. I almost went for the opening of Princes Mononoke, Attack of the Tatari-Gami, which is both great action music and one of the most sinister themes in animation history. In the end, I settled upon a piece from Spirited Away, which is possibly one of Hisaishi’s most sweeping, yearning scores. 

Variously known as Procession of the Gods (on the US pressing of the soundtrack I have), Procession of the Spirits and The Procession of Celestial Beings, the cue is actually seriously truncated in the movie and not allowed to fully bloom the way it does on the soundtrack album. You’re going to have to take my word for that, because unfortunately there is no official Studio Ghibli channel that I can find on YouTube that showcases Hisaishi’s work, but you can do a search and find several cover versions that attempt to recapture its ominous majesty. Here’s a link to how it sounds in the film, but I’d encourage you to seek out the soundtrack album and listen to it in all its pomp, 

The scene it accompanies is shortly after the main character, a ten-year old girl called Chihiro, finds herself stranded in a magical world. Her parents have turned into pigs (yes) and she attempts to find the tunnel that is a gateway back to her reality, only to find that she is now separated from it by a newly-appeared river. A boat begins crossing the water towards her and this music begins to play, all string-plucked notes and magical portent. There are no visible passengers until the boat hits the shore, where Chihiro stands watching. Doors open, the music swells, heralding the arrival of beings that no human child should witness. They appear as masks that float around head height and, floating above the deck, file off the boat one by one. As they disembark, cloaks flow from the masks, like paint tipped from a bucket, flowing down to describe the shapes of their intangible bodies…

…And Chihiro flees, the music fades. On the soundtrack album it reaches a magnificent crescendo and ends on a playful note, punctuated by human voices. It’s a scene that goes from a foreboding menace to awe and wonder, from fear to celebration and back again.

If you’ve never seen the film, see it. It is far, far from being merely a children’s entertainment and occupies a place among the most visionary films ever made.

I have another version of Procession from the Spirited Away Image Album, which I think might be a demo rather than the more usual “song in character” pieces you get on those kinds of tie-ins (but I can’t read Japanese, so I might be completely wrong about that. Feel free to correct me if so via Twitter or email or if you have any further information about this particularly sumptuous film score).

To get a flavour of Joe Hisaishi’s imaginative brilliance, you can watch and listen to a whole concert here.

More info on Studio Ghibli (n English) available here.

[headlesssamurai]

Why should a piece of film be faithful to a book? Why can't it be considered a separate artwork with input from several artists?

The reasoning behind a film being faithful to its source material, if there be any, should be obvious, but I’ll try be quick for the Ritalin kids’ sake. Anything derived from another work of art, plain and simple, ISN’T a separate work. It’s ball-and-chain married to that original source material forever, whether it likes it or not. There are nuances of course, like films which were inspired by one thing or another, and other films which are heavily, suspiciously iterative of other works (see Michael Bay’s The Island versus 1979′s The Clonus Horror) without claiming to be directly based on anything in particular, sometimes quite conveniently.The main dynamic faced between adapting one form of art into another medium comes from how influential both works are on their own, sometimes the adaptation is far more recognized than is its point of origin, and thus is regarded as more important with the original work being virtually forgotten.In the case of books being adapted into movies, generally speaking, most books as literary works are unfortunately held to a much higher standard of editorial efficiency than most screenplays, because the actual writing is all that exists tell the story in that medium (this is also because film producers reserve the right to edit or completely trash a screenplay if they feel like it or are having a particularly shitty day). Thus, books tend to have far more artistic integrity in terms of character writing, plotting, world-building, and narrative coherence because their existence as storytelling mediums are entirely predicated on telling a fucking story, and if it isn’t told well they get tossed in the thank-you-for-playing bin by most publishers and never see the shape of print.If a book, held to that overbearing standard of quality, gets to the point where someone wants to option it for a screenplay, it’s either because millions of people are reading it, the book is written particularly well, or a combination of both (but neither of these are ever mutually exclusive, look at gutter trash like Fifty Shades for instance).I’m not arguing the validity of one art-form over another. I enjoy both books and movies for their own respective strengths, and I find comparing the two to be a futile effort.I stress the following as my opinion, but objectively sound regardless, movies should not be adapted from a book if the producers have no plans to respect the source material. Movies can never be one-hundred percent faithful to books, these are very different mediums after all, but fidelity and respect are different things. If you plan to take a book and turn it into a giant silver-screen spectacle, please have some respect. I understand the point is to sell as many tickets as possible, but alienating the story’s established fanbase by butchering the story or characters is ethically and artistically questionable. I believe the distance between respectful movies based on books and cynical ones that butcher their story is about the same distance between an artist and a pimp.If respect isn’t in the cards for you as a film producer, just don’t adapt the book. What’s the point in adapting something if you just want to axe out everything that made it great to start with? Just don’t adapt it, plagiarize it if you have to, then title it something else and act like it’s your own original work. You know, like that dude who wrote a Black Widow screenplay but got rejected, so he turned it into a novel with sequels and everything– then got a movie deal! I mean, damn. That’s some serious mimesis right there.Reckon that wasn’t quick after-all. Ah, well. Just pop another pill, you’ll be fine.Anyhow, as MauLer says: Please have some respect.

