The management of the project in general didn’t fare much better what was intended as a cheaper, quick TV project ended up costing well beyond expectations, and for all their intent to give Ghibli’s own youth the main role, they had to rely on other studios to save the production from doom. The movie is admittedly clumsy, starting from the patchwork narrative framing device that struggled to cover both past and present even after a sizable length increase. This isn’t to say Mochizuki’s work was without fault, of course. In the end I would argue that Ghibli’s brand asphyxiated even Takahata, whose works were heavily penalized in the box office by his desire to stray away from their established identity, so I wouldn’t blame anyone for failing to sit on a throne that had become Hayao Miyazaki’s alone. Neither raw talent nor sharing artistic (or even literal!) bloodlines could achieve something that was essentially impossible by design – offering something new while at the same time following up the exact steps of the biggest figures in anime. Much like other renowned directors like Mamoru Hosoda and Hiromasa Yonebayashi, Tomomi Mochizuki failed to become the successor to the titans who founded the studio. Don’t get me wrong: that was a factor as well, and as you likely know, they didn’t succeed at all. This is worth pointing out because the project’s intent to give young staff an opportunity is often conflated with Ghibli’s unsuccessful attempt to find new directors to handle their works, an attitude that’s reductive at the best of times. Those youngsters were trained in Takahata’s Only Yesterday and Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso, but they needed a platform to stand on their own – and the stars aligned for that idea to become Ocean Waves, which not by coincidence was the very first project animated at their now iconic, idyllic studio. They stayed true to their beliefs and took the risky bet of entirely restructuring the way the studio operated, switching to a salary system and making an effort to raise talent of their own. As documented in The Birth of Studio Ghibli, after wrapping up the production of Kiki’s Delivery Service the studio was forced to tackle a conflict we summed up in our Takahata retrospective the reliance on freelancers and poor remuneration considering the immense effort that went into their films compromised Miyazaki and Takahata’s ideals, since they once famously fought for worker rights. To understand where Ocean Waves came from, we’ve got to look back a bit further than that. This month marked 25 years since its original broadcast, which gives us a nice opportunity to check what this equal parts interesting and messy little project was like. At the same time, claims that it was thoroughly mediocre undersell it, and the common interpretation that it was a failure because it didn’t succeed in raising a new generation of Ghibli creators as intended is pretty ahistorical and ignorant of the context. Considering how much attention almost all works by the studio receive, the existence of some fairly obscure exceptions gives those a special mystique that might lead you to believe they’re forgotten masterpieces… which as far as I’m concerned this one really is not, as fond of it as I am. Ocean Waves really is a curious case – starting by the fact that you might instead know it by the more literal translation of its Japanese title I Can Hear the Sea, as Ghibli neglected the movie and didn’t grant it their usual official localized name for a long time. Let’s look back at a fascinating little chapter in their story, since both its achievements and shortcomings are rarely discussed with the full context in mind. Back in May of 1993, Japanese audiences got to experience a curious experiment: studio Ghibli’s first and essentially last large-scale TV project, a film meant to put their younger staff under the spotlight for a change.
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