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      ‘2023 Sundance Film Festival Short Films’ Review: Small Bites’

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      From animated partygoers to real families embracing a name, this basket of goodies includes seven titles, among them comedy, tragedy and documentary.Every year, features from the Sundance Film Festival can become critical favorites — “Past Lives” is a notable example — but the fest’s shorter works can fade away. The “2023 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Tour” brings a seven-film omnibus to cinemas across the country, and Kayla Abuda Galang’s “When You Left Me on That Boulevard” alone is reason enough to see it.This lovely and funny short portrays a Filipino American family’s Thanksgiving get-together through the eyes of Ly, an introverted teenager who’s a daydreamer even before she gets stoned with her cousins. It’s a film that contains both bustling images and delicate vibes, inner-voice stillness and subtle soundscapes, all of which can flourish in a movie theater.Galang seems especially drawn to dialing into private spaces in social situations, for example when Ly talks about her boyfriend as if to herself, until a cut reveals she’s surrounded by family members. Ly can sound endearingly oblivious, but instead of having the actor play that tendency for cheap laughs, the writer-director picks up on the warmth in the room.Galang also looks out for different ways of showing how the family is together, whether it’s karaoke — the short’s title comes from a song Ly’s aunt belts out — or a cool split shot of kids and parents hanging out on either side of a wall. If past Sundance collections are any guide, this short might preview a feature, and Galang’s immersive exploration of inner and outer spaces makes one eager to watch what comes next.Family bonds weather transitions in a number of the shorts. “Parker,” from Catherine Hoffman and Sharon Liese, the sole documentary in this selection, teases out a rich, arduous history of Black experience in a decision by members of a family in Kansas City to adopt the same surname. Interviews with the parents and their children show the love, and the fears and trauma, that can be inscribed in a name, and the peace of mind and unity promised by their choice.Resembling vérité nonfiction, Crystal Kayiza’s “Rest Stop” follows a Ugandan-American mother traveling with her three children to join her estranged partner. Kayiza dwells on scenes that a feature might relegate to a montage, the better to sit with feeling unsettled and tired and scattered, but pushing ahead to another future. Liz Sargent’s “Take Me Home” is also a portrait in becoming, as an overwhelmed, cognitively disabled woman (played by Sargent’s real-life sister, Anna) sends an S.O.S. to her sister after years of relying on their ailing mother.Comedies are well-represented in the collection: “Pro Pool” feels like a trailer for itself as it churns through retail workplace humor, while the stop-motion animation “Inglorious Liaisons” fondly portrays a goofy teen party, wherein people have light switches for faces. But Aemilia Scott’s shrewdly written, well-cast opener to the program, “Help Me Understand,” turns a focus group of women testing detergent scents into a nervy experiment in hung-jury dynamics. Shifting gears from satire to a double-edged dissection of point of view, it’s a snappy way of prepping viewers for the multiplicity of voices to follow.2023 Sundance Film Festival Short Film TourNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More

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      A Director and a Rock Band Are Redrawing the Contours of Anime

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      For hits like “Your Name” and now “Suzume,” Makoto Shinkai has worked with Radwimps on the narrative as well as the score. The results have won awards.Since the 2016 release of the global megahit “Your Name,” the stirring music in the animated epics of the Japanese director Makoto Shinkai has become inextricable from their transporting images.Shinkai’s recent high-stakes melodramas about star-crossed teenage lovers and impending supernatural catastrophes move to the up-tempo songs and luminous instrumental tracks of the Japanese rock band Radwimps. On multiple occasions, the band’s compositions have also persuaded the filmmaker to make significant changes to his narratives.In U.S. theaters Friday, “Suzume,” a fantastical saga inspired by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, represents the third collaboration between the acclaimed storyteller and the musicians.The international popularity of Shinkai’s films has in turn broadened Radwimps’ audience to include fans beyond Japan’s borders. The band will kick off its first North American tour this weekend in San Jose, Calif.“Radwimps and I are two wheels of the same bicycle,” Shinkai, 50, said via an interpreter at a hotel in West Hollywood, Calif. “We need each other, and we are pushing one another forward.”Before enlisting Radwimps, Shinkai had worked with the composer Tenmon, a colleague from his time in video games, on the scores for his short films and early features.But on the more ambitious “Your Name,” a body-swap tale about a boy and a girl connected through time and space, Shinkai sought to differentiate himself from the influential anime production company Studio Ghibli, and from its co-founder, Hayao Miyazaki, in particular. Over the years, as Shinkai’s profile grew, the director said, journalists continually described him as “the next Miyazaki coming out of Japan.” Despite his unabashed admiration for the master animator, Shinkai disliked the constant comparisons.“For ‘Your Name,’ I wanted to do something Miyazaki would never do in one of his films, which was use rock music,” he said.When Shinkai, who had been a Radwimps fan for years, first approached the band in 2014, the artists had been playing together for over a decade but had yet to create music for movies. The lead singer and songwriter, Yojiro Noda, 37, saw this as a chance to reinvigorate the band and push its artistic boundaries while he learned new skills like orchestration.Upon reading the screenplay, Noda quickly turned around the songs “ZenZenZense” (“Past Past Life”), which became the propulsive soundtrack for the opening sequence, and the power ballad “Sparkle.”On “Suzume,” Shinkai, center, worked with Radwimps’ Yojiro Noda, right, as well as the composer Kazuma Jinnouchi.Suzume Film Partners“When I get the script, it’s like a ritual for me to write a few songs just right away without filter and without overthinking it,” Noda, speaking during a recent video interview from Tokyo, explained through a translator.From ages 6 to 10, Noda lived in the United States, and while his English vocabulary during that time was limited, two words stuck with him: “rad,” to describe something exciting, and “wimp,” with its negative connotation. Putting them together created an oxymoron that he thought fit his band, which he started with middle-school friends in the early 2000s.Radwimps has gone through multiple configurations over the years, with some members departing or going on hiatus. Its current lineup is Noda, who also plays guitar and piano; the bassist Yusuke Takeda; and the guitarist Akira Kuwahara.Once Noda decides on the melody and lyrical theme based on Shinkai’s text, he shares it with his bandmates, who enrich the sound with their instruments, synthesizers and percussion.The beautifully hyperbolic lyrics, however, are all Noda’s. “He’s one of the very few poets left in Japan right now who can write the way he does,” Shinkai said.The composer, who’s also written and performed English-language versions of some of the songs created for Shinkai’s animated romances, explained: “All of the music for ‘Your Name’ came from that longing to see each other that was so genuine and pure between the two characters, Mitsuha and Taki.”The “Your Name” soundtrack album debuted at No. 1 on the Japanese national album chart and stayed there for another week. That distinction came on top of the monumental box-office success that eventually turned the film into the third-highest-grossing Japanese production in the country’s history, animated or otherwise.“Radwimps’ music was essential to the success of ‘Your Name,’” Shinkai said. “It really propelled that film into a worldwide social phenomenon.”For Shinkai, Noda’s interpretation of his stories “feels like his way of giving me feedback on my screenplay, but it just happens to come in the form of music.” These exchanges, he believes, have become essential for him to see the full potential of what the film can be.Through his music, Noda essentially provided feedback on the “Suzume” screenplay, Shinkai said.CrunchyrollOn their second outing together, “Weathering With You” (2020), in which a young man must choose between love and saving Tokyo from torrential rain, Shinkai decided to expand a pivotal sequence where the protagonists fall from the sky after he listened to the choir voices featured in “Grand Escape,” one of the early songs Radwimps produced for the movie.Something similar occurred with “Suzume.” Noda delivered “Tamaki,” a song about the aunt and guardian of the 17-year-old title character. Inspired by the tune, Shinkai realized Tamaki’s relevance and added more interactions between her and Suzume. Such changes can be made because the band comes on board long before the visual development starts.For the theme song, “Suzume no Tojimari” (also the name of the film in Japan, where it’s already a hit), Noda listened to Shinkai’s suggestion that the music should capture the scent of the earth itself and the sound of the wind.They also agreed that since a girl is at the center of this whimsical coming-of-age saga, the track needed a female singer. After scouring multiple social media platforms for the right voice, they came across a TikToker named Toaka. She had no professional experience, but videos of her singing at home impressed them.Radwimps has now received three Japan Academy Awards — the country’s Oscar equivalents — for best music, one for each of their collaborations with Shinkai. (For “Suzume,” they shared the prize with composer Kazuma Jinnouchi, who created some of the score’s instrumental moments.)With no plans for the partnership to end, Noda thanks destiny, a concept crucial to the director’s metaphysical adventures, for bringing them together.“Shinkai often tells me there’s no limit to creativity,” Noda said. “He’s an inspiration, and writing songs for his anime is always going to be something special for me.” More

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      Cautionary Climate Tales That Give People Pause When They Press Play

