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2008-11-01

Video - Iblard Jikan

(Update: This video has since been removed from Youtube.  Sorry.)

Iblard Jikan was a direct-to-DVD project released late last year in Japan on DVD and Blu-Ray. It is based upon the work of fantasy artist Naohisa Inoue, who also contributed his work for the fantasy dream sequences in Mimi wo Sumaseba (Whisper of the Heart).

I wrote a post last December on the Iblard DVD here, so feel free to catch up. Fortunately, this short film is available on YouTube, so I thought it would be fun to watch it. Since there's next to no chance of ever seeing it commercially available here in the US, we may as well take advantage of this opportunity.

This is a very interesting and entertaining Studio Ghibli work. It's always a thrill for me to see the studio's amazing talent unleashed on a minor project, free from the tyranny of Miyazaki or Takahata. There is often a certain freedom, a greater sense of visual experimentation, in these shorts. These are very often the proving grounds for ideas techniques used later in the proper Ghibli films.

Iblard Jikan contains very little animation, which may be a bit of a surprise. The Inoue's artwork is the star of the show. The animators are only adding flourishes to his world. In fact, there really isn't any narrative present at all; only a travelogue of locales in the Iblard realm. The more cynical will toss this aside as a glorified slideshow, and they may be on to something. But it's very difficult to resist the quality of Inoue's psychedelic paintings. Does the DVD come with mushrooms?

If anything, watching this short only makes me want to sit down and watch Mimi again, one of my favorite movies, animation or live. For most everybody else, Iblard Jikan is a minor work for the dedicated Ghibli Freaks only.

Iblard Jikan runs about 30 minutes, in three segments.

3 comments:

Cory Gross said...

I love this short... I think the main appeal to me, beyond the quality of the art itself, is the possibilities it illustrates for our own world. Sure there are no flying, three-tiered lakes, but it does show in snippits a world where ecology and technology are more satisfactorily integrated than our own. My fvaorite scene is probably the beautiful, retro streetcar rolling down a cobblestone street surrounded by foliage. I want to live in that world. And in that sense, I think it is safe to say that it may be free from Miyazaki's tyranny but not his ideology.

Daniel Thomas MacInnes said...

Well put.

Haddock said...

Really beautiful - I want to be there, at least in my dreams

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