未制作の映画が宮崎駿を形作った

An Unmade Film Shaped Hayao MiyazakiPlus: newsbits.Oct 12, 202679519ShareA Hayao Miyazaki concept sketch for Rowlf, courtesy of the book Nausicaä PrehistoryWelcome! It’s a new Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Here’s the agenda for today:1. Rowlf and Miyazaki’s turnaround.2. Animation newsbits.3. The last word.With that, let’s go! 1. TransformingIn 1980, Hayao Miyazaki turned 39 years old. He was just shy of middle age, but he’d made almost none of the work associated with his name today. He felt kind of washed up. Miyazaki’s debut feature The Castle of Cagliostro (1979) had flopped at the box office, and he viewed it as a rehash of his past projects. “I don’t think I added anything new,” he admitted. He saw his creations as stuck. 1“With every piece I made it was obvious that I was just trotting out everything I had done before [laughs],” he said. “Nineteen eighty was my year of being mired in gloom.” He’d built a style and a set of reference points. Miyazaki excelled at children’s cartoons with big emotions, zany action, slapstick, good guys and bad guys. Among his influences were The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep and the Soviet Snow Queen from the ‘50s, and Fleischer stuff like Popeye and Mr. Bug Goes to Town. But he started to believe that his approach was too simplistic. “I wondered if it was no longer possible to make an action movie where defeating the villain was enough to make a happy ending,” he said. The times had changed: heroism and villainy seemed like murkier concepts than they once were. 2As Miyazaki searched for other possibilities, he got into alt comics in the orbit of Métal Hurlant, a foreign magazine. That included Arzach by Mœbius. “I first saw it around 1980. It had a great impact on me,” he said. 3 Meanwhile, an American comic from the same circle lit up his imagination. It was called Rowlf (1971). “I chanced upon Rowlf around the time I was wondering what to do for my next work after I had completed Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro,” he wrote recently. He was so impressed that he proposed, in 1980, to adapt the story as his second feature film. That decision would change his career. 4Hayao Miyazaki concept sketches for Rowlf, courtesy of the books Nausicaä Prehistory and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind: Watercolor Impressions In many ways, Rowlf was the opposite of Miyazaki’s past loves. Author Richard Corben came from America’s underground comix scene. In their content, his violent, transgressive stories weren’t far off the exploitation films of their era. Miyazaki wrote in 1980 that Rowlf “definitely is not for little children.” But he detected potential here: In Rowlf, a world that appears at first to be grotesque and ironic is actually filled with faith in a healthy life. The story possesses the power of old fairy tales — the ability to encourage people, to reassure us and give us hope. It’s no exaggeration to say that it is rare to see such a work today. Rowlf unfolds in a mixed-up world. In Corben’s description, “We have fantasy elements like the castles and medieval costumes and sorcerers, and then they clash with these mutants with their sort of ‘Panzer’ tanks.” He thought it up in the ‘60s as a film (he was an amateur animator) before he retooled it as a comic. 5Corben took from his childhood dog for the Rowlf character — the pet of Maryara, a princess. When she’s kidnapped, Rowlf turns into a kind of werewolf and goes on a rampage to save her. The narrative is basic, and its handling of its damsel in distress is flat and often in poor taste. But Corben had a knack for telling stories in images: Rowlf’s panels have a fleshy physicality and strong feeling of space. The Academy of Comic Book Arts named him the year’s top new talent. This edgy, 20th-century Beauty and the Beast story appealed to Miyazaki. Among its other qualities, he noted its “[d]ramatic staging, including the desert (upon which Rowlf’s tank casts long shadows).” But he found it “boring” to use Maryara as she was: “I wanted her to be more active in the story’s progression.” A few panels from Richard Corben’s Rowlf comic In the concept sketches that Miyazaki and the artist Yoshifumi Kondo did for Rowlf, Maryara appears as a bolder character, sometimes holding weapons — one author mentioned the “nobility and inner strength” in these drawings. Along the way, Miyazaki added flying machines and other oddities from Mœbius. 7Although he was changing Rowlf, Miyazaki wasn’t turning it into the same type of story he’d done before. As the project evolved, he was evolving, too. Like he said: While I was filling out Rowlf in this fashion, I moved further and further away from the original story. And as [Maryara] began to have a stronger mind and feelings, I ended up with “a princess in her castle” and “a pathetic father.” This father was a little touched — while he had once been quite heroic, now he was confined to bed and completely useless. Yet despite this, he remained a very proud man. I believed a girl with that father would make Rowlf into a much more interesting story. Suitors came one after the other, their eyes on the country’s minimal wealth. … I was trying to build in a secondary theme in which she preserved her pride while rebuffing these men. … The concept of someone struggling to live up to … responsibility had been planted inside my mind for the first time. Before that, all the characters I’d considered were completely free. Concept sketches for Rowlf by Yoshifumi Kondo, as seen in Works of Yoshifumi Kondo Miyazaki concept pieces for Rowlf — the last one appears to depict one of Maryara’s suitors. Courtesy of Nausicaä Prehistory. When he first stumbled across Rowlf, Miyazaki was working with Tokyo’s Telecom (Cagliostro). The producer Yutaka Fujioka established the studio with one major goal: to cross over in the West. According to animator Yasuo Otsuka, Fujioka had dreamed since the early ‘70s of blowing up in America — business meetings with Max Fleischer made him think it was possible. From there, Fujioka did lots of wheeling and dealing in Hollywood. 8 And Rowlf was part of that effort. In late 1980, Miyazaki opened his proposal to the studio like this: I think that Rowlf would be ideal for a theatrical feature film targeting the American market. … [I]f handled properly it could potentially appeal to all classes of young Americans and far surpass the appeal of Bakshi’s Wizards. The images in Rowlf may seem unfamiliar and grotesque to Japanese audiences, but by massaging them and making them more digestible, I believe the film could also attract young Japanese audiences. Miyazaki’s reference to Wizards shows what he had in mind here. His Rowlf would retain that alternative energy he got from Mœbius and from Corben’s original comic. And it would go for older viewers than Miyazaki normally did. This project was a very different thing than, say, his Future Boy Conan (1978). He wrapped up his proposal with these words: Rowlf is unconditionally devoted to his mistress, Maryara, but audiences will be particularly inspired and impressed by his courage as he becomes more self-aware, starts to learn and eventually matures to the point where he can take on the demons. For today’s young people — who feel over-managed, overprotected and suffocated by society, or who find their choices increasingly limited and thus are increasingly neurotic — this story would be the ideal present. Fujioka was sold, and he wasn’t the only one. In 1981, Miyazaki told Osamu Tezuka about his intention to animate Rowlf. The author pledged his support for the project in Animage. “I’m certain that Miyazaki-san will make it into a fantastically amazing film,” he wrote. 9The hurdle was Corben. For a time, the “agents were going back and forth,” Miyazaki said. At one point, Fujioka went to cut a deal himself. “Fujioka-san became interested in Richard Corben because of his popularity in America,” wrote Otsuka, “and he went to Cincinnati to meet Corben in person, but Corben turned h