Hacker Cinema
Mary and The Witch's Flower
メアリと魔女の花
2017 · Film · 103 min
Directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi
AnimationAdventureFamilyFantasy
Mary Smith, a young girl who lives with her great-aunt in the countryside, follows a mysterious cat into the nearby forest where she finds a strange flower and an old broom, none of which is as ordinary as it seems.
1 negative2 neutralfrom 3 commenters
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3 comments on Hacker News
>This, however, is not the first time ghibli has had competition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_and_the_Witch's_Flower in fact they have a whole studio dedicated to copying ghibli: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_Ponoc
It is not "competition" and "copying", it is the fact that Ghibli almost closed for good several times, so some employees created their own studio.
>On August 3, 2014, Toshio Suzuki announced that Studio Ghibli would take a "brief pause" to re-evaluate and restructure in the wake of Miyazaki's retirement. He stated some concerns about where the company would go in the future. This led to speculation that Studio Ghibli will never produce another feature film again. On November 7, 2014, Miyazaki stated, "That was not my intention, though. All I did was announce that I would be retiring and not making any more features."[40] Lead producer Yoshiaki Nishimura among several other staffers from Ghibli, such as director Hiromasa Yonebayashi, left to found Studio Ponoc in April 2015, working on the film Mary and the Witch's Flower.
Ghibli art is famous because ghibli art means ghibli movies. It is more beautiful in motion than still, the beauty is in part due to the emotion evoked by the story.
There were a million Doom clones, none of which were as good as Doom. The same will be true of AI art copycats.
This, however, is not the first time ghibli has had competition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_and_the_Witch's_Flower in fact they have a whole studio dedicated to copying ghibli: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_Ponoc
Yes they used to work at ghibli, but so too did john romero work at id, and yet daikatana was not a quake-killer.
This doesn't devalue ghibli at all, I think
(In fact, I think AI will always have the fundamental problem that most people have no taste or sense or introspection, they don't know why good things are good, and can't see that crap things are crap, so they are predestined to only be able to produce garbage. Nod to Ted Sturgeon.)
Mary and the Witch's Flower was an utter disappointment for me. They clearly were giving nods to Spirited away and trying to capture its magic, but somehow it all felt very shallow. And those scenes when some action things happen under exactly the same musical motif... the third time it happened, it felt super lazy. Like, mr movie director, did you run out of music samples?