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      The India-born director Joshua Ashish Dawson builds digital worlds that ruminate on the future shock of environmental destruction in the real world.This article is part of our Design special section on how the recent push for diversity is changing the way the world looks.A young woman is distressed. She seems unwell. Her body was “never designed to cope with the extremes of a shifting climate,” a soothing voice informs us. As a dreamy soundtrack plays in the background, she arrives at “Spa Sybarite,” where futuristic stone treatment pods hover on stilts above a desert landscape.“Spa Sybarite” is a three-minute film by Joshua Ashish Dawson, a 32-year-old Angeleno who describes himself as a “world builder” and much of his work as “speculative climate futures.” Trained as an architect, he uses digital design tools and the language of cinema to create environments and scenarios that, he said, “ask viewers to question their assumptions about the world they live in.”At “Spa Sybarite,” the voice-over goes on, guests are offered “an assortment of scientifically tested customized treatments to help your body condition itself to the environmental despair that faces our planet.” Soaking in an outdoor tub rinses skin “of the deposits of wildfire ash,” and healthy meals are “customized to your prior nutritional accessibility.” There is also “solastalgia therapy,” where digital visualization artists create an immersive 3-D simulation of your wildfire-destroyed home for you to visit.A character in “Spa Sybarite” rinses in a tub that’s meant to cleanse her of wildfire ash. Both hyper-realistic and satirical, this film probes how people might shift their wellness rituals to cope with extreme climate change.Joshua DawsonThe conceit for “Spa Sybarite” is both slightly absurd and eminently believable. Elements almost feel like satire, something Mr. Dawson plays with, but his ultimate aim is for a kind of “hyper-realism,” he said of the film, noting that the idea of a climate spa is not very far from reality. “Wellness is a multi-trillion-dollar industry,” he said, “and it’s only a matter of time before someone takes the obvious opportunity to market wellness as the solution to climate-based illness, the biggest global health threat of our time.”Having grown up in Bangalore, India, he is sensitive to how climate change disproportionally affects low-income communities and communities of color. His invention of a white, presumably wealthy protagonist in “Spa Sybarite” raises the question of who has access to wellness, not to mention basic heath care. He sees the luxury spa as a product of disaster capitalism, “where these infrastructures of care are used to make a profit off of a crisis.”Mr. Dawson has made three other films, ranging from four to seven minutes, with related themes: In “Cáustico,” it is the politics of water privatization; in “Loa’s Promise,” the ecological and human impacts of unregulated resource extraction; and in “Denervation,” the threats posed by counterfeiting in an unscrupulous pharmaceutical industry. Concern with the environment and health underlie everything.He traces his career path to his childhood in India in the 1990s, when two of his loves were Lego and movies. His father is an English-speaking Protestant Christian who works as an interior designer, and his mother is a Hindu civil engineer whose first language is Marathi. The family spoke English at home, and both Mr. Dawson and his sister attended convent schools that had been established by the British.“The influx of Hollywood at that point in time in Bangalore really was something that we grabbed onto and were excited about,” he recounted. Even today, he said, movies are a big part of how his family connects.“I never had a road map set by someone who looked like me,” said Mr. Dawson. Here, he sits inside the Bradbury Building in Los Angeles where he plans to shoot his next project: a feature film.Tanveer Badal for The New York TimesHe went on to study at the RV College of Architecture in Bangalore, where he received a bachelor’s degree in architecture. While in school, he interned for several months in the Ahmedabad office of Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi, India’s first Pritzker Prize-winning architect.Doshi, who died in January, worked with Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, two influential figures in modern architecture, and he was known for adapting the International Style to a community-minded modernist approach and regional focus that reflected India’s culture and climate.The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.The Tom Cruise Factor: Stars were starstruck when the “Top Gun: Maverick” headliner showed up at the Oscar nominees luncheon.An Andrea Riseborough FAQ: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why her nod was controversial.Sundance and the Oscars: Which films from the festival could follow “CODA” to the 2024 Academy Awards.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.“I learned a lot from him in terms of how he used mythmaking and storytelling very much in his design process,” Mr. Dawson said. “And it was the start of something that was sort of going off in my head.”After graduating from architecture school, he received his license to practice in India. But he lacked experience with digital tools used for design and fabrication. That led him to enroll in the master’s program in advanced architectural studies at the University of Southern California, where he met another key mentor, Alex McDowell.Mr. McDowell is a Hollywood film production designer with credits on “Fight Club,” “Minority Report” and “Man of Steel,” among others. His studio, Experimental Design, creates future-gazing story worlds for corporate clients, educational institutions and cultural organizations. He is also on the faculty of the USC School of Cinematic Arts and is the director of the school’s World Building Media Lab, where students collaborate on immersive storytelling.“What’s exciting is when students come in from completely different disciplines with this very open-minded approach to storytelling,” Mr. McDowell said. “And Joshua was one of relatively few who really pushed against the edges of his discipline. He came into class as an architect, very open and excited, I think, by the idea of entertainment media. He came in ready to break down the walls.”Mr. Dawson’s graduation project was his first short, “Cáustico.” Set in the year 2036, in a computer-generated city of anonymous steel-and-glass structures, the film envisions a future where dwindling fresh water supplies are controlled by a fictional company called Turquoise, whose depletion of underground aquifers causes massive sinkholes, while some of the most privileged citizens start moving into a subterranean lower city to be closer to the water. For the audio, Mr. Dawson used snippets of actual news reports on climate and water issues from 2014 and 2015, reminding us that such a future might not be so far away.In “Cáustico,” Mr. Dawson conceptualizes the politics of water privatization. Eventually, he’d like to create real-world spaces but for now is focused on continuing to explore experimental, design-based projects.Joshua DawsonSince then, he has turned out films at a measured pace while working day jobs. He spent four and a half years as a designer at Price Architects and HKS (the two firms merged in 2019), and for the past two years, he has been a narrative visualization specialist at IBI Group, producing dynamic 3-D models that help planners study the impact potential infrastructure and development projects will have on future urban environments.Mr. Dawson said he eventually wants to create real-world spaces. For now, he remains focused on the films he thinks of as a critical design practice, taking inspiration from ’60s and ’70s radical architecture collectives like Superstudio and Archigram, which rejected building in favor of exploring experimental concepts in films, artworks and manifestoes that challenged the status quo.Funded with grants and his own savings, each short film has involved a handful of partners. Some he has known since his days at USC, like Ashton Rae, a cinematographer, who described Mr. Dawson as “an incredibly collaborative director” with “a clear and punctuated vision.” She noted that in addition to making films “about real-world issues that affect marginalized individuals,” Mr. Dawson prioritizes having a diverse crew on set and for postproduction work.Mr. Dawson said his own identity as an immigrant of color is an asset in his work, giving him “a different perspective on issues that locals can’t see or see in biased ways.” As a Christian and the product of an interfaith marriage in India, he described himself as a micro-minority who “always felt like an outsider.”Familiar with the religious, gender and caste-based discrimination that is widespread in India, he is still learning about racism in the U.S., where he said immigrants are often expected to feel grateful just for being here. Based on his name, people often assume he is white before they meet him, which can cut both ways.“Since the killing of George Floyd, there definitely has been an increase in the kind of space making for people of color to be given a place at the table,” he said. “But it can be a little bit like a quota, like tokenism, with one spot or two spots that all the marginalized groups of people within their discipline have to compete for.”His hope is to see more people like him doing the kind of work he loves. “I never had a road map set by someone who looked like me, who paved this sort of interdisciplinary path like the one I’m trying to forge,” he said.A conceptual image of Mr. Dawson’s upcoming project where he reimagines the Bradbury Building as an ancient Indian stepwell. He plans for it to serve as a backdrop for a full-length murder-mystery movie.Joshua DawsonHis next project is a feature film that will incorporate cultural references tied to his identity as an India-born designer. It started as a visual thought experiment, a reimagining of the historic Bradbury Building in Los Angeles — specifically its soaring interior court with a glass ceiling and ornate Victorian ironwork — as an ancient Indian stepwell. The fictional hybrid structure will serve as a setting for a story about an Indian American detective who threads through its spaces as she investigates a murder.While Mr. Dawson was working on the screenplay this winter, drought-stricken Los Angeles was being battered by heavy storms, with most of the rainfall washing into the ocean because of insufficient drainage and catchment infrastructure. His project is a provocation to city planners to look to India’s stepwells — subterranean structures that are admired as aesthetic as well as engineering marvels, which for centuries provided reserves of clean water for drinking and bathing — for creative inspiration, if not literal solutions.“The past can teach us a lot, not just in terms of how water histories are written but also how water is controlled by the state,” Mr. Dawson said.He attributed his decision to weave his cultural background into his work to finding his voice as a designer and storyteller, but he added that it probably also has something to do with an increased openness to diverse cultural narratives.“Personally,” he said, “I like to roll with this idea that it’s a beautiful synchronization between the two.” More

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      Growing a Generation of Movie-Loving Global Citizens

