Let me start off by saying that it was an absolute pleasure for WhatIfGaming to fly to Japan to meet Hayao Miyazaki. Seeing  and lightly greeting Mr. Miyazaki from Comic Con to Cannes can be a bit impersonal, and this is just what we needed. Thanks to our friends Studio Ghibli. Note: Mr. Miyazaki’s responses are all translated and should be taken in context.

WhatIfGaming: Mr. Miyazaki, I just wanted to start off by telling you I personally am a big fan of your work for the longest time since Toei Animation. One of the long awaited questions I had for a long time was the inspiration that led to you doing these concepts to begin with – what started it all?

Hiyao Miyazaki: This was not something I planned for. My father worked with his company to create parts for airplanes and I remember he would come home at late night and I would always have a picture to show him of the work I did. I wanted to make him proud of something I just started back then. There were no video-games and there was only the light camaraderie between me and my brothers that was not always so strong. We each served to do what we loved, I found the pencil and started to scribble. It is good that I liked my airplanes otherwise we would not be here.

WhatIfGaming: One thing to best describe the level of energy and emotions in the films, described as early European-influenced artistry has been the dialogue and the strong motif symbols with each film. The joy in some, the loss of innocence and the cathartic introduction into the mind of nature itself. Why these specific themes? Why are the films so creatively crafted with a vibrant array of colors, a centrifugal force that is the anticlimax to the protagonist’s plot, the happiness and joy with each film that is symbolic of one of your distributors? Disney in specific.

HM: I can say for sure I have always been a happy man. I have a son and a company that is doing well and I have people that care for me and the work that everyone at our studios does. But, with this happiness, there is equal negativity and grief. I have suffered at times trying to get my ideas onto the paper. I have struggled in seeing the bad in this world and hoping to make something good out of my time on this planet. I feel that there is this constant negativity that I cannot control and that is all around me everywhere I go. There is nothing more I can do to explain this or cure it if it even needs a cure, but I do feel my films are that cure little by little or help to take away from that.

WhatIfGaming: I know we are running out of time but I want to get the truly asked questions we have been pondering for a long time out of the way quickly. The inspiration for Spirited Away?

HM:  A daughter’s friend I knew was kind of shy and timid to move her toys around and never wanted to change because she was afraid they would not like her if she did. I took this innocence and created Spirited Away. It represents that no matter what you do and where you or your items go, the nature of the places you love will always follow you.

WhatIfGaming: Lastly, what do you feel the future holds?

HM: This is a very tough question for anyone I feel. I just want to say that I do think about this everyday, and I am not sure about you personally but to me I just want nothing. I truly want nothing and can see nothing that the future chooses to hold for me. I have always valued what I have and have never taken my struggles and negativity for mistake. I just want my company to continue what it does and remain strong until nature runs the course it has planned. I feel we all can use strength of not just our hearts, but about our ideas of what is to come.

WhatIfGaming: Mr. Miyazaki, a pleasure as always.

HM: Thank you very much. We will, I hope, talk again when the time comes.

Note: this interview was conducted two months ago. It just took some time verifying what Mr. Miyazaki had said.

Imagination runs wild in Coraline Jones (Dakota Fanning), a bright and cute girl that effortlessly tries to create a universe in which all her fears and wishes are best expressed. Based fully on Neil Gaman’s incredible fantasy-filled journey and place on the frame of those who love dreaminess artistry in the Nightmare Before Christmas filmmaker Henry Selick, and you are left with Coraline. By allowing us into her world, Coraline makes ‘Coraline’ a thrilling stop-motion animated adventure which shines as a high point in Selick’s career of creating handcrafted wonderlands of beauty blended with multiple layers of genius.

Coraline moves with her constantly busy parents (Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman) to an apartment in an old and weird establishment: the Pink Palace Apartments. The tenants are similarly unusual. There is a pair of British ladies of the stage (Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French), and a Russian circus gymnast (Ian McShane) who’s all skinny blue limbs and big blue belly. Coraline is bored, and is constantly ignored as the movie makes quite clear until she discovers a secret door in the living room. Curiosity sparks the mind, and she climbs through a beautiful loop filled with glittery cloud dusts and sparkly ornaments fit for a princess. She is then greeted by her Other Mother (also Hatcher) — an impossibly caring version of her real parent, better in every way except for her eyes. Coraline is shocked to find they are black-shaded buttons. There is a more charming Other Father too, with more magnificent versions of everyone she left behind until the danger is fully revealed. We obviously don’t want to go into this.

