Ronja, The Robber's Daughter
Mar. 30th, 2018 11:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
type_wildThis one goes out to every person who has ever complained about how the film/series/anime "cut out so much from the novels". You got what you wanted with this one. I deeply suspect that not a single line of dialogue has been cut.
Formative childhood literature aside, I watched it because it's Studio Ghibli's first take on a TV anime, directed by Miyazaki Jr. I was knocked out by either a mild flu or the cold from hell, so something slow and simple was just what my brain needed.
I somewhat suspect that Astrid Lindgren is not the universal childhood staple in the Anglosphere as it is Scandinavia, so a brief summary might in fact be needed here: In Some Mythical Medieval Scandinavia, Mattis is the leader of a band of robbers and becomes the world's most dumbest dad upon the birth of his headstrong, free-spirited daughter Ronja. He is eventually convinced that he needs to let her run free and learn to fend for herself in the wild woods surrounding the robbers' fort, but he might've had (even more) second thoughts about that if he'd realised that that meant she'd run into the only other child this far out of civilisation: the son of his arch-enemy.
This anime was made with the blessing of, if not outright comissioned by, the Astrid Lindgren estate. It's Ghibli to the extreme and unlike pretty much everything I've seen of recent children's animation in style, be it Japanese or not. And to be completely honest, by the halfway point, I was still having trouble figuring out who the hell was the target audience for this. Even as I'd come to be happy with it, satisfied with it, by the end, I'm still puzzled by who, exactly, they were trying to reach.
On the surface it looks like it's trying to be the post-millenial version of the seventies Heidi anime, with which Miyazaki Sr. was involved. They both have the same weird pacing and the same topic, being Japan's fascination with the fantasy of a past and untainted Europe. Ronja replaces Heidi's pastoral with a very Ghibli depiction of the wild nature, but the purpose seems to be the same: Watch children frolick in the idyllic landscape. Don't you wish you were living there yet?
[ETA: There's apparently a lot more Ghibli in Heidi, or possibly Heidi in Ghibli, than I knew. I'll leave this for people who know anime history better than me to pursue, but suffice it to say that Ronja seems to descend from a legit tradition of animated western children's literature]
"Wanting to be Heidi" is a difficult one for two reasons, the first being that I'm not at all sure that the children of 2015 have the patience of children of 1975. I didn't test it, but I'm pretty certain that today's children, reared on the MTV-paced, 180 BPM speed of Dreamworks and the likes, would give up on Heidi and Ronja both within the first ten minutes of nothing happening. And even if you want to offer up a calm and comforting respite for the younger and over-stimulated part of the crowd, you absolutely picked the wrong children's work to adapt. Because the second problem is that while Heidi, for all its depictions of various degrees of child neglect, in fact IS idyllic and relatively naive, Ronja can be downright gruesome when it gets going. Like, a child being stuck in the snow and having fantasies about her father finding her presumably decomposed body come spring. Obviously,
is not going to be
(that's the same conversation, for those of you who don't understand Swedish. Or Danish, for that matter)
but thanks to the faithful-beyond-reason adaptation, we get some weird tonal dissonances at times. Ronja-the-anime wants to be cute, but Ronja-the-source-material is the one where a child is abducted, beaten up and humiliated by a crowd of grown men. It's all in here, and it's exactly as horrifying as it should be, but it feels wildly out of place in an anime that looks like it wants to court the kindergarten crowd. In what world do ten-year-olds reach no higher than the waistline of an adult?
Being faithful to the source material means that all the good bits are there, and there are a LOT of good bits. The characterisation is spot-on from the book. The hilarious and pathetic and heartwarming and heartbreaking mess that is Mattis' relationship to Ronja is brilliantly, brilliantly brought out here. The harpies are genuinely terrifying, the Ghibli-i-fying of the rest of Lindgren's weird creatures is brilliant. Tiny children aside, I adore almost every piece of character design here. The nature is impressively depicted, given that the singular detail my sorry Scandinavian ass could nitpick is that going by the size, they had Ronja and Birk harvest domesticated, not wild, raspberries. The directing is good, with some moments that truly shine. No joke: That moment where Ronja makes the decision to take That One Jump felt like it was worth enduring all the previous dwelling on eating breakfast and fetching water and shoveling snow.
