More Miyazaki on US Blu Ray

[Ben]

"The Secret World of Arriety" which was the last Ghibli film Disney distributed theatrically in the US.

Well, apart from The Wind Rises...

[Randall]

Here's the Amazon link to the Fireflies two-disc set, though they only list used copies from Marketplace sellers:
http://www.amazon.com/Fireflies-Two-Dis ... 009&sr=1-4

Ocean Waves is another Ghibli film MIA in North America, though it was produced as a TV movie, not a theatrical. It is available on DVD elsewhere, such as the UK.

[GeorgeC]

"The Secret World of Arriety" which was the last Ghibli film Disney distributed theatrically in the US.

Well, apart from The Wind Rises...

You're right! I forgot that.

Honestly, the last Disney-distributed Ghibli film I saw in theaters was Ponyo. (The last Ghibli movie I saw in theaters, period, was Princess Kaguya but that's being distributed by GKids and I DID buy the Blu ray the day it was released.) I skipped the other two for a variety of reasons but still got them on home video. Heck, the last Ghibli film I bought was Tales from Undersea and that's only because I want to be a completist for the Ghibli films. I'm aware of the fact that the film has probably the worst reviews of a Ghibli movie BUT there's a very good chance that it'll be the first Ghibli film to go out-of-print on Blu ray and DVD in North America!

Here's the Amazon link to the Fireflies two-disc set, though they only list used copies from Marketplace sellers:
http://www.amazon.com/Fireflies-Two-Dis ... 009&sr=1-4

Ocean Waves is another Ghibli film MIA in North America, though it was produced as a TV movie, not a theatrical. It is available on DVD elsewhere, such as the UK.

Did not know about Ocean Waves. You generally only hear about the Miyazaki or Takahata films or whatever else Disney licensed. (Whispers of the Heart is pretty darn good...) A shame because the GKids Ghibli licenses seem to be very good even if the films didn't do so well as the Miyazaki features.

As for the two-disc version of Grave of the Fireflies, I think you can at least get the Section23 release brand-new from some of the anime store webshops. I've seen it at Barnes & Noble as well. I still plan on getting it on Blu ray but that hasn't been a high priority for me. Probably get it in the next year before Section23 loses the license and it goes out of print! (That almost happened to me with one of the Lupin III anime TV special releases but I managed to find the out-of-print DVD at retail price at a recent anime con.)

One mistake I saw made about GKids was the belief on one review site that the company had a bunch of Ghibli licenses. As far as I have read, they only have three of them -- From Up on Poppy Hill, The Tale of Princess Kaguya, and When Marnie Was There. They do have a ton of other anime features as well as some European stuff. The anime features look a lot better than the other animated features to be honest... I think right now the only Euro-feature I'm interested in The Illusionist (distributed by another company; I really have wanted to get that film for years but keep putting it on a backburner). One of the other anime features licensed by GKids is a sci-fi feature about gravity run amuck... Can't remember the name but it looked very interesting.

A couple of other companies are also licensing newer anime features. I saw A Letter to Momo (distributed by yet another home video company) recently and it's an excellent film. If you asked me ten years ago how I felt about anime features, I would have said people were wasting their time and should stick to anime TV. Right now, I think the opposite is true.

(A lot of the more recent TV shows just don't look very appealing to me and it's next-to-impossible to see this stuff on TV and over half of it isn't being sold in stores anymore... You CAN find most of it online BUT ---!)

I think the better anime being released on home video now are the feature films and a very small fraction of that is Studio Ghibli. There have been a number of good, recent features that are original stories or adaptations of novels (not manga which is what at least half of anime is based off of). Besides A Letter to Momo, there's Summer Wars and Wolf Children directed by the same person... they're both excellent and showed me that there was at least another Japanese director besides Miyazaki and the late Satoshi Kon who produces consistently excellent work. Most of the other anime feature/TV directors I'm familiar with are very up-and-down with their work...

Satoshi Kon... there's another guy whose work deserves to be re-released on Blu ray. The only feature of his released on Blu ray in North America is Paprika and that may be the only Kon feature still in print in North America. Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress really need remastered re-releases in high definition... (I understand that Japanese Blu ray of Perfect Blue wasn't great, either...) Very under-rated director.

[Ben]

Spirited Away and The Cat Returns just announced for June 16.

[Dan]

Woot!

So, if I recall correctly, that leaves Only Yesterday, Ocean Waves, and My Neighbors the Yamadas as the only Studio Ghibli titles yet to be released on blu over here.

I will say, I'm curious to see if any one will consider bringing over the music video Miyazaki made, "On Your Mark". Having a bootleg set that had all the Ghibli films up to Mononoke includes the video, which I thought was quite fun to watch.

[GeorgeC]

Spirited Away and The Cat Returns just announced for June 16.

Yeah, I saw that...

Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro Blu ray (US edition) has been pushed back a week after those titles... So it's a 6/23/15 release and NOT end of April like announced earlier...

<Grrrr....>


My Neighbors the Yamadas MIGHT get a Blu ray release (I'm surprised this next wave of Ghibli titles is only 2 this time; I thought everything was pretty much released on Blu ray and Europe already!) but I seriously doubt Disney will bring over Only Yesterday to the States. They didn't release it on DVD in the States and I don't know that there are enough Studio Ghibli fans in the States for them to bother.