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      The selections at this year’s New York International Children’s Film Festival blend fantastical elements with serious real-world themes.The characters in the offerings at the 2023 New York International Children’s Film Festival often resolve crises in unexpected ways: by tossing magical seeds. Or slamming enchanted doors. Or, in what may be the most startling example, following a giant porcupine as it lumbers through the streets of Rotterdam.These fantastical elements, however, appear alongside realities that more commercial movies for young people usually avoid. This year’s festival, which begins on Friday evening and continues for three weekends — two in Manhattan and Brooklyn theaters, and one at the Sag Harbor Cinema on Long Island — explores subjects like the civil war in Syria, accelerating threats of natural disaster, the plight of unauthorized immigrants and, in one short documentary, the effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on a family with members in both New York and Odesa. Now in its 26th year, the festival seeks not just to entertain young audiences but also to expand their worldviews.“There’s a concerted effort to talk about human rights and focus on global citizenry,” Maria-Christina Villaseñor, the festival’s programming director, said in an interview. But, she added, “I think that playfulness is really rolling out in all kinds of interesting ways throughout our slate.”That menu, comprising 16 features and nearly 60 short films, which will be offered entirely in person for the first time since 2020, begins with Friday’s world premiere of “Ernest & Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia.” (This title and many others will be shown more than once.) An animated film from France and Luxembourg, it follows Ernest, a gruff but good-hearted bear, and Celestine, a vivacious mouse, as they journey to Ernest’s homeland to have his cherished violin, a “Stradibearius,” repaired. Once there, they’re shocked to learn that the country has prohibited almost all music-making.“Ernest & Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia,” which will make its world premiere at the festival, follows a bear and a mouse on a wild journey that touches on themes of autocracy and personal autonomy.GKIDS/StudioCanalThe filmmakers, Julien Chheng and Jean-Christophe Roger (Roger will visit the festival for an opening-night Q. and A.), have filled the movie with wild chases, narrow escapes and a full-fledged musical resistance. But it also touches on autocracy and personal autonomy — relevant themes in a world where dissenters are sometimes imprisoned and certain children’s books are being banned.“Kids are able to enter these films at the level that they are comfortable or ready for,” said Nina Guralnick, the executive director of the festival, which offers titles for viewers as young as 3 and has a jury that judges a broad swath of the short films. (The prizewinners then become eligible for Academy Award consideration.) “But that’s also what makes those films last,” she said, “because they will come back and think about them as their thinking becomes more sophisticated.”The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.The Tom Cruise Factor: Stars were starstruck when the “Top Gun: Maverick” headliner showed up at the Oscar nominees luncheon.An Andrea Riseborough FAQ: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why her nod was controversial.Sundance and the Oscars: Which films from the festival could follow “CODA” to the 2024 Academy Awards.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.Marya Zarif, a Syrian-born filmmaker who lives in Montreal, said in a video interview that she intended “Dounia & the Princess of Aleppo,” the Canadian and French animated feature that she directed with André Kadi, to be a festival film to which young viewers can repeatedly return for new insights.Dounia, its vibrant 6-year-old heroine, sees the war steadily encroaching on her joyful life in Syria. But she has powerful protection: nigella seeds, a Middle Eastern spice. In the movie, they have mystical properties that Dounia discovers after she and her grandparents become refugees on a dangerous and sometimes heartbreaking odyssey.“I needed a magic that was rooted in Dounia’s culture,” said Zarif, who will appear via video link for a post-screening Q. and A. on Sunday. “And I needed something very small but that had big effects, like Dounia herself.”The festival also has fare for viewers well into their teens. “Suzume,” an anime feature by Makoto Shinkai that is already a blockbuster in Japan, will receive its North American premiere at the festival on Sunday.The title character, an orphaned high school student who lives with her aunt, encounters Souta, a youth who is “a closer” — one who has the task of shutting ordinary-looking doors that, when left open, unleash terrors like earthquakes and tsunamis. When a spell transforms Souta into a walking, talking chair, Suzume shoulders his world-saving burden.Such stories of female empowerment are a favorite with the festival, which annually features the short-film program “Girls’ POV.” Its offerings this year include a story that illustrates the frustrations of obtaining menstrual products and a documentary about an American all-girl tackle football league.Girls also take charge in the Dutch live-action feature “Okthanksbye,” whose two main characters are deaf 13-year-olds. When the beloved Parisian grandmother of one of the teenagers is hospitalized, they leave their Netherlands boarding school and head to France. Portrayed by Mae van de Loo and Douae Zine El Abidine — young, deaf first-time actresses — the girls embark on an adventure that includes traveling with a female punk band.The film’s director, Nicole van Kilsdonk, who wrote the script with Lilian Sijbesma, said the movie wasn’t meant to be about disability, even though the girls’ situations — one has a cochlear implant; one doesn’t — play a role. Van Kilsdonk, who on Saturday will attend the first of two open-captioned screenings and take part in a sign-language-interpreted discussion, said this coming-of-age story held a universal message: “You can do more than you think.”Douae Zine El Abidine, left, and Mae van de Loo are first-time actresses, both deaf, who play deaf teenagers in the Dutch coming-of-age feature “Okthanksbye.”Labyrint FilmFar more perilous border crossings lie at the heart of the features about immigration. “Home Is Somewhere Else,” a Mexican documentary, chronicles, in their own words, the experiences of young people with different legal statuses. Framed by the spoken-word poetry of José Eduardo Aguilar, who was himself deported from the United States, the film eschews live action in favor of vivid, varied animation.“That also was a way to protect our protagonists’ identity,” said Jorge Villalobos, who wrote and directed the film with Carlos Hagerman. (Hagerman will participate in a Q. and A. after the film’s screening on March 11.) But the men, who dealt with families on each side of the U.S.-Mexico border, also found that animation gave them freedom to employ visual metaphors and depict the world through their subjects’ eyes.“Usually, documentaries are kind of talking about how the system doesn’t work,” Hagerman said. “And we are more into experiencing how does it feel to live in these situations.”Similar struggles infuse “Totem,” Sander Burger’s fictional live-action feature from Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, which focuses on Ama (Amani-Jean Philippe), an 11-year-old whose Senegalese family lives in Rotterdam without documentation. Regarding herself as thoroughly Dutch, Ama ends up on the run and searching for her father after the authorities detain her other relatives. This high-spirited heroine gets aid from her spirit animal, a massive porcupine.The strong language in both immigration-related features hasn’t deterred the festival’s organizers, who provide parental advisories online. And families who may be reluctant to take children into theaters during a virus-filled winter can look forward to the festival’s Kid Flicks National Touring Program, which, in the summer, will begin sharing selections from some of its short-film packages — including Celebrating Black Stories and the Latin-themed ¡Hola Cine! — with museums, libraries and cinemas. (The festival also offers film-based curriculums for schools.)“We think we’ve doubled the number of programs that we send out,” Guralnick said. “And I feel like we just keep adding partners.” All share a goal, she added: “growing that next generation of filmgoers.”The New York International Children’s Film FestivalMarch 3-19; 212-349-0330; nyicff.org. More

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      Spirited Away to Miyazaki Land

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      Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.As an American, I know what it feels like to arrive at a theme park. The totalizing consumerist embrace. The blunt-force, world-warping, escapist delight. I have known theme parks with entrance gates like international borders and ticket prices like mortgage payments and parking lots the size of Cleveland. I have been to Disney World, an alternate reality that basically occupies its own tax zone, with its own Fire Department and its own agriculture — a place where, before you’ve even entered, you see a 100-foot-tall electrical pole along the freeway with Mickey Mouse ears. This is a theme park’s job: to swallow the universe. To replace our boring, aimless, frustrating world with a new one made just for us.Imagine my confusion, then, when I arrived at Ghibli Park, Japan’s long-awaited tribute to the legendary animation of Studio Ghibli.Like filmgoers all over the world, I had been fantasizing about a visit to Ghibli Park since the project was announced more than five years ago. I tracked the online rumors, inhaled the concept drawings, scrutinized the maps. Ghibli’s animation has always felt destined to be turned into a theme park. Hayao Miyazaki, the studio’s co-founder, is one of the all-time great imaginary world-builders — right up there with Lewis Carroll, Jim Henson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Charles Schulz, Maurice Sendak and composers of the Icelandic sagas. Even Miyazaki’s most fantastical creations — a castle with giant metal chicken legs, a yellow bus with the body of a cat — feel somehow thick and plausible and real.Miyazaki started Studio Ghibli in 1985, out of desperation, when he and his co-founders, Isao Takahata and Toshio Suzuki, couldn’t find a studio willing to put out their work. The films were brilliant but notoriously artsy, expensive, labor-intensive. Miyazaki is maniacally detail-obsessed. He agonizes over his children’s cartoons as if he were Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel. He will pour whole oceans of effort and time and money into the smallest effects: the way a jumping fish twists as it leaps, individual faces in a crowd reacting to an earthquake, the physics of tiles during a rooftop chase scene. Miyazaki insists that, although few viewers will be conscious of all this work, every viewer will feel it. And we do. Those tiny touches, adding up across the length of a film, anchor his fantasies in the actual world.