The interesting thing about Coraline is not actual other world, but it’s the heavy metaphor used in terms of the buttons. Eventually Coraline loves the Other World so much, that she is tempted to join until it is revealed she needs to sew buttons on her eyes to do so. Of course, our pretty-eyed heroine refuses to acknowledge the very buttons of her dismantling life: busy parents, and the constant thought of loneliness. A few buttons couldn’t possibly be that much of a sacrifice. As viewers will later discover, there are many other literary intricacies in Coraline that have brilliantly been carried over through the book, which is a key reason lovers of the novel will not leave disappointed with the all too familiar “the book was better” scenario.

The only downside to Coraline as a film itself comes in the form of Dakota Fanning. Casting wise, it makes sense to hire a girl that exaggerates her acting naturally as much as exaggeration allows for in terms of emotion in voice acting. The only problem is Dakota Fanning leaves on-screen Coraline eventually unbearable. The cringing exaggerated outbursts and the very empty voice performance of anything related to the plot in a major way are completely desiderated by her utterly horrible voice acting. It’s a shame that she was casted when a better and perhaps more remarkable performance could have easily been given by an introductory actor.

Coraline is a great film that should be seen in 3-D stop motion if it’s available to a nearest theater. If not, still see the normal anamorphic version. It’s magical either way, minus the bad voice acting.

New Line Cinema has just recently put out a film about the woes and confusing uncertainty that love presents in a tightly packed romantic comedy including big names like Ben Affleck, Drew Barrymore, Jennifer and Kevin Connolly, and Ginnifer Goodwin as a personified desperate love seeker Gigi.  The film bases out of the premise that true love is often hard to come by and is usually split amongst two types of people in a relationship relative to the woman: the exception and the rule. Gigi is typically described as the stupid albeit daring woman that follows the path of love wherever it takes her, even if it is to a guy that does not care. She’s the rule according to her run in with Justin Long’s character Adam, a friend of the date that blew Gigi off and explains her the overall deal with guys and how they perceive things. If a guy cares, he calls and he “makes something happen,” if not he’s just not that into you.

The roots of the story are based around the relationship with Gigi to her relationship with Beth (Jennifer Aniston) and Janine (Connolly) as they try and help her find a guy she likes. Through the initial subplot of a story-arch, we follow the story of the other two girls as well with Beth’s “I can’t marry anyone” boyfriend (Affleck) and Janine’s cheating husband (Bradley Cooper) with the very husky and tempting Anna played by a talented Scarlett Johansson. Everything that happens clearly happens with a purpose in the tangled web of love on screen. Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein really showed talent in delivering a screenplay that has equal opportunity to be perceived compared to the book. Sadly, the performances were bland and it almost seems like the casting agency chose roles for people that were just not working.

While the film manages to deliver a storyline that cleverly mixes characters together in an almost Crash-eque sort of way, it falls unbearably to the realms of a story plot that is essentially pointless and predictable. We do not need to go over who gets with who in the end, but it is very obvious if you can imagine the shape of this New Line flick in the form of a cookiecutter girlflick. Women, the movie says, can find a hundred ways to deny a simple truth: that if a man does not act interested, it is probably because he’s not interested. Simple enough, but it just feels like a film that wanted to stretch too far into being something that comes about an overall theme that is not predictable but obvious. By doing so, the film is the most obvious stark truth of all: if it reeks of an average plot, they’re just not into you. ‘They’ being the audience.

Two Lovers captures the very essence of what raw and vulnerable performance has long been seeking. It’s very conspicuous at first view that Two Lovers is undeniably a film that captures the emotions of love and the susceptibility of falling back to your emotions. James Gray (“We Own the Night”), has led the star cast of Gwenth Paltrow, Vinessa Shaw, and Joaquin Phoenix to all perform more than admirably in the production value of a film that on paper does not seem so remarkable, but on the screen is simply exhilarating.

There’s something unruly about romantic dramas. It is often extremely difficult to portray emotions in characters that have so many foibles and are played by actors that are usually disconcerted with the actual convention of the relationship itself, leaving an audience with a believable act but one that essentially feels void of any reality. Authenticity of emotion surprisingly triumphs in Two Lovers. For the lack of a better phrase, it has made us believers in the connection that the two characters share on screen.

