Thursday 10/29/2020 at 4:00-5:30 p.m.
Music, Sound, and Nostalgia in My Neighbor Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies
Live Streamed on the Music at Pitt You Tube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzhaYWy3kDp19c8mskKBMlg?view_as=subscriber
In this presentation, Kunio Hara explores the essential role of sound and music in how we experience two classics of Japanese animation: Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro and Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies.
Although developed and released simultaneously as a double feature by Studio Ghibli in 1988, the worlds that the two films depict could not be more different. Similarly, Miyazaki and Takahata established differing working relationships with their musical collaborators. Miyazaki, on the one hand, turned to his trusted musical partner Joe Hisaishi early in the production. For the soundtrack of this project, Hisaishi suggested fashioning a collection of newly composed children’s songs as a starting point. On the other hand, Takahata took a more conventional path, using his keen directorial ear to interleave Michio Mamiya’s emotionally restrained underscoring with diegetic music that, at times, creates harrowing and devastating effects.
As a result, the two composers’ contributions to the films interact with their narratives in dissimilar ways, accentuating the gulf between the bucolic fantasy of Miyazaki’s Totoro and the stark realism of Takahata’s Fireflies. At the same time, the two soundtracks highlight the directors’ shared ideas about the ability of sound and music to conjure powerful memories in surprising and unexpected ways.
Kunio Hara (musicology, University of South Carolina) is scheduled to take place on October 30, 2020. Dr. Hara is the author of a recent book on animated film music (Joe Hisaishi's Soundtrack for My Neighbor Totoro (2020), part of the Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 Japan Series. Kunio Hara is an associate professor of music history at the University of South Carolina. His research interests include Puccini's operas, exoticism and Orientalism in music, nostalgia, and music in postwar Japan. Dr. Hara teaches courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels on music history with an emphasis on nineteenth- and twentieth-century music.
To learn more about this lecture, please check out our flyer here