                      侍   headless                           

[recentanimenews]

INTERVIEW: The English Voices Behind the New "Fate/Stay Night" Movie

June 5th saw in the English dub premiere of Fate/stay night [Heaven's Feel] THE MOVIE 1.presage flower, and we took the opportunity to sit down with the English dub cast to ask a few questions. Bryce Papenbrook (voice of Shirou Emiya), Tony Oliver (ADR director and voice of Lancer), Cristina Vee (voice of Sakura Matou), Kyle McCarley (voice of Shinji Matou), and Kaiji Tang (voice of Archer) all sat down to share their thoughts on the film and the dubbing process that went into it.

  Spoilers for the first movie ahead!

  Tony Oliver

What makes Heaven's Feel different from the other routes?

Tony Oliver: What makes this a little different is that it's an expansion of the story. Where we had Unlimited Blade Works that followed Fate/Zero where we set up the story and laid out the characters in this universe, now the universe is getting bigger and starting to corrupt, and the outcomes... the consequences of what's come before in the previous two iterations are now being fleshed out in this one. Even though we're only a third of the way through, we're already seeing where it's taken some turns. So it's a little darker in that respect, and that's hard to believe but it is a little darker in the sense of where it's going, but also the characters are a little bit more fleshed out and we're seeing larger aspects of things we've seen before – only now we're seeing more dimensions of it. That's the difference for me.

  Cristina Vee: There's a lot more Sakura.

  Kaiji Tang: So, having previously been acquainted with the story elements of Heaven's Feel, I think the main difference is the tone and character relationships. In the two previous paths, the character relationships were much different. Like, for example, you saw during the mapo tofu scene that character and Shirou are going to have a bit of a different kind of on-screen relationship going forward. The plot of Heaven's Feel takes all the established lore and flips it onto its side, gives it a different perspective, and it's a lot more horror-elemented this time around. It's a lot darker and a lot creepier. It sort of gets more messed up as time goes along, so I'm really excited to see the next two.

  For Tony, you've been involved with this since the original anime in 2006 where you voiced Lancer. Has your opinion of the franchise changed over time?

TO: My opinion of the franchise has matured. When I first worked on it in the original, first of all, I didn't like my character very much. I mean, I loved playing him, but as a person I didn't think he was... I didn't like him very much. So I kind of felt a little standoffish and it was also a little more steeped in some of the high school lore, where they come from, which has never been my cup of tea in terms of shows. When I started directing in Fate/Zero, I got to be more intimate with it and got to see it in a larger perspective. And so in that respect, my opinion has changed quite a bit and it's expanded and it's grown to be my favorite franchise I've ever worked on. Particularly Fate/Zero really affected me a lot. It's grown and I've come to appreciate it more and more, the storytelling.

  Do any of you know anything from the other routes or past where the movie covered?

KT: Yes, absolutely, and I can't say anything without spoiling the rest of it. But on record, yes.

  Any favorite characters beyond the ones you all voiced?

TO: Directing it, the character relationships are what I liked the most. I really enjoyed for instance, in Fate/Zero, the relationship between Waver and Rider was the one that gripped my heart the most. In Heaven's Feel, the relationships are still evolving, so it's kind of hard to find the right one. Except for kind of the eternal relationship that's going on between Shirou and Rin, which seems to come up in every iteration in a different way. And I like that each time they're still trying to find out whether they like each other or not. (laughs) And it's like, you know, go ahead and date already for crying out loud!

  For Cristina, Sakura has had a pretty minor role in the other adaptations. How does it feel having her in the spotlight? Has your impression of her changed?

CV: Yeah, it's been really awesome to play the character and see her grow from the little girl who was thrown into the pit of worms repeatedly and to now figure out, to see that she kind of has this, I don't know what's going to happen, but I know it's going to be scary because I just have a feeling that she's the type of character that has a really scary turn. It's always the quiet meek ones. She's very quiet and meek, so she's going to be very scary.

  Cristina Vee

It's something alright! Don't want to spoil anything!

TO: "I know something you don't know!"

  Stay off the wiki! (laughter)

  Bryce Papenbrook: I have not been spoiled either.

  Kyle McCarley: I just was. About ten minutes ago.

  KT: Oh yeah, who spoiled it for you?

  KM: A fan. I asked. I was like, "I want to know."

  (laughter)

  Any favorite routes out of the three?

KT: Favorite is still Unlimited Blade Works by a very narrow margin because Heaven's Feel is tremendous.