Leonard Kraditor is captivating but essentially a broken-hearted trouble. His last girlfriend dumped him as we learn at the beginning of the film through a very glimpse silhouette in the water. Thankfully, he’s slowly rebuilding himself with the help of his parents Sandra and Reuben Kraditor (Isabella Rossellini and Moni Monoshov). Leonard meets two women, a la two lovers that can be thought of as essentially a conceit in the compelling nature of something like love: Michelle (the lovely Gwyneth Paltrow), an enigmatic but beautiful neighbor who represents a fervid desire in Leonard’s world, and Sandra, the comfy and loveable daughter of a businessman buying out their old dry-cleaning family run business. As he gets acquainted with both of them, he learns more and more about each one that ultimately requires that he make a decision between the two, and risk losing what he once had all over again: a sense of belonging to someone and vice versa.

Joaquin Phoenix act mesmerizingly and it is a shame that he has chosen to retire from acting, but this is the perfect film that sets him off for his flight to a new industry and in whatever he chooses. Paltrow delivers a stunning performance as she always has been in every one of her films, while the rest of the cast balances perfectly to the divulging and hectic nature of the ensemble.

Two Lovers is simply internalized conflict that magnifies itself in an incredible and thought provoking way. The film itself is brave, and the performances are bold and vulnerable enough to be considered emotionally intense that deserves each and everyone to set out to theaters to watch this.

Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman has managed to combine the deciduous canvases of the extraordinary and painful in the autobiographical documentary of his life and the adventure of self-realization through the past with Vals Im Bashir / Waltz with Bashir. Most films come with a sad factor of divagation in the main storyline to make something appear to be of certain strength, asserting itself through the plot of the entire picture. The beauty in Waltz with Bashir is an unmatched and epicurean revival into the tragedies of the Lebanon War.

Often the times of war place someone into a mindset of fallacious reasoning. Waltz with Bashir is essentially a journey that Folman places the viewers in. It’s not a detached experience as one later learns. Folman was a soldier in the Israeli army during the gruesome Lebanon war, taking place on the duty in which a slaughter, referred to as “the massacre”, took place on the Palestinians by Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia at Sabra and Shatila. Right from the beginning, Folman makes us extremely interested in the isochronal parts of his memories. Boaz Rein-Buskila, voiced by Mickey Leon, is a long time army friend of Folman that has terrible nightmares about 26 dogs, essentially the apex to the journey into the highly erratic confines of Folman’s mind. Folman inveterately puts off that he does not remember the war experience. He does not find this shocking but interesting to start. To get to the bottom of his detachment, the filmmaker engages on a therapeutic mission with others that were with him throughout the times when the skies were mostly orange and filled with forgotten memories.

There is one critical thing to be mentioned with the masterpiece that Waltz with Bashir assumes: that we are not a part of the film. Rather, the war becomes a part of us right from the start. The encyclical dream of the 26 dogs — the unrealized metaphor to trauma to the very end of the film in the image that art director David Polonsky and Folman imprint in our conscious. Folman eventually becomes engaged with the very power that the subconscious displays throughout the film, and the viewers will find themselves just as obsessed in the munificence of the art of storytelling.

Waltz with Bashir is the definition of existentialism as the idea of its own riveting story. What a human does when the horrifying view of the past becomes entirely overwhelming for everyone involved: to forget and not perceive it as reality. Through exploring the perceptions of what the mind is as opposed to the line that separates it from reality, Waltz with Bashir leaves an indelible mark on everything.

By the end of the film, it’s hard for anyone to be detached to the story and the photography that leave me surprised. Of course, when it is all over, everyone walks out of the screening and carries on with life just to live it the way that Folman did once: in passing and temporal existence. But there’s one key difference to an audience, or to that one person that watches this film out of interest alone: they have experienced the war. To a degree, Waltz with Bashir is not just a detective tale—it’s a beautifully harrowing experience that you take with you.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button tells the haunting tale of a man, born at the close of World War I, who ages backwards while those around him age forward. Where others are born unformed and unwrinkled, Benjamin comes into the world a decrepit old man; where others wither, he dies in a pink and creaseless state of infancy. For Benjamin, love is inextricable from loss since his path runs counterclockwise to nature. This unsettling, melancholy notion is attached by the thinnest thread to its original literary source, a 1922 short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. But in the hands of director David Fincher, and with Brad Pitt as Benjamin, this Button is a curious case: an extravagantly ambitious movie that is easy to admire but a challenge to love.