Because dear god does this anime dwell. It takes an episode and half until Ronja is old enough to be talking; Birk is not introduced until four episodes in. Did we really need to spend five minutes of Mattis having a fit? No, no we didn't, we got the point after the first twenty seconds, but sure, let's watch him trash his big hall while his robbers are cowering in fear anyway. I spent the first twelve-fifteen episodes going "what are you doing, what IS this?", because so. little. HAPPENED. To return to the above point about Heidi, it feels as if setting and atmosphere were the central points here, not story. And that is fair enough, and certainly has worked more than well enough in Ghibli's previous works (Totoro and Spirited Away both spring to mind), but a two hour film is not a thirteen-hour anime. And for the record: The eighties film adaptation was exactly two hours long, later extended into a 150-minute TV series. That one was considered a great one back in the day. All in all, this anime could have been a lot shorter and it should have been at least considerably shorter than what it is. It could've worked with 13 episodes. Had it not been bound by Japanese broadcasting schedules, it might've cut at least some eight-ten episodes of the total count (26) and lost nothing but hours and hours of idyllic nature and robbers partying.
And that inexplicable pacing is such a shame, because so much else about this show is really, really great. The only other thing I can think to complain about is that Mattis looked a lot less rugged than I feel that Mattis should be; this was, unfortunately, not helped by him being miserably miscast in the dub I watched. (The English-language version is a UK dub, and really great from the bits I've watched on youtube.) I enjoyed the animation. I loved so much of how they depicted the events from the book. I liked how they portrayed the robbers. I cherished every moment Lovis was on screen. I mean, all the moments that had me emotional in the book as a child had me even more emotional here, as an adult.
It's just. I had to wait. so long. between each one of them.
Formative childhood literature aside, I watched it because it's Studio Ghibli's first take on a TV anime, directed by Miyazaki Jr. I was knocked out by either a mild flu or the cold from hell, so something slow and simple was just what my brain needed.
I somewhat suspect that Astrid Lindgren is not the universal childhood staple in the Anglosphere as it is Scandinavia, so a brief summary might in fact be needed here: In Some Mythical Medieval Scandinavia, Mattis is the leader of a band of robbers and becomes the world's most dumbest dad upon the birth of his headstrong, free-spirited daughter Ronja. He is eventually convinced that he needs to let her run free and learn to fend for herself in the wild woods surrounding the robbers' fort, but he might've had (even more) second thoughts about that if he'd realised that that meant she'd run into the only other child this far out of civilisation: the son of his arch-enemy.
This anime was made with the blessing of, if not outright comissioned by, the Astrid Lindgren estate. It's Ghibli to the extreme and unlike pretty much everything I've seen of recent children's animation in style, be it Japanese or not. And to be completely honest, by the halfway point, I was still having trouble figuring out who the hell was the target audience for this. Even as I'd come to be happy with it, satisfied with it, by the end, I'm still puzzled by who, exactly, they were trying to reach.
On the surface it looks like it's trying to be the post-millenial version of the seventies Heidi anime, with which Miyazaki Sr. was involved. They both have the same weird pacing and the same topic, being Japan's fascination with the fantasy of a past and untainted Europe. Ronja replaces Heidi's pastoral with a very Ghibli depiction of the wild nature, but the purpose seems to be the same: Watch children frolick in the idyllic landscape. Don't you wish you were living there yet?
[ETA: There's apparently a lot more Ghibli in Heidi, or possibly Heidi in Ghibli, than I knew. I'll leave this for people who know anime history better than me to pursue, but suffice it to say that Ronja seems to descend from a legit tradition of animated western children's literature]
"Wanting to be Heidi" is a difficult one for two reasons, the first being that I'm not at all sure that the children of 2015 have the patience of children of 1975. I didn't test it, but I'm pretty certain that today's children, reared on the MTV-paced, 180 BPM speed of Dreamworks and the likes, would give up on Heidi and Ronja both within the first ten minutes of nothing happening. And even if you want to offer up a calm and comforting respite for the younger and over-stimulated part of the crowd, you absolutely picked the wrong children's work to adapt. Because the second problem is that while Heidi, for all its depictions of various degrees of child neglect, in fact IS idyllic and relatively naive, Ronja can be downright gruesome when it gets going. Like, a child being stuck in the snow and having fantasies about her father finding her presumably decomposed body come spring. Obviously,
is not going to be
(that's the same conversation, for those of you who don't understand Swedish. Or Danish, for that matter)
but thanks to the faithful-beyond-reason adaptation, we get some weird tonal dissonances at times. Ronja-the-anime wants to be cute, but Ronja-the-source-material is the one where a child is abducted, beaten up and humiliated by a crowd of grown men. It's all in here, and it's exactly as horrifying as it should be, but it feels wildly out of place in an anime that looks like it wants to court the kindergarten crowd. In what world do ten-year-olds reach no higher than the waistline of an adult?