  TO: It's tough because they're kind of all my step-children. Zero, right now, is... it's not really a route... it's the basis, it's where it started and I thought the script was extraordinary and the story got to me. So Zero is my favorite out of all of them.

  BP: I don't know the end of this route, so how can I choose?

  Bryce Papenbrook

Now one for Bryce. What do you think of Shirou in Heaven's Feel compared to Unlimited Blade Works?

BP: Well, again, I'll still be diplomatic with my question. We haven't seen how this plays out, and at the end of the movie I was shocked. I have no idea what's going to happen in the second one, so how can I answer that question yet? But so far, what we've seen of Shirou, I mean, he's kind of shown in his relationship with Sakura, sort of like a very protective side, and I'm very interested to see where it goes.

  One more for you, has there been any scene voicing Shirou in this or Unlimited Blade Works that you found particularly difficult to do?

BP: I think one thing that's been very demanding is playing it very real. In the directing, Tony has always asked me to give him something that has a lot of emotion without a lot of volume. It's lines that are deep with a lot of feeling, without doing much. So it's challenging, it's playing the role almost as a real person in there, and it's kind of a different vibe than most anime have, so trying to play it that way has been challenging. And I've found that just technically, I've been a little quiet, and especially in Heaven's Feel I've found that I had to increase my volume without increasing it too much, so to say. So he could hear what I was doing, but not let it disappear.

  TO: Let me jump in on that, since these guys won't tell you this because they're humble, well kind of. (laughter) We're actors! But all of the parts they played are difficult in this. This is not your typical show where we're looking for a particular sound or a funny feel or something that's kind of surface for entertainment. The story calls for a lot of depth and a lot of depth of character, depth of the feeling. These characters are feeling nine things at once all in conflict, and we spend a lot of time what I call nuance chasing, just looking for that one little nugget that touches your heart. And it's really, really hard to do. What these guys do is really difficult. It's not just walking up and reading. So I'm gonna give them the props on that, because I do demand a lot, and the story demands a lot, and these guys are all up to it, and it's hard what they do, it really is.

  Another one for you, actually. How do you feel about how Lancer is treated in each route?

(laughter)

  TO: How is Lancer treated? Well, he dies early. In the game he does not; it's impossible to kill him in the game.

  In Grand Order, he's immortal.

TO: It's amazing. But in the show, except for that one iteration, Grand Order, where I actually got to kill Archer and last more than two episodes... (laughs) He's a character that's about chivalry and posturing and grand ideas, and those are always the most fun to kill early. So I think he gets treated fine, it's what he needs to be. Somebody's got to be that character, so it has to be him.

  KT: It's so weird that it's him, though, he's literally Irish Hercules. You'd think he'd be one of the last ones in every route.

  Yeah, he's one of the strongest, but...

TO: But everyone who's been morally pure have kind of been the ones who get messed up the most. Look what's happening to Saber.

  By the way, I loved seeing Saber Alter at the end of this one.

KT: Oh, Saber Alter, my favorite.

  TO: I love the fact that we have an actor who can handle that, so well.

  It's playing the same character in two different roles.

TO: Another thing that's hard to do.

  Which you've done for Lancer in Grand Order as a Caster, right?

TO: Yes. Well, he was a Caster, he's still the same character, he just had a different skill. And got to win.

  For once.

Is there anything you kept in mind, especially when you were directing? Anything from the original, anything that you really kept in mind through the whole thing?

TO: It's been important to all of us to maintain a consistency from story to story, so we do go back and revisit the characters. We go back to the original voice files and rematch. We remind ourselves what these characters are up to and what they've done before and do pay attention very much to the individual attributes that each character has. They do change a little from incarnation to incarnation, but the basis is very much the same, and it's just a matter of point of view, so we're very careful about that, remaining consistent across all of these various incarnations we see, and hopefully we didn't make any mistakes. And if we did, don't notice – please, thank you!

  (laughter)

  Kaiji Tang

One for Kaiji, what do you do to get into character as Archer?

KT: I guess my answer is a little weird because I'm very familiar with this character from the years prior of not only being familiar with character himself, but having played through a lot of the Fate stuff. I played through the original visual novel, all the way through, all three paths. I watched the original Studio DEEN anime. I've been an anime fan my whole life, so I've been very, very familiar with this character in particular. So when I got to read for him for the first time, it's a weird experience trying to come up with a character that you already know the foundation for. So it's like you don't want to lean too heavily on what's been done in the past, and at the same time you don't want to change so much that people are like "wait, that's a complete 180 from the character we're familiar with." So I guess it was a challenge in that I wanted to make something new with the old.

  ---

Skyler has been an anime fan since he first saw Naruto on Toonami in 2005. He loves action shows and strong character writing, and finds writing about himself in the third person awkward. Read more of his work at his blog apieceofanime.com and follow him on Twitter at Videogamep3.

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com