Eric Roth’s fanciful screenplay makes use of a weird structure to frame the film. A grown daughter (Julia Ormond) learns her mother’s romantic secrets as the old woman lays dying in a New Orleans hospital bed just as Hurricane Katrina is gathering force. The old woman, named Daisy, is Cate Blanchett after many hours with make-up artists; the secret is that Daisy met Benjamin in Louisiana a lifetime ago when the two were kids and he was old/young, and their love went on.

The movie has been in the works for years, pored over by Fincher like a favorite fairytale from his childhood. Just now has computer-driven wizardry matured enough to meet the story’s challenges so unobtrusively. Brad Pitt is a phenomenon of heightened celebrity. And that status, combined with great effects produces the exact force field of fame needed to take our breath away in that first moment on screen when Benjamin shines without grey hair.

The only lack of fundamentalism in Button is the complete disembarkation from the short story. The short story is more taciturn, maintaining a father and son relationship while the film, well —totally goes Hollywood. It is a common side effect of the cold that is a great story by Fitzgerald that when Hollywood gets their hands on anything allowed, they turn it into something that tries to challenge the senses. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is about the challenges of life and death, and how each are irrevocably irreversible in any way and how the sentimentalization of time is inebriated through experiences. While the film is a sad example of a book rendition to screen, it is one that shows nothing has to be exact. This version is just fine, and it does not have to be like the short story to be remarkably sad, in a good and great way.

Clint Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a widowed, retired autoworker alienated from his grown sons and just about everybody else in Gran Torino, a thrilling drama. Walt spends most of his time growling, tinkering, mowing his postage-stamp lawn, and raging against a world that’s changed and will not change back no matter how hard he glares. Change has certainly come to his run-down Detroit neighborhood: Hmong immigrants with strange, foreign ways have moved in. Next door, there is a fatherless, generational family that includes a quick-witted daughter (Ahney Her) and an uneasy younger teenage son (Bee Vang) who struggles to steer clear of the local Hmong gangbangers pressuring him to join them.

Walt thinks people stink. He’s obnoxiously rude to a baby-faced Catholic priest (Christopher Carley, with the puss of a young Spencer Tracy) who, fulfilling the dying request of Walt’s late wife, urges the SOB to go to confession. And the character regularly lets loose with such a vile spew of racist epithets that it is clear Eastwood is looking to inflame the PC ears of a contemporary audience.

Then, when someone attempts to steal Walt’s prized car, the coiled Korean War vet reaches for his weapon.  The connection leads to a shocking spiritual salvation, in fact. And to gang warfare. And to a movie at once understated and radical, deceptively unremarkable in presentation and ballsy in its earnestness. Don’t let the star’s overly familiar squint fool you: This is subtle, perceptive stuff.

Eastwood has devoted his recent work to refracting the image of American men in decline. His movies, pared and sinewy in both production and performance style (with the exception of the 2008 showpiece Changeling), meditate on compromises and losses, and even (most memorably in Million Dollar Baby) on serious questions of religious faith. Gran Torino, though, grafts those signature late-career preoccupations onto a story that’s got the energy of a gangly youth, right down to the naturalistic performances by the mostly nonprofessional Hmong cast. The inquisitive script is by newcomer Nick Schenk, from a story by Schenk and fellow first-timer Dave Johannson, both of whom do an amazing job. Dirty Harry has nothing on this.

Some will be drawn to the angst and closeted guilt of Anne Hathaway’s character Kym, a portrayal with layers that announces new talent in the starlet.  Others will be delighted and taken by Bill Irwin’s equal doses of authenticity and questionable mugging.

Others still might side with the conflicted and forcefully honest sparkplug of the film’s title, conveyed splendidly by Rosemarie Dewitt; or the five or ten minutes Debra Winger gets to step in as an absentee mother before flying off the rails in one of the most painfully unrealistic scenes of the year.

Perhaps the calming presence of Tunde Adebimpe’s groom-to-be Sidney will sooth the soul, however bizarre his coupling seems to be, or the overall zen of Anna Deveare Smith’s alpha female Carol.