“Ghibli” is an Italian word, derived from Arabic, for a hot wind that blows across Libya. The plan was for the company to blow like a hot wind through the stagnant world of animation. It succeeded. For more than 35 years, Studio Ghibli has been the great eccentric juggernaut of anime, cranking out classic after odd classic: “Castle in the Sky” (1986), “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988), “Kiki’s Delivery Service” (1989), “Only Yesterday” (1991), “Princess Mononoke” (1997), “Spirited Away” (2001). In Japan, the release of a new Ghibli film is a national event, and the studio’s most popular characters are ubiquitous: plump Totoro, mysterious No Face, the grinning Cat Bus, googly-eyed soot sprites. As a kind of shorthand, Miyazaki is often called the Walt Disney of Japan.Waiting for the Cat Bus in “My Neighbor Totoro.”I was dying to see, in person, how a Ghibli theme park might work. How could these surreal worlds possibly be translated into reality? What would it feel like to lose ourselves inside them?In November, when Ghibli Park finally opened, I made sure to get myself there. And so, after many years, and much traveling — at long last — I found myself stepping into the wonders of Ghibli Park.Or did I? Did I find myself stepping into the wonders of Ghibli Park?My first impression was not awe or majesty or surrender or consumerist bliss. It was confusion. For a surprisingly long time after I arrived, I could not tell whether or not I had arrived. There was no security checkpoint, no ticket booths, no ambient Ghibli soundtrack, no mountainous Cat Bus statue. Instead, I found myself stepping out of a very ordinary train station into what seemed to be a large municipal park. A sea of pavement. Sports fields. Vending machines. It looked like the kind of place you might go on a lazy weekend to see a pretty good softball tournament.There were some buildings around, but it was hard to tell which of them might or might not be Ghibli-related. In the distance, the arc of a Ferris wheel broke the horizon — but this, I would discover, had nothing to do with Ghibli Park. I wandered into and out of a convenience store. I saw some children wearing Totoro hats and started to follow them. It felt like some kind of bizarre treasure hunt — a theme park where the theme was searching for the theme park. Which was, in a way, perfectly Studio Ghibli: no pleasure without a little challenge. And so I headed down the hill, trying to find my way in.The magazine sent the Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi to Ghibli Park on a day when it was closed to the public, and she took along her daughter and some friends. Rinko Kawauchi for The New York TimesLike many non-Japanese viewers, I first encountered Studio Ghibli through the 2001 film “Spirited Away.” It is Miyazaki’s masterpiece, a popular and critical supertriumph that won the Oscar for best animated feature and became, for two decades, the highest-grossing film in Japanese history. Critics all over the world simultaneously fell out of their armchairs to praise it in the most ecstatic possible terms. Nigel Andrews of The Financial Times rated it six out of five stars, justifying this mathematical impossibility (“Exception must be made for the exceptional”) with a flood of rapturous beat poetry: “What is the film about? It is about 122 minutes and 12 billion years. It sums up all existence and gives us a mythology good for every society, amoebal, animal or human, that ever lived.” And he offered the ultimate existentialist blurb: “Rush now while life lasts.”I, on the other hand, am not a film critic. I am an ordinary American, someone raised on MTV and “S.N.L.” and CGI. Which means that my entertainment metabolism has been carefully tuned to digest the purest visual corn syrup. Sarcastic men with large guns. Yearning princesses with grumpy fathers. Explosive explosions explosively exploding. When I watched “Spirited Away,” at first I had no idea what I was looking at. In the simplest terms, the film tells the coming-of-age story of a 10-year-old girl named Chihiro. It takes place in a haunted theme park — where, almost immediately, Chihiro’s parents are turned into pigs, and Chihiro is forced to sign away her name and perform menial labor in a bathhouse for ghosts (ghosts, spirits, monsters, gods — it’s hard to know exactly what to call them, and the film never explains). A full plot summary would be impossible. The story moves at a strange, tumbling pace, with elements connecting and separating and floating around, revolving and recombining, as if in a dream.A bathhouse for ghosts in “Spirited Away.”But plot isn’t really the point. The majestic thing about “Spirited Away” is the world itself. Miyazaki’s creativity is radically dense; every little molecule of the film seems charged with invention. The haunted bathhouse attracts a proliferation of very weird beings: giant yellow ducklings, a sentient slime-blob, fanged monsters with antlers, a humanoid radish spirit who appears to be wearing an upside-down red bowl for a hat. There is a trio of green disembodied heads, with black mustaches and angry faces, who bounce around and pile up on top of one another and grunt disapprovingly at Chihiro. There are so many creatures, stuffed into so many nooks and crannies, that it seems as if Miyazaki has been spending multiple eternities, on multiple planets, running parallel evolutionary timelines, just so he can sketch the most interesting results. As a viewer, you have to surrender to the abundance. Crowd-surf into the hallucination.Chihiro and the soot sprites in “Spirited Away.”Miyazaki knows that his work can be difficult — and he is, at all times, righteously defiant. “I must say that I hate Disney’s works,” he once declared. “The barrier to both the entry and exit of Disney films is too low and too wide. To me, they show nothing but contempt for the audience.” At home, Miyazaki is a celebrity, recognizable to the point of parody: caterpillar eyebrows, heavy, dark-rimmed glasses, sculpted white beard, cigarette. In 2019, the TV network NHK — Japan’s rough equivalent to the BBC — aired a four-part documentary chronicling Miyazaki’s creative process. It is a festival of grouchy agony, full of insults (“He’s not an adult yet,” he says of his then 39-year-old son Goro) and self-reproach (“I feel like a comb with missing teeth”). Miyazaki is the curmudgeon’s curmudgeon. Over the decades, he has dismissed everything from iPads (“disgusting”) to 1980s Japanese animation (“resembles the food served on jumbo-jet airliners”) to art created by artificial intelligence (“I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself”). Many artists have high standards. Miyazaki’s are in outer space.Disney is, famously, a vast corporate content farm, with all artistic choices carefully examined by an assembly line of executives, marketers, focus groups, etc. Whereas Miyazaki’s vision is absolutely his own. Despite its global success, Studio Ghibli has remained quirky and unpredictable, a direct reflection of the personalities of its founders. To this day, Miyazaki insists on meticulously hand-drawing his own storyboards. When his sketches go to Ghibli’s larger team for the technical work of animation, he checks every image, and if he sees something he dislikes he will erase it and draw right over it — explaining the whole time why it was wrong. For as long as he possibly could, Miyazaki resisted computer animation. He still refuses, on principle, to make sequels. He has long told parents that children should not watch his films more than once a year. (“Whatever experiences we provide them,” Miyazaki has said, “are in a sense stealing time from them that otherwise might be spent in a world where they go out and make their own discoveries or have their own personal experiences.”)Miyazaki is now 82. He has tried multiple times, without success, to pass the creative torch. “I trained successors, but I couldn’t let go,” he once said. “I devoured them. I devoured their talent. … That was my destiny. I ate them all.” Even his elder son, Goro, has tried his hand at directing — with mixed results. Miyazaki has abruptly retired, and then just as suddenly unretired, by my count, four times. He is currently finishing work on a new film titled “How Do You Live?” It is now in production and should be out in Japan this summer.All of which raises some huge questions for Studio Ghibli — questions so deep they are practically theological. What will happen to the company when the great Miyazaki is gone? Can such idiosyncratic imaginative worlds outlive the mind that made them? Would a theme park help (as it did for Walt Disney) to answer both of those questions?More on the Walt Disney CompanyDeSantis-Disney Rift: In the latest development in a battle between the Florida governor and Disney, Ron DeSantis has gained control of the board that oversees development at Walt Disney World, a move that restricts the autonomy of Disney over its theme-park complex.Quarterly Earnings Report: In Disney’s first earnings report since Bob Iger returned as chief executive, the company exceeded Wall Street’s expectations. But thousands of employees are expected to be laid off.Board Seat Bid Ends: The activist investor Nelson Peltz has ended his attempt to install himself or his son on Disney’s board and shake up the company.Splash Mountain’s Closure: As Disney takes steps to erase the racist back story of the Walt Disney World ride, some are claiming to be selling water from the attraction online.“Spirited Away” is now more than 20 years old. Since that first confused encounter, I have watched it many, many times. I still find it strange and scary and disorienting — but also uplifting. Despite his crankiness, Miyazaki has always defined his artistic mission in inspirational terms. “I want to send a message of cheer to all those wandering aimlessly through life,” he has written. So when the real world gets bad — when I feel depressed, stressed, misanthropic, crushed by politics or deadlines — I often find myself stepping once more into Chihiro’s world. I find myself wanting to float around in Miyazaki’s imagination as the spirits float in the herbal pools of the “Spirited Away” bathhouse. I want to snuggle into the world of Ghibli like Totoro snuggling into a bed of ferns.An elevator tower renovated to include elements from films like “Castle in the Sky.”Rinko Kawauchi for The New York Times‘‘Do you recognize this?” one of my Ghibli Park guides asked me.I did. Of course I did.We were staring at a big old-fashioned Japanese gate: red, with dark brown wood and a green tile roof. It was a structure straight out of “Spirited Away.” Waiting on the other side, framed perfectly in the doorway, was one of my favorite things in all of Miyazaki: a squat stone statue, inscrutable and smiling.My guides were two friendly members of Ghibli’s P.R. team, Mai Sato and Seika Wang. I met them up at the train station, after I finished puttering around the area, lost. They confirmed that yes, I had come to the right place. Unlike any theme park I’d ever been to, Ghibli Park was located inside a larger park, Expo 2005 Aichi Commemorative Park. And, like a very polite houseguest, it had tucked itself in without making much of a fuss. Its signage was subtle, and its attractions were spread around, at great distances from one another. The guides told me that our tour would take approximately four hours.As my body passed through the “Spirited Away” gate, I felt a slight, shimmering thrill. That smiling statue on the other side was a spirit shrine, guardian of the other world — the first real sign, in the film, that Chihiro’s life is about to be transformed. As we approached, I wanted to stop and take a selfie and text it to everyone I know. But other tourists were doing that, and more people, over to the side, were waiting politely for their turn. So the guides and I walked on.This is when we entered the forest.If you want Miyazaki to love you, it might help to be a tree. He has a well-documented reverence for nature. Rivers and mountains and oceans are practically the heroes of many Ghibli films. Miyazaki’s forests are so distinctive that certain mossy shades of green automatically make me think of them. In fact, Miyazaki often compares storytelling itself to a tree. It’s not just about flashy ornamentation, he likes to say, it’s about the deep invisible roots that support the trunk that supports the branches — all of which, in the end, allows you to hang the ornaments that everyone will admire.Totoro, Satsuki and Mei with trees in “My Neighbor Totoro.”Ghibli Park was designed, as the official website puts it, in “close consultation with the surrounding forest.” My guides told me that, amazingly, not a single tree was cut down. Again I thought of Disney World, which was created at the expense of whole ecosystems — square miles denatured and paved to make way for lucrative, user-friendly worlds of plastic and metal. Ghibli Park, by contrast, is largely unchanged forest. Seeing its attractions involves walking, endlessly, through