Being faithful to the source material means that all the good bits are there, and there are a LOT of good bits. The characterisation is spot-on from the book. The hilarious and pathetic and heartwarming and heartbreaking mess that is Mattis' relationship to Ronja is brilliantly, brilliantly brought out here. The harpies are genuinely terrifying, the Ghibli-i-fying of the rest of Lindgren's weird creatures is brilliant. Tiny children aside, I adore almost every piece of character design here. The nature is impressively depicted, given that the singular detail my sorry Scandinavian ass could nitpick is that going by the size, they had Ronja and Birk harvest domesticated, not wild, raspberries. The directing is good, with some moments that truly shine. No joke: That moment where Ronja makes the decision to take That One Jump felt like it was worth enduring all the previous dwelling on eating breakfast and fetching water and shoveling snow.
Because dear god does this anime dwell. It takes an episode and half until Ronja is old enough to be talking; Birk is not introduced until four episodes in. Did we really need to spend five minutes of Mattis having a fit? No, no we didn't, we got the point after the first twenty seconds, but sure, let's watch him trash his big hall while his robbers are cowering in fear anyway. I spent the first twelve-fifteen episodes going "what are you doing, what IS this?", because so. little. HAPPENED. To return to the above point about Heidi, it feels as if setting and atmosphere were the central points here, not story. And that is fair enough, and certainly has worked more than well enough in Ghibli's previous works (Totoro and Spirited Away both spring to mind), but a two hour film is not a thirteen-hour anime. And for the record: The eighties film adaptation was exactly two hours long, later extended into a 150-minute TV series. That one was considered a great one back in the day. All in all, this anime could have been a lot shorter and it should have been at least considerably shorter than what it is. It could've worked with 13 episodes. Had it not been bound by Japanese broadcasting schedules, it might've cut at least some eight-ten episodes of the total count (26) and lost nothing but hours and hours of idyllic nature and robbers partying.
And that inexplicable pacing is such a shame, because so much else about this show is really, really great. The only other thing I can think to complain about is that Mattis looked a lot less rugged than I feel that Mattis should be; this was, unfortunately, not helped by him being miserably miscast in the dub I watched. (The English-language version is a UK dub, and really great from the bits I've watched on youtube.) I enjoyed the animation. I loved so much of how they depicted the events from the book. I liked how they portrayed the robbers. I cherished every moment Lovis was on screen. I mean, all the moments that had me emotional in the book as a child had me even more emotional here, as an adult.
It's just. I had to wait. so long. between each one of them.
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no subject
Date: 2018-03-30 05:47 pm (UTC)At any rate, it wouldn't surprise me if the Ronja anime was going for that same style and flow.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-30 08:47 pm (UTC)It still begs the question if the intended audience for this anime, then, was in fact adults with nostalgia? Because if you wanted to create something for the same age bracket as Heidi, there's no lack of Lindgren works that at least wouldn't traumatise them. I mean, I saw maybe three or four episodes of Heidi, but I can't imagine it ending an episode with Heidi and Peter about to be crushed at the bottom of a rocky waterfall. And that's far from the only point in this anime where we see children in mortal peril.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-31 12:51 am (UTC)I went and found the picture I took in Tirano, and misremembered the kana -- it's simply ティラノ -- and the plaque says that it's a gift from the Hakone Tozan Railway, which seems to be a sister railway to the Rhaetian Railway. (Would make sense, since they're both mountain railways that had to work with some very challenging terrain....)