Whatever your attraction to the film’s ensemble, the point that should be taken away is how vibrantly Demme has wrought its diversity and thematic purpose throughout.  Comparison’s to Noah Baumbach’s “Margot at the Wedding” may be in store, but unlike Baumbach, Demme understand the impact of true realism over a reaching attempt at stylizing it.

Jenny Lumet’s script isn’t as hackneyed as it might be, though it certainly isn’t as complete as it thinks it is.  But perhaps that is another important (if tired) artistic point: the episodic nature of family, the ups and downs and how they seem to fade into a cluster of events impossible to distinguish.  No grand insightful gestures are made, no sweeping epiphanies of characterization, but Demme brings the appropriate edge and guidance to make it pass for unique.

Despite valiant stands in front of and behind the camera, however, “Rachel” suffers from a screenplay that seems trite when boiled to its essence and leaves no real room for creative expansion. The long-winded scenes, the 30-minute drives with a camera view out the window for that “real life” artsy feel is just getting boring and undermines the cinematography in general. For everything it does right, the film manages to get some things wrong that undermine the film to a degree. The film still retains it is boudoir, but things start to fall out so to speak.

There are few directorial talents with the energetic potential Baz Luhrmann brings to his projects.  Danny Boyle comes to mind.  On good days, Fernando Meirelles does too.  But one thing each of these filmmakers capitalizes on through their complicated sense of visual storytelling is the power of intimacy in the scripts they set out to film.

Somehow, Baz Luhrmann forgets this.  Not that he wouldn’t be capable of tacking a project as ambitious as “Australia,” but at least right now, it has proven to be simply too much movie for the filmmaker at this stage in his career.

Visceral satisfaction is present. Larger than life characterizations are apparent. If you’re willing to let it, you will probably be swept off your feet.  But somewhere in the ambition, Luhrmann loses a grip on his own talents, producing something that is a considerable mess.

The romance that sparks between Lady Ashley and the Drover ultimately falls flat dramatically. Part of the staleness stems from the couple’s first intimate encounter, a trite moment of intoxication that seems begrudgingly concocted to set the characters on their way.  But what really affects the impact of this central relationship is the ambiguity of Jackman’s Drover.

The film’s considerable artistry is not the stunning example one might have expected, but there are moments of true precision.  Much of Mandy Walker’s cinematography is concerned with capturing the picturesque beauty of the Outback, and when clumsy (near embarrassing) CG effects stay out of its way, it succeeds.

The ultimate failure of “Australia” is Luhrmann’s preoccupation with grandiose filmmaking, paradoxically his greatest strength in past examples.  It’s a style not suited to a sloppy plot structure that could have used some more attention.  Vibrant visuals reveal the scars of a lacking narrative, leaving the frayed ends of a couple of interesting stories to dangle like horrible intentions to begin with.

Darren Aronofsky went back to the drawing board on “The Wrestler,” a film that swims in nuance, spearheaded by a performance of grace and subtle charisma.

After “The Fountain” failed to catch on in any meaningful way (though this viewer considered it one of the best films of 2006), the director ravaged by a studio system that condensed his vision to an essence he wasn’t fully comfortable with, Aronofsky took up the reins of the most modest, straight-forward project he’s tackled in 10 years.  The result is as affecting as it is numbing.

Mickey Rourke stars as Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a one-time head of the class professional wrestler who makes his living (barely) working in the independent circuit.  His body as beat up as Aronofsky’s confidence must have been two years ago (he wears a hearing aid as a result of his work description and the look of a broken mare across his face), Randy is in some ways the ultimate blue collar guy.

He gets by on what little income he can manage from his stake of this event gate or that, sleeping in his big Dodge van (a Ram, of course) when he isn’t able to meet the rent on his trailer.  His afternoon hang-out is the local dive strip club where he is friendly with Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), over the hill but with a goddess’s body and a heart of gold to match.  She becomes even more attractive, somehow, with the revelation that she has a 9-year-old son, a point of connection for Randy, who has been estranged from his daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood) for many years.

Whether he’s playing an old Nintendo game featuring his younger self with a neighborhood kid or pouring through clothes at a vintage shop for a present for his daughter, Rourke sells the character as a part of himself.  He owns the movie until its vague but poignant conclusion and the first few strums of Bruce Springsteen’s original track filter through over black.