wooded paths. Some of those paths are new or recently improved. But many seem old. The forest’s trees were thin and twisty; they stretched over our heads like sunlit hallways. They tangled off into the distance. They just stood there, being trees. Staircases, wooden and stone, branched off up and down hills. Without my guides, I would have had no idea where to go. As we walked, the American in me kept wondering about lawsuits. Surely, someone would someday trip on a root and fall down a staircase. And wouldn’t that person blame Ghibli Park? At one point, we saw a warning sign, attached to a post, telling people to beware of snakes and hornets. It listed a phone number to call if you got into trouble.Months before, in my first meeting with Studio Ghibli’s P.R. team about a possible visit, I was told that the studio would be happy to work with me but had one serious concern. If The New York Times published an article about Ghibli Park, they said, it might make more people want to come visit. This struck them as a problem. Like many Ghibli products, Ghibli Park is impishly non-user-friendly. This is true for people in Japan, and even more so for international visitors. Consider, for instance, its location. Unlike Tokyo Disneyland or Universal Studios Japan (in Osaka), Ghibli Park is not located in a tourist hub. Instead, it sits on the outskirts of an unglamorous city called Nagoya, in a region famous for being the home of Toyota — basically, the Detroit of Japan. And the park is not even in Nagoya proper. From my hotel in the center of the city, it took me an hour, and three different trains, to reach Ghibli Park. The website suggests taking the train because the park has no dedicated parking lot.The website also does its best to lower expectations, declaring immediately, “There are no big attractions or rides in Ghibli Park.” The surrounding grounds are public and free to walk around, all day long. There are only three paid areas in Ghibli Park, and by theme-park standards the admission fees are laughably low: the equivalent of about $10 to $20 for each area. But tickets, at that time, were nearly impossible to get. There was a lottery system, and they were sold out for months in advance.Occasionally, my guides would lead me to a modest little statue. “Do you recognize this?” they would ask. And it would be something from a Ghibli film: sitting on a bench, Mei’s hat and ear of corn from “My Neighbor Totoro”; standing near a tree, a tanuki from “Pom Poko”; on a table, Sosuke’s bucket from “Ponyo.” There are 15 of these objects, they told me, scattered throughout the park. A little fan-service scavenger hunt. I would pause, identify the item and take a photo. Other tourists would stop and do the same. And then we would all keep walking through the trees.Tanuki in “Pom Poko.”After a while I told my guides, only half joking, that Ghibli Park seemed like an extremely elaborate way to lure people out into the middle of an obscure Japanese forest.Yes, they said. That is basically correct.Studio Ghibli did not offer me an interview with Hayao Miyazaki. He was busy with his final film, and he almost never agrees to do interviews anymore. Besides, they said, Ghibli Park was not really his project. The man in charge was Goro — Hayao Miyazaki’s son.In person, Goro Miyazaki is almost the opposite of his father. Miyazaki the elder is a spectacle — perpetually in motion, smoking and agonizing and clutching his hair. He looks like a Miyazaki character. Goro, by contrast, looks like an absolutely normal man. He is 56, clean-shaven, slim. He sits still and speaks softly, modestly, with none of his father’s bombast. His eyes are like deep pools.Goro and I met at Ghibli headquarters, a leafy compound, designed by Hayao Miyazaki himself, that is spread over several blocks of a quiet Tokyo suburb. We sat in a meeting room featuring shelves of animation books and statuettes of Ghibli characters. Goro arrived carrying multiple large folders: his sketches and plans for Ghibli Park.The Miyazakis, father and son, have what you might call a fraught relationship. Both men have been surprisingly open about this. During Goro’s childhood, the great animator was mostly absent, cranking out masterpieces. The little boy got to know his father like the rest of Japan, by watching his films. “I just wanted him to be there,” Goro says in the NHK documentary, with great feeling. “He feels alive only when he’s making a film.” And then he adds, resigned, “He can’t change now.”“I owe that little boy an apology,” Hayao Miyazaki says.Goro Miyazaki, son of Hayao, at Studio Ghibli in Koganei, Japan.Rinko Kawauchi for The New York TimesGoro, meanwhile, was raised by his mother, Akemi Miyazaki. She taught him to love the outdoors. They were always going hiking, and they spent summers up in her father’s mountain cabin. In high school, Goro joined the mountaineering club. In college, he studied forestry. After graduation, he worked in landscape architecture. In his 30s, Goro led the construction of a quirky little Ghibli Museum in suburban Tokyo, designed by his father, which opened in 2001.This is something father and son could share: a reverence for nature. And Goro brought this reverence to his design for Ghibli Park.“There was a time when we considered making our own version of Disneyland,” he told me. “Here is the Totoro area. People can ride the Cat Bus. That’s great. But what about the environment around it?”After all, the action of “My Neighbor Totoro” is inseparable from its natural setting: thick trees, grass fields, rice paddies. Totoro drops acorns everywhere as a kind of calling card. To love Totoro is to love not just a single creature but a whole habitat.“It doesn’t feel right to have that kind of idyllic landscape in a theme park,” Goro continued. “You can’t have a rice field that’s green all year round.”What about plastic? I asked.“A plastic rice field contradicts the whole idea of Totoro’s world,” he said.In Tokyo, I went to see Toshio Suzuki, the yin to Miyazaki’s yang, the most important person in the company’s history aside from Miyazaki and Takahata. Although he has held many titles (producer, president), most crucially Suzuki has functioned as a kind of Miyazaki whisperer: a combination of friend, critic, right-hand man, creative consultant, collaborator and business partner. When Miyazaki strains a major deadline, or decides out of nowhere to retire, or when he can’t decide how to end a film — Suzuki is the one who figures out how to make it all OK, to stretch budgets and schedules, to hire or lay off whole teams of people.I met Suzuki at his office, the doorway of which features a Totoro welcome mat. We sat together at a long table, speaking through an interpreter.While Miyazaki is famously grouchy, Suzuki is open and affable. He has a deep, hearty, easy laugh. He loves to talk — so much so that he hosts his own weekly radio show.Suzuki told me that the story of Ghibli Park began, almost by accident, 20 years ago — with a quirky one-off project. It was Suzuki’s idea. For years, he had been fantasizing about building a real-world simulacrum of the cartoon house from “My Neighbor Totoro.” This was partly nostalgia: Suzuki actually grew up, in Nagoya, in a house like that — an old-style Japanese country house, with traditional woodworking. Finally, the real world gave him a perfect excuse. He learned that in 2005 a big World Expo would be held in this municipal park on the edge of Nagoya. Its organizers were inviting companies from around the world, including Ghibli, to create pavilions. And so Suzuki said: Yes. We will build this house.The expo organizers loved the idea. Maybe you could put a Totoro in the house, they said. Or some of those cute little soot sprites.No! Suzuki said. (In our interview, he actually yelled this right out loud, in English: “No!”) He was only interested in building the house. No characters. Nothing fantastical. Just the house! To this day, Suzuki is not sure why he was so adamant about that. He insists it was not some great principled stand. He just felt like saying no. When it came time to name the place, he didn’t name it after Totoro — he named it after the film’s two human children. “Satsuki and Mei’s House.”Satsuki and Mei arriving at their house in “My Neighbor Totoro.”To build the house, Suzuki enlisted Goro. Goro may not have had his father’s animation genius — no one really did — but he had other things. A similar obsession with detail. An iron will. Goro knew construction. He had a good practical head on his shoulders. He had built the Ghibli Museum. He would be able to solve any logistical problems. And he had people skills that his father lacked.“The one thing that’s very different from Goro to his father, what sets them apart, is how they use staff members,” Suzuki told me. “Hayao Miyazaki is maybe not a great leader. But Goro is very good at making the team function. He’s very good at bringing the best out of each team member.”The whole Totoro house project was a lark. Would the public even be interested in visiting an elaborate wooden replica of a house from a cartoon? Suzuki had no idea. But popularity wasn’t really the point. The impulse was deeper than that.Well, it turned out that the public was interested. In 2005, when the World Expo opened, Satsuki and Mei’s House was an instant sensation. Such huge floods of Miyazaki fans poured in that everyone worried the house would be ruined. Its artisanal woodworking was not designed for so much traffic. They imposed a limit: 800 visitors a day. But the competition for those 800 spots was so fierce that, eventually, the expo instituted a lottery system. On an average day, 600,000 people applied. Everyone in Japan seemed to want to put their physical bodies inside the world of Studio Ghibli.Suzuki is still amazed by this. It was just a house! When the expo ended, he said, Ghibli received calls from all over Japan — from north to south, Hokkaido to Okinawa. Everyone wanted Satsuki and Mei’s House to be moved to their city. Suzuki even received a call from the city of Toyota, which was interested in moving the house inside the car company’s headquarters.What on earth was this insatiable hunger? I asked Suzuki. Why would so many people go to so much trouble to stand inside an ordinary house?It’s an excellent question, he said. In fact, that’s exactly what the head of Toyota asked him. Toyota hoped that, if they could figure out the source of this public frenzy, it might help them sell their next car.But Suzuki had no good explanation. And in the end he told everyone that Satsuki and Mei’s House would stay in Nagoya. Many years later, this odd building would become the anchor, and the guiding spirit, of Ghibli Park.Satsuki and Mei’s house, an exact replica of the home from “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988).Rinko Kawauchi for The New York TimesGoro started planning Ghibli Park in 2017. It was similar to Satsuki and Mei’s House — but much bigger, much more complicated. It would require all of his skills. His ability to lead teams of actual humans. His ability to haul his father’s imaginary structures, kicking and screaming, into reality.Building that Totoro house, Goro told me, had been an incredible hassle. Architecturally, he discovered, the cartoon structure made very little sense. It was tricky to come up with a design that would be both recognizable to viewers of “My Neighbor Totoro” while also functioning as a real-world house. The traditional woodworking required a highly select group of artisans. They were proud, opinionated and stubborn. They argued with Goro over all kinds of things: the blueprints, the height of the ceilings. They didn’t want to build a temporary