The Disney company is getting mighty risk-averse. The last 1 or 2 CG films they released on home video (Frozen, Big Hero 6) did NOT get Blu ray 3D releases in the US despite being made with 3D in mind. They did release The Little Mermaid 3D only because it was already done for (the canceled) theatrical re-release.

Somethin' is up...

[Randall]

I can now rest easy, knowing that Spirited Away is finally on the way. I'll have to pick up The Cat Returns too, but I wouldn't have been too bothered to just keep my DVD for that one. Yamadas may need another viewing, but it's not one that I liked all that much the first time. Still, it would be nice if it appeared on Blu just for consistency on the ol' shelf.

[Ben]

I just need SA and Lupin III and I'll be happy with my Ghiblis on Blu, though I still may get Fireflies at somepoint, either picking up the 2-disc DVD or the lesser-packed (but better image, by all accounts) BD.

[GeorgeC]

Grave of the Fireflies is so depressing that I DO NOT think that getting a 2-disc version is going to make much difference!

Recommendation: If you actually do see the film sometime, be prepared with tissue boxes, antidepressants, and another film that's much more pleasant to watch!
(They DID pair My Neighbor Totoro with that film in the original theatrical release in Japan... Odd choice. Talk about a bipolar filmgoing experience!)


Personally, I liked Whispers of the Heart better than The Cat Returns but the films are tangentially connected. 'The Cat' character appears in both. I think Whispers of the Heart is one of the better non-Miyazaki Ghibli features.

The thing is that a lot of the non-Miyazaki films tend to be 'less fantastic.' They really don't have a lot if any fantasy elements to them. (There are exceptions like Tales from Undersea and The Cat Returns as well as brief segments with 'The Cat' in Whispers of the Heart. Pom Poko is another of these films and is one of the weirdest Ghibil films, period.) The Miyazaki stuff is definitely for people who like sci-fi, mythology, retro-technology (Castle in the Sky, Porco Rosso), and magic.

The characterizations are good but I think --- I dunno. It's that whole argument of using animation to showcase the fantastic versus doing animation that's 'more like real life.' I'm more in the camp that says animation's more appropriate for tales of the fantastic than it is for 'capturing life.' I get bored when animation becomes rotoscoping.

From Up on Poppy Hill is a nice film but did it really have to be done as animation? Is there anything in that film that couldn't have been done live-action?

(I still stay superheroes are done better in animation than live-action, FYI. My favorite versions of Superman and Batman -- outside of certain comic book issues -- are animated, not live-action. The same for Spider-Man. It's just that whole stupid argument and bias that people generally have about animation, period = it's Looney Tunes or Disney princesses. So many darn compromises have to be made to make the characters -- let alone the costumes -- work in live-action that I rarely have seen many good live-action adaptations of comic characters let alone superheroes. The general public is so ignorant of a lot of the basics that it's difficult to have an intelligent conversation with many people about why one version of Superman in film really is NOT the same as the character from the comics. Way less than 1% of the population has even read the original comics -- and that's just the United States alone! It doesn't help that the publisher keeps changing things in the comics every 6-8 years, too, and that there's probably less consistency now for the past decade than there was in the previous 30-40 years!)

Ironically, Miyazaki still has his fingerprints on a bunch of the non-fantastic films, too. I think he did stories or scripts for quite a few of those films including From Up on Poppy Hill.

[Dan]

Well, he was writer and producer on Poppy Hill.

Looking further, Ghibli going on hiatus because of Miyazaki's retirement has a lot of deeper merit since he really did have a hand in nearly all the films except for a few. He's been director, writer, and/or producer on all except Grave of the Fireflies, Ocean Waves, My Neighbors the Yamadas, Tales from Earthsea (he actually wasn't on speaking terms with his son throughout the production of this one), Tale of Princess Kaguya, and the forthcoming When Marnie was There.

[Ben]

Just wanna say that I have previously stated I have seen - and own on DVD - Grave Of The Fireflies!

I was going to pick up the BD and Rand mentioned there was a two-disc DVD that I didn't know about. Hence those mentions.

[Ben]

Not sure if it's a mistake or not, but Lupin III on Blu-ray is just $14.99 at Amazon.com right now...get your pre-orders in!

[Randall]

Yep, got that done a couple of days ago! Still, with the high shipping and import fees, it may still be cheaper for me getting it from Amazon.ca.

[GeorgeC]

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/daily-b ... les/.87372

Supposedly this is the last Ghibli movie that had yet to make the jump to Blu ray...
It's a 72-minute TV movie described as a high school romance.
(They have a ton of those already...! If it's not a comedy, I don't generally bother with this sort of thing.)

This is also one of the Ghibli films that HASN'T been licensed for North America.

Here's the article

"Walt Disney Japan lists the July 17 release of Tomomi Mochizuki and Studio Ghibli's television special Ocean Waves (Umi ga Kikoeru) on Blu-ray Disc. Retailers list the Blu-ray Disc with Japanese and English subtitles under the Ghibli ga Ippai Collection label.

"Optimum Releasing released the special on DVD in the United Kingdom in 2010, and Madman Entertainment released it on DVD in Australia later that year."



Keep in mind that Japanese Blu rays have the same region coding as North America (Region A) and there are multi-region Blu ray players, too.

The Japanese disc will probably still cost at least $55 if not $70!

[Randall]

I watched Ocean Waves last year, but barely remember it now. It was OK, though. It may never get a release here due to some frank discussion of female biology.