Title: My Neighbor Yamada
Category: Animation (High Definition Subtitles)
Type:
Tags: Hayao Miyazaki, Recent Recommendations
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Chinese Title: My Neighbor Yamada
English Title: My Neighbors the Yamadas
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Release Date: July 20, 1999
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese
Color: Color
Film Length: 104 min
Type: Animation/Comedy
Plot Summary:
This film was made after Miyazaki completed "Princess Mononoke" and announced his retirement. With this important figure no longer at Ghibli, people naturally questioned the studio's standard. As a large studio, it certainly couldn't dissolve just because of someone's retirement; work had to continue. The innovative and challenging Ghibli then took on the task of experimenting with this piece.
"My Neighbor Yamada" has a style distinct from all previous Ghibli works — the original artwork's drawing style is very similar to "Crayon Shin-chan," not focusing on the richness or intricacy of the drawings, even appearing somewhat crooked and uneven, but excelling in content rather than visuals.
"My Neighbor Yamada" tells the story of the Yamada family, a traditional Japanese household leading an ordinary life: the father is a white-collar worker, the mother is a housewife, the grandmother is the elder, and the children are a brother and sister. These countless ordinary families, living ordinary lives, make up the entire society. However, if you look closely, you can find countless warmth, joy, sadness, and pain within them. You can experience the essence of life through these small stories.
The theme of the story: the safety and happiness of its members is the wish of every family in the world.
The original work is in the form of a four-panel comic, so adapting it into a feature-length movie was naturally impossible, plus the "crooked" drawing style of the original gave Ghibli a significant challenge when adapting it into an animated film! However, Takahata is a master, and Ghibli's capabilities cannot be underestimated. The animation presented before our eyes faithfully embodies the "crooked" style of the original, but it's also clear that the animation production staff indeed put in as much effort as they would with finely detailed animations. There won't be any long static scenes or simple panning that often appear in many cut-rate productions! Moreover, all places are moving, and there are even 3D scenes with a "crooked" style — this is the power of theatrical animation!
However, regardless of everything, this work is relatively less favored by audiences, with evaluations generally not as good as other Ghibli animations, but being a product of a renowned studio, it is still worth watching, and it will never disappoint.