Ocean Waves: Ghibli Giblets

I wish I had done a little more research on this film before I decided to send off for the DVD, but I was thinking, “It’s a Studio Ghibli film. I want all the Ghibli films! It must be good!” Sure, it was about Japanese teen life, but so were “From Up on Poppy Hill” and “Whisper of the Heart”, and I had enjoyed them well enough. Look, right there on the box, "From the Creators of Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro"!

I got my copy a few weeks ago and, first of all, was surprised to find that it was exclusively in Japanese but had an option of English subtitles. Fair enough. I gave it a go and got through the first fifteen minutes. I have to say I was not engaged but thought perhaps that my mood was not right. I set it aside.

Today I gave it another shot. Again, I found myself feeling restless at the fifteen-minute mark. Puzzled, I turned it off and decided to do a little research at last, the research, perhaps, that I should have done before my purchase.

What I found on Wikipedia: “Ocean Waves, known in Japan as I Can Hear the Sea, is a 1993 Japanese anime … It was animated by Studio Ghibli for Tokuma Shoten and the Nippon Television Network … Ocean Waves was an attempt by Studio Ghibli to allow their younger staff members to make a film reasonably cheaply. However, it ended up going both over budget and over schedule. The film was released on DVD and Blu-ray by GKIDS on April 18, 2017, with only the Japanese audio with English subtitles… Production of Ocean Waves was controlled by Studio Ghibli, but much of the animation was produced with the assistance of J.C.Staff, Madhouse Studios, and Oh! Production, who had worked with Ghibli on past projects. This film is the first Ghibli anime directed by someone other than Hayao Miyazaki or Isao Takahata. Tomomi Mochizuki, who was 34 years old at the time, was brought in to direct. The film was an attempt to make anime solely by the young staff members, mostly in their 20s and 30s. Their motto was to produce "quickly, cheaply and with quality", but ultimately it went over budget and over schedule.”

Which of course says nothing about the quality of the movie. While it may be fine for what it is (a teen drama, for sure), it seems to lack any of the whimsy or visionary quality I see in other Ghibli films, even those set in similar surroundings and not in expressly ‘mythic’ venues. At some time or other I shall probably dutifully set myself down to watch the whole thing, so I can give a fairer assessment, but at the moment I feel no real compunction to lead me on.

The only other Ghibli movies I lack are “The Red Turtle” and “Earwig and the Witch”. Before and if I order them, I shall definitely look into them more, although even knowing something about a movie beforehand does not guarantee whether one will like it or not. But it couldn’t hurt.