The Mike Toole Show

Ghibli Before Ghibli

A few weeks back, our long national nightmare ended as Castle in the Sky, but the company has remained insistent that it consistently sells better than any other Miyazaki title. No surprise, then, that it's among the first to arrive on blu-ray. Not bad for a little movie that isn't even technically a Ghibli film.

Yep, Nausicaä falls into that odd gray area before Tokyo Movie Shinsha t, long before Ghibli was the animation force we all know and love. In fact, if you examine the works of Miyazaki and Takahata, the two pillars of the studio, Ghibli's legacy stretches all the way back to the sixties.

I've talked about some of the earliest of Miyazaki and Takahata's works in this space before. As kids, the pair were inspired by films like Paul Grimault's The King and the Bird and otaku culture that we know and (sometimes) love.

Miyazaki, for his part, would work on two films in the following year that would continue to define his career path and become classics in their own right. After more than a decade spent making sumptuously animated features, Toei's Ponyo!

After that, Miyazaki would team up with Ikeda again for 1971's Animal Treasure Island. If Takahata's blueprint for the traditional strong Studio Ghibli heroine was Prince of the Sun's Hilda, Miyazaki's has got to be this movie's character Cathy - the steely-eyed young girl takes charge swiftly, fighting Long John Silver and his men with guns, swords, and bombs as Jim Hawkins looks on disbelievingly. Then Miyazaki had a hand in making Ali Baba's Revenge, something extraordinarily different-looking from most of his animated works. The great director and his studio are known for modest character designs and incredibly detailed scenery and animation, but here it's all pitched in favor of a wacky, wobbly, cartoony take on 1001 Arabian Nights, as Al Haq, the descendant of the original king of thieves, reclaims his treasure from the bumbling, nasty descendant of Ali Baba. (No, I don't quite get why the English title is "Ali Baba's Revenge," either.) Still, the movie's constant stream of inventive, giggle-inducing gags makes it stand out, even 40 years later.

While Miyazaki was busy making awesome movies, Takahata was bouncing back from Prince of the Sun by using TV animation projects like Panda! Go, Panda!. If you check these shorts out (and you should! the DVD is out of print, but not terribly hard to find) you'll notice that main character Mimiko has startlingly red hair and pigtails - now you know why!

Both directors would stick to television for much of the 1970s. Miyazaki directed the insanely great franchise. We know and love The Castle of Cagliostro now, but again, this was a film that didn't do very well upon its original release. Maybe that's why Miyazaki didn't come flying out of the gate as the 80s began.

Well, part of the reason for this is because Miyazaki and Takahata were lured into TMS and Sherlock Hound, as it's known here, went onto the shelf after six episodes were produced, but those episodes were hastily dusted off when the legal problems were solved in 1984. Two of the best episodes ran as a featurette in front of the Japanese theatrical release of Nausicaä, and the resulting momentum meant that the Hound TV series would be finished, even if it was by another director.

Takahata would have one more film, Fred Ladd, who has championed the movie for years. Heck, if you're not above googling, you can even find dub-only digital copies of long out-of-print fare like Ali Baba's Revenge and Gulliver's Travels Beyond the Moon.

The truly intriguing thing is the sheer number of titles referenced above that never got released in the west. There's no Flying Ghost Ship DVD, or Anne of Green Gables box sets, or Future Boy Conan on Netflix. You'd think that having one or both of the founders of Ghibli attached to the show would make it an easy sell, but this apparently isn't the case. Despite all of that, there's still plenty of Ghibli goodness to look forward to as more of the studio's titles make the hop to blu-ray. Which Studio Ghibli blu-ray do you think will be the next to land on American shores?