structure, so Goro had to promise to protect it even after the expo ended. Studio Ghibli had planned to paint the house when it was finished, to make it look plausibly old. But the artisans hated that idea and insisted on aging it in their own way: burning and rubbing the wood, lacquering it with persimmon juice. To make everything worse, the expo’s roads were blocked by construction, so carpenters had to drag supplies over a hill. Everything took longer than it was supposed to. When the expo auditors saw the expenses, they thought there had to be some mistake. It’s not possible to spend so much money on a single house! they said. We could have built a beautiful modern house for a fraction of this cost.Inside Satsuki and Mei’s house, where visitors can open drawers and closets and find real dishes in the cupboards.Rinko Kawauchi for The New York TimesNevertheless, Goro persisted. He overcame all the obstacles. He built the imaginary house. Unfortunately, however, that triumph did not last — because somehow, Goro agreed to step out of the real world and into the world of his father. He agreed to direct a Studio Ghibli film.It did not go well. Goro’s film, “Tales From Earthsea,” lacked the energy that defined his father’s work: the throbbing physicality, the restless joy, the moral ambiguity. It was, to be blunt, stiff and humorless. The villain cackled. The hero was noble. At a screening, Miyazaki walked out after only an hour. “It felt like I’d been in there for three hours,” he said, despondently, before reluctantly heading back in. All of this was captured in the NHK documentary. Still, almost unbelievably, Goro went back for more. He proposed directing a second film. In the end, after some more father-son fireworks, this one, “From Up on Poppy Hill,” was — thank the Forest Spirit — much better than his first.And then came this huge undertaking of Ghibli Park. A theme park, in a way, had higher stakes for Goro Miyazaki than any single film. This would be a public, physical, visitable, globally anticipated translation of his father’s imaginative worlds. And Goro would be absolutely in charge.A detail in Satsuki and Mei’s father’s study.Rinko Kawauchi for The New York TimesEventually, after our very long walk through the forest, my guides and I arrived at Satsuki and Mei’s House. As an attraction, it is hilariously minimalist — almost more conceptual art about a theme-park attraction than a proper attraction in itself. It’s as if a giant hand reached into the film, plucked just this building out and set it down in a clearing in this forest. We stepped inside. The house was clean, small and crowded. Visitors had removed their shoes, as if they were visiting a real person’s home. And everyone was just doing house things: opening drawers, opening closets, turning faucets on and off. The place had been arranged, with perfect realism, as if a Japanese family actually lived there. Tatami mats covered the floor. Dishes filled the cupboards. I slid open a closet. Nice, actual blankets, folded neatly, sat on the shelves. The bathroom had a big round tub just like the one in the film. Outside, the yard featured a working water pump: pull the handle, watch it flow.There was not a single image of Totoro — the most beloved of all the Studio Ghibli characters, the company’s equivalent of Mickey Mouse. Nor could I find any soot sprites. I stepped outside. On one side of the house, down at the ground, people were lining up to peek into a dark hole. In the film, this is the portal through which Totoro emerges. I got in line. Surely there would be a Totoro here. A pair of eyes at least. Finally! I thought. Ghibli Park had made me work for it, but I had found a Totoro. I waited my turn. I bent down. The hole was empty.When I told Goro about this experience, he seemed pleased.“We wanted to do something authentic,” he said. “Once you try to bring Totoro into reality, you can only do it with a doll, or a robot, or someone dressed as Totoro. It would just lose authenticity. I felt that it was more important to have the building give the feeling that Totoro might be there. When you sit in that tatami room, or if you look under the stairs, you feel like he might be hiding.”The most theme-park-like area of Ghibli Park — the place that you will see all over Instagram — is called Ghibli’s Grand Warehouse. From the outside, it absolutely lives up to that name. It is a big giant warehouse: hulking, boxy, utilitarian. It looks as if it might contain a municipal swimming pool — which, in fact, it once did. (An identical building, right next door, still contains an ice rink.) Now the building is stuffed with Ghibliana: a dense bonanza of references and tableaus and scale-model buildings. It is colorful chaos. There are fountains and staircases and bright mosaics with Ghibli’s signature creatures worked into the patterns. There is a children’s play area featuring Totoro and a giant Cat Bus. There is a grand old-fashioned theater that plays charming short films never released in theaters. (I saw one about a group of preschoolers who imagine their way out onto the open sea, where they lasso a smiling whale.)Princess MononokeThe Grand Warehouse’s main draw was an exhibition called, wonderfully, “Exhibition: Becoming Characters in Memorable Ghibli Scenes.” It is a series of life-size tableaus from beloved Studio Ghibli films into which visitors can insert themselves. You can run on top of a giant fish with Ponyo, pose with a robot from “Castle in the Sky,” enter the cluttered clubhouse in “From Up on Poppy Hill” or stand with the hunters from “Princess Mononoke.” Or, the most popular choice, you can sit on the train next to No Face.Let’s pause here, briefly, to make sure we all fully appreciate No Face. The very best Miyazaki characters, the ones that hit on the deepest spiritual levels, are the ones that do not speak. Totoro, the Cat Bus, soot sprites, kodama (the little rattle-headed forest spirits in “Princess Mononoke”). And the greatest of all these — one of the great strange miracles in the history of cinema — is No Face. No Face is a lonely ghost who appears, out of thin air, in the middle of “Spirited Away.” He is so simple and deep, so eloquently silent, that it is hard to even describe him. Words themselves hesitate. This, in fact, is partly what No Face is about: the failure of language. He speaks in incoherent monosyllables (“eh, eh, eh”) — tender little noises that nudge their way toward language but never quite get there. And yet his sounds are full of feeling, full of all that wants to be expressed but can’t.An exhibit in the Grand Warehouse with No Face, from ‘‘Spirited Away’’ (2001).Rinko Kawauchi for The New York TimesNo Face, in other words, is quintessential Miyazaki. In a 2002 interview, Roger Ebert told Miyazaki he loved the “gratuitous motion” in his films, the way “sometimes people will just sit for a moment, or sigh, or gaze at a running stream, or do something extra, not to advance the story but only to give the sense of time and place and who they are.” To which Miyazaki responded: “We have a word for that in Japanese. It’s called ma. Emptiness. It’s there intentionally.” Miyazaki clapped his hands. “The time in between my clapping is ma,” he told Ebert. “If you just have nonstop action with no breathing space at all, it’s just busyness.”No Face is ma come to life. He is a living negation, an absent presence — a character so minor that he becomes extremely major. His body is a big black swoop. His face is a white mask, in which the eyes and mouth are just black holes. No Face’s body is semitransparent, so you can actually see the background right through him.This was the one experience I absolutely wanted to have at Ghibli Park, the thing I had been fantasizing about from thousands of miles away: to sit next to No Face. I wanted to enter Miyazaki’s most iconic scene: No Face, sitting, expressionless, on a red velvet seat on an ethereal train near the end of “Spirited Away.” I needed to sit there with him, to put my real 3-D body next to his fake 3-D body. I needed to feel that I was gliding over the water, lonely but not alone, on his sad hopeful journey.Chihiro with No Face in “Spirited Away.”Unfortunately, this turned out not to be possible. Everyone else in Japan seemed to have come to Ghibli Park to take this photo. The line seemed infinite. My guides simply acknowledged that, given the time constraints of our tour, the wait would be too long. (They did not offer, even for a second, to let me cut the line, which I appreciated, because I almost certainly would have done it, thereby violating the whole anti-greed ethos of “Spirited Away.”)As a consolation, my guides took my photo in a different tableau, one with a very short line. It was the climactic scene from “Porco Rosso,” Miyazaki’s story of an Italian pig-pilot. This is not one of my favorite Ghibli films, but I would take what I could get. In the tableau, a huge crowd cheers as Porco, his face battered and swollen, throws a punch. I stepped into the fight, tilting my body to absorb Porco’s punch, pretending to punch him back. It felt completely ridiculous. The P.R. team took my photo. It looks as ridiculous as I felt.I left the Grand Warehouse feeling — I have to say — mildly disappointed. I had not sat with No Face. Nor had I enjoyed the concession stand that offers, as the website puts it, “local milk in a glass bottle with an original design.” (Another infinite line.) Despite all its color, the Grand Warehouse felt static, plastic, a little anticlimactic. Unlike in Ghibli’s films, nothing moved. Part of me — again, the American part — had been expecting to be shocked, entertained, thrown around. It was hard to imagine Hayao Miyazaki, the genius world-builder, the man obsessed with motion, building a place so oddly still. He would have built a rollicking theme park.In fact, Toshio Suzuki told me, that had once been his plan. Not many people knew this, Suzuki said, but a long time ago Hayao Miyazaki went to Disneyland. And he loved it.“He kept it to himself,” Suzuki said. “He never said that at home — that he had fun at Disneyland. But I know what happened.”The Cat Bus, an interactive exhibit taking children into the world of “My Neighbor Totoro.’’Rinko Kawauchi for The New York TimesIn fact, Miyazaki had so much fun that he came back to Japan dreaming of building a theme park of his own. He sketched secret plans of Ghibli-themed roller coasters. Suzuki saw them. But these plans never came to pass. Goro wasn’t interested.The Grand Warehouse, Goro told me, was motionless by design. He felt that even the most advanced theme-park effects — rides, virtual reality — could never compare with the experience of watching Studio Ghibli’s films. So he didn’t even try. The absence of attractions, the lack of motion in the Grand Warehouse — it was all perfectly intentional.“It’s the visitors that create the motion,” he said. “The characters don’t move, so the visitors have to move themselves. People get very creative, interacting with the scenes. Whether you enjoy it or not — and how you enjoy it — is up to you. And I think that is more Ghibli-esque.”A couple of weeks before it opened, Miyazaki visited Ghibli Park. Toshio Suzuki went with him. Goro gave them a tour.The park, Miyazaki said, “was something that I wouldn’t have come up with myself.”“He looked a little lonely,” Suzuki told me. “Maybe thinking that his time was up.”An exhibit inspired by ‘‘The Secret World of Arrietty’’ (2010).Rinko Kawauchi for The New York TimesMy favorite experience of Ghibli Park, the most “Ghibli Park” experience of all, came at the very end. It involved no lines, no merch, no Miyazaki characters — and yet somehow it felt steered, or framed, or made possible, by Miyazaki. Back at the train station, after my tour, I said goodbye to my guides. Then I turned and walked, over the sea of concrete, back down the hill. Past the Grand Warehouse, through the “Spirited Away” gate. And I followed the path back into the forest. The forest was, after all, the whole point of this park, its inspiration — the thing that father and son could always absolutely agree on.I plunged into the trees and started wandering at random. The forest was not, like so many of the forests in Miyazaki’s films, ancient and primeval. It was younger, more modest. World War II left Nagoya and its surroundings in ruins. The city was destroyed by bombs. The trees were cut down. Much of the soil had been stripped to make clay. This forest was planted, in the years following the war, as an intentional act of recovery. Since then, these trees had been struggling to grow in that white, clay-heavy soil. That’s why they looked the way they did: lean, hungry, twisting. They had to work harder than trees in other places. This is part of why Goro was determined not to cut down a single one. When a few trees got in the way of Ghibli Park’s construction, he had them carefully moved.I kept walking. I scaled steep wooden stairways. Very few other people were out hiking, so most of the time it felt as if we were all alone, me and the trees. I considered the Japanese term “forest bathing” — the notion that walking through trees cleanses your soul. I walked on boardwalks that stretched up toward the canopy. I thought about how this was a place I never would have visited in 100 lifetimes — this unfamous small forest in a municipal park on the outskirts of an industrial city in Japan. And how this was exactly Goro’s plan: to lure people here with the promise of Ghibli’s imaginary world — and then to give them this real one. This place was real, and I was real, and those two realities were overlapping. Trees, trees, trees. It was entirely up to me where to go, what to look at, when to leave.I stopped to watch a spider working in some upper branches, building a large web, twisting and prancing, silhouetted against the blue sky. I passed clusters of fallen acorns on the ground — the forest replenishing itself — and they made me think about Totoro, and thinking about Totoro made me notice more acorns, and soon I stooped to collect some. I filled my pockets. I was happy. And it struck me that this was exactly what I went into Miyazaki’s films for, and what Miyazaki’s animation almost paradoxically did for me: It helped me to find reality, to really see it, to experience it as real, ordinary and strange, boring and surprising. Ghibli Park, in its simplicity, honored this spirit completely. Goro’s vision of a theme park was more radical than the grandest roller coaster could ever be.As the sun started to set, I followed a steep path to the top of a hill. There was a little clearing with wooden benches. An old informational sign from the World Expo. It looked like a place no one had been in 10 years. I went inside a small wooden building that turned out to be a bathroom. Taped up on a utility closet, with thick green tape, was a single sheet of paper. It seemed to be some kind of sign. I examined it. It showed a blurry photo of a stout monkey, standing on all fours. There was some Japanese text underneath, so I ran it through my phone’s translation app. The sign was a warning for hikers. But in that moment it read to me like a poem, or a whole life philosophy:Do not make eye contact with monkeys.Do not feed the monkeys or expose them to foodAfter a while, we will move. not stimulating please.A play area in Ghibli Park’s Grand Warehouse, one of the only conventionally theme-park-like parts of the park.Rinko Kawauchi for The New York TimesSam Anderson is a staff writer at the magazine. He has written about rhinos, pencils, poets, water parks, basketball, weight loss and the Fountain of Youth. Rinko Kawauchi is a Japanese photographer known for her images of elemental subjects collected in books including “Ametsuchi” and “Halo.” Her solo exhibition will be shown at the Shiga Museum of Art through March. More

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      For ‘Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,’ a Star Built From Tiny Gears and 3-D Printing

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      The studio behind stop-motion hits like ‘Coraline’ and ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ started work on the new film in 2008 but had to wait for the technology to catch up.From its earliest stages of development more than 15 years ago, “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” was envisioned as a stop-motion production. The director explained, “It was clear to me that the film needed to be done in stop-motion to serve the story about a puppet that lives in a world populated by other puppets who think they are not puppets.”He also knew that key members of the cast had to be built by the British studio Mackinnon and Saunders. “They are the best in the world,” he said in a recent video interview. “The starring roles of the movie needed to be fabricated by them.” As the producer Lisa Henson put it, “They do things that other puppet builders do not have the patience or the expertise to do.”“Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” is the latest example of the efflorescence of stop-motion animation. For decades, the technique was overshadowed by the more expressive drawn animation and, later, by computer-generated imagery. But new technologies have allowed artists to create vivid performances that rival other media.Artists and technicians at Mackinnon and Saunders pushed stop-motion technology in an entirely new direction for “Corpse Bride” (2005) by inventing systems of tiny gears that fit inside puppets’ heads. The animators adjusted the gears between frames to create subtle expressions: Victor, the title character’s groom, could raise an eyebrow or lift the edge of his lip in the start of smile. This technique also enlivened “Fantastic Mr. Fox” (2009) and “Frankenweenie” (2012).“Tim Burton or Guillermo del Toro will bring us the story, then give us the space to say, ‘What can we do with these puppet characters? Let’s find something new to do,’” said Ian Mackinnon, a founder of the firm.Mackinnon and Saunders’ credits include, from left, “Corpse Bride,” “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and “Frankenweenie.” Warner Bros.; Fox Searchlight; DisneyHe likened the mechanics inside puppet heads to components of a Swiss watch. “Those heads are not much bigger than a ping-pong ball or a walnut,” he said, explaining that the animator moves the gears by putting a tiny tool into the character’s ear or the top of its head. “The gears are linked to the puppet’s silicone skin, enabling the animator to create the nuances you see on a big cinema screen,” he said.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.The introduction of geared heads was part of a series of overlapping waves of innovation in stop-motion that brought visuals to the screen that had never been possible. Nick Park and the artists at the British Aardman Animations sculpted new subtleties into clay animation in “Creature Comforts” (1989) and “The Wrong Trousers” (1993). Meanwhile, Disney’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (1993) showcased the new technology of facial replacement. A library of three-dimensional expressions was sculpted and molded for each character; an animator snapped out one section of the face and replaced it with a slightly different one between exposures. Then the Portland, Ore.-based Laika Studios pushed this technique further, using 3-D printing to create faces, beginning with “Coraline” (2009).For “Pinocchio,” which debuted on Netflix a few months after Disney released Robert Zemeckis’s partly animated version of the story, most of the puppets were built at ShadowMachine in Portland, where most of the film was shot. Candlewick, the human boy Pinocchio befriends in the film, “has threads set into the corners of his mouth which are attached to a double-barreled gear system,” explained Georgina Hayns, an alumna of Mackinnon and Saunders who was director of character fabrication at ShadowMachine. “If you turn the gear inside the ear clockwise, it pulls the upper thread and creates a smile. If you turn it anticlockwise, it pulls a lower thread which produces a frown. It really is amazing.”That was the result of a process that began in 2008, when the Mackinnon and Saunders team made some early prototypes. “By the time Netflix greenlit the film in 2018, we were ready and waiting,” Mackinnon said. “If we’d tried to do ‘Pinocchio’ 10 or 15 years ago, the technology wouldn’t have been there.”Georgina Hayns served as director of character fabrication for the film.Jason Schmidt/NetflixAlthough mechanical heads are used for most of the key characters in the film, Pinocchio himself was animated with replacement faces. Because he has to look like he’s made of wood, he needed to have a hard surface, the animation supervisor Brian Leif Hansen said, explaining that 3,000 of the faces were printed. “His expressions are snappy; the mechanical faces look softer and more fluid compared to Pinocchio. He’s built differently and animated in a different way to set him apart.”The character is the first metal 3-D-printed puppet, Hansen said. Because he’s skinny, “the only way they could make him strong enough was to print the puppet in metal. He’s a strong little guy, quite difficult to break. The animators loved animating him.”Thanks to a team of engineers and the puppet designer Richard Pickersgill, “we’ve moved the replacement technology forward a little bit,” Mackinnon said. The designer “gave Pinocchio spindly limbs and joints that look like Geppetto carved them by hand.”The studio spent a year and a half prototyping Pinocchio before making the first production model. Eventually more than 20 puppets were built to ensure the animators had enough.Several versions of Pinocchio were made for the film. via Mackinnon & Saunders; Jason Schmidt/NetflixThe studio has made figures as big as the “life-sized” Martians in “Mars Attacks” (1996), but most stop-motion puppets are about the size of Barbie dolls — Pinocchio is 9.5 inches tall. The sophisticated creations meant del Toro and his co-director, Mark Gustafson, could get the performances they needed. They looked for inspiration to the films of Hayao Miyazaki, whose characters think, pause and change their minds as they move.“I had a road-to-Damascus moment watching ‘My Neighbor Totoro’ where the father tries to put his shoe on: He misses it twice, then gets it on the third try,” del Toro explained. “Miyazaki says if you animate the ordinary, it will be extraordinary. So we went for failed acts because we wanted to breathe life into these characters.”He estimated that 35 shots had to be redone because “we said, ‘The character is moving, but I don’t see the character thinking or feeling.’ The little failed gestures or hesitations before a movement tell you, ‘This is a living character.’”Gustafson said that failed gestures were especially difficult “because the intention has to be visible — it’s not actually a mistake. I think our brains are really wired to recognize when a gesture is false somehow, so we worked really hard at getting those things to feel as natural as we could.”Replacement faces were used for Pinocchio to make his expressions look snappy. By contrast, characters with mechanical gears like Count Volpe had a softer look.NetflixArtists can change or rework computer-generated and 2-D animation during production, but once stop-motion animators begin moving a puppet, they have to continue to the end of the scene — or start over. They can’t alter what they’ve already filmed, any more than an actor can stop midstride, walk backward a few steps and cross the set differently.“Stop-motion is the art form in animation that is most analogous to live-action, because you are doing real movement, from point A to point B,” del Toro said. “You cannot edit. You’re dealing with real sets and real props, lit by real light. Stop-motion is to live-action what Ginger Rogers is to Fred Astaire: We do the same steps, backwards in high heels.” More

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      ‘Annual Animation Show of Shows’ Review: A Mix of Whimsy and Dread

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      This festival’s 22nd edition covers themes of crisis, both personal and planetary, with short works from the likes of Gil Alkabetz and Frédéric Back.In 2016, the celebrated Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki was shown footage of animation generated by artificial intelligence. In it, a humanoid form slithers back and forth, its movements startlingly alien. Far from being impressed, Miyazaki was deeply disturbed. To this most humane of artists, the demonstration was “an insult to life.”Thankfully, Miyazaki is unlikely to be offended by the examples of short-form animation presented in the 22nd edition of “The Annual Animation Show of Shows.” Curated by the producer Ron Diamond, the chosen films (nine recent, plus one restored classic) feature multiple techniques (none of them assisted by A.I.) and worldwide talent. Themes include crises both personal and planetary, in tones ranging from whimsical to hopeful to vaguely apocalyptic. Unsurprisingly, the pressures of modern life loom large, with more than one short stressing our dependency on the environment and one another.Two of the sweetest address emotional connections with childlike simplicity. In “Aurora,” the Canadian director Jo Meuris, supported by a lovely musical score and endearing stick-figure drawings, narrates the story of a little girl’s love for a horse. And in the ingeniously evocative “Ties,” the Russian animator Dina Velikovskaya shows how a daughter leaving for college can be the literal thread that unravels the life she has left behind.While none of the offerings directly references the pandemic, one of my favorites, Geoffroy de Crécy’s “Empty Places,” drifts past on a melancholy, meditative mood and world-without-us images. A turntable playing Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” endlessly repeats; unclaimed luggage circles aimlessly on an airport carousel. The film’s deserted, pastel-hued spaces have a poignancy that’s echoed in “Beseder (Good and Better),” by the Israeli animator Gil Alkabetz, who died earlier this year, and the musician Tova Gertner. Together, they weave gentle song lyrics and artfully distorted figures into surreal vignettes on the stubbornness of pessimism.In general, the vibe is subdued, with several of the more abstract inclusions — like Jeanne Apergis’s “Zoizoglyphe,” whose sounds and images align to portray crowds of birdlike figures panicked by an outsider — demanding more than one viewing to parse. It’s something of a relief, then, to encounter the clarity and earthy realism of Gísli Darri Halldórsson’s “Yes-People (Ja Folkio),” the collection’s sole comedy. Resounding with the familiar grunts, sighs and orgasmic shrieks of the residents of a thin-walled apartment building as they go about their daily lives, this primary-colored charmer delivers a timely plea for tolerance. Even when your neighbors are embarrassingly lusty.Bringing up the rear — and claiming one-third of the compilation’s 90-minute running time — is the English version of the Canadian director Frédéric Back’s digitally remastered, 1987 Oscar winner, “The Man Who Planted Trees.” Buoyed by Christopher Plummer’s velvety narration, the movie follows a lone Alpine shepherd as he plants thousands of acorns, his industry finally rewarded by a forest that transforms his desolate surroundings. Based on a 1953 fable by Jean Giono, Back’s beautifully impressionistic drawings make a simple argument for environmental renewal and individual agency. The film’s idealization of a pared-down life might feel dated, but its do-something message is one that never goes out of style.The 22nd Annual Animation Show of ShowsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Treasure Planet’ at 20: Disney’s Failed Space Odyssey Deserved to Soar

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      This maligned flight of fancy contains a trove of underrated accomplishments worthy of reappraisal.Retro futuristic sailing ships and dazzling action scenes failed to entice audiences when Disney’s “Treasure Planet” opened in theaters on Thanksgiving weekend 20 years ago.The interstellar adventure followed an angsty teenager, Jim Hawkins (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), his deceitful cyborg mentor, John Silver (Brian Murray), and a crew of aliens and anthropomorphic animals across dangerous space phenomena and celestial bodies to find riches in a remote location. The stellar voice cast also featured Emma Thompson as the strict Captain Amelia and Martin Short as the talking robot B.E.N.For the directors Ron Clements and John Musker, who were responsible for some of the studio’s most profitable animated releases including “The Little Mermaid” and “Aladdin,” this outer space retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson’s seminal novel “Treasure Island” had been a beloved brainchild for 17 years before its fateful release in 2002.Over the five-day holiday weekend, the space odyssey took in only $16.7 million at the domestic box office, on a budget of $140 million, as well as plenty of unfavorable reviews. Analysts scrambled to determine the cause of such a cataclysmic financial disappointment.Some experts considered it a casualty of an oversaturated family market (“Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” and “The Santa Clause 2” were still occupying screens), or perhaps it was a victim of a self-serious marketing campaign with a troublemaker animated protagonist.At the time, the Variety critic Andy Klein praised the visuals as up to the “studio’s best,” but felt the “film’s total appeal may be undercut by a script that rarely feels inspired.” Roger Ebert wasn’t taken with the adaptation, writing that “pirate ships and ocean storms and real whales (as opposed to space whales) are exciting enough.”Other experts thought of it as further proof of young viewers’ resistance to animated features in the science fiction genre after the stumbles of “Titan A.E.,” released in 2000, and “Atlantis: The Lost Empire,” which debuted in 2001. And still some blamed video games for having captured the attention of preadolescent boys — the perceived target audience. The most concerned went as far as to suggest that Disney should rethink its entire investment in animation. (As we now know, the studio didn’t yield, but two decades later its $180 million sci-fi saga “Strange World” stumbled on the same weekend, bringing in only $18.6 million this past Thanksgiving.)The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.Despite the troubled history of “Treasure Planet,” this maligned flight of fancy contains a trove of underrated accomplishments worthy of reappraisal. Both its technologically advanced visuals and the poignancy of its interpersonal conflicts make it a bright anomaly in the constellation of early 2000s animation that deserved to soar.Told in a world where 18th-century designs and futuristic stylization collide, this is the story of a teenage hero evolving from a boy into a man. Constantly straddling the line between the old and the new, in form and in narrative, Musker and Clements steered the literary classic into the new millennium and beyond the stars.The interstitial essence that defines the film is also reflected in the craftsmanship behind it. An unsung triumph of technical innovation, “Treasure Planet” marked a turning point in the use of 3-D computer graphics in Disney animated features.The veteran animator Glen Keane’s work on John Silver highlighted this transition. The pirate’s body was animated by hand while his bionic arm came to life via computer-generated imagery.Most of the characters, with the exception of the robot B.E.N., were hand-drawn and inhabited virtual sets conceived through a process known as “deep canvas,” which allows artists to draw detailed 3-D environments, for a striking hybrid aesthetic.A sequence where the main vessel, RLS Legacy (named after Robert Louis Stevenson), must traverse a dangerous supernova serves as imposing example of one of the many instances in which this visionary combination of modern tools and old-fashioned handmade animation astounds. The traditionally animated sailors face the realistically rendered fiery supernova as it becomes a black hole for an action-packed set piece full of interplanetary explosions.Among the final Disney productions to implement substantial 2-D components, “Treasure Planet” was caught between the past and the future of animation.By the early 2000s, the advent of 3-D computer graphic animation as preferred cost-cutting approach over hand-drawn animation had begun to take hold with competitors like DreamWorks, who found success with the Oscar-winning “Shrek,” or Blue Sky Studios, with its box-office hit “Ice Age.”Outside of its irreplicable conception, “Treasure Planet” also tapped into adolescent woes that powerfully spoke to many teens because it treated the flood of emotions young people grapple with as legitimate. The hero here was rough around the edges.For their intergalactic coming-of-age tale, the directors turned Hawkins into a rebellious 15-year-old with a braided rat tail who surfs the skies on a solar-powered board. His father left when he was a child and his loving but worried mother can’t seem to get through to him. To find himself and mature, this brooding heartthrob must leave on an epic quest.Back when it hit theaters, observers may have deemed this version of Jim an unsympathetic lead, but it’s precisely his temperamental attitude, defiance toward authority and guarded vulnerability that make his unconventionally heroic character profoundly relatable.Though not a musical, “Treasure Planet” features a touching montage to the tune of the singer’s John Rzeznik’s “I’m Still Here,” a song written for the film, that bridges Hawkins’s abandonment trauma and his burgeoning relationship with Silver, a figure filling that paternal void.That aching search for validation — the need for a flawed role model to tell you how proud they are of you — comes across with a deep emotional maturity in Musker and Clements’s passion project, written with Rob Edwards.Months after its disastrous stint in cinemas, “Treasure Planet” received an Academy Award nomination for best animated feature, an accolade that, according to reports, came as a surprise to those at Disney. The worldwide gross was a meager $109.5 million. That it was met with disinterest in its time is a tragic outcome for one of the most indelibly out-of-the-box efforts Disney has ever produced.Still underappreciated but not entirely forgotten among those who would discover it on home video growing up, the movie embodies the pioneering spirit of honoring, but still surpassing, what was done before in order to reach new heights.That’s what Hawkins and his band of extraterrestrial misfits are after, and exactly what the pair of seasoned storytellers that brought them to life did with the source material, warts and all. More