As the year winds down and Hollywood’s focus shifts to the triumphs and defeats of the awards circuit, the most surprising upset of the season has instead taken place at the box office.
This past weekend, Hayao Miyazaki’s probably-final-but-we-never-really-know-do-we film The Boy and the Heron flew away with the No 1 spot, besting the IP vehicles Trolls Band Together and The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes as both slowed in their fourth week of release. However, the latest marvel from Studio Ghibli may have benefited from a sparseness of competition, the $12.8m take in stateside cinemas attests to the enduring popularity of a name synonymous with the highest standard of brilliance in anime.
In a matter of days, the US gross will exceed the Ghibli record of $15.1m set by Ponyo, while the international totals will climb to nine figures. The enthusiastic reception and valedictory air for a living master have some prognosticators floating the idea of an Oscar breakout from the marginalized animated feature category to best picture’s big dance. A body of work that first arrived as an overseas novelty a generation ago now lands with the seismic impact of a bona fide Event.
Speaking of leaving a dent: the intrepid adventurers and cannibalistic parakeets of Miyazaki’s farewell address came closely tailed by Godzilla, as the Toho-produced sleeper sensation Godzilla Minus One racked up another $8.3m in the weekend’s third spot to hit a worldwide sum of nearly $52m. This unusual confluence of Japanese-language moneymakers caps off a year marked by a greater than average number of internationally fluent entrants into the American mainstream, a cultural channel finally starting to reflect the diversity of its makeup.
The partially Korea-set Past Lives and European co-pro Anatomy of a Fall weave the language barrier into their drama, creating linguistic distance between characters struggling to make themselves understood to one another. The latter’s star, Sandra Hüller, speaks in her native German as a Nazi commandant’s wife in the critics’ list-topper The Zone of Interest. And Monday’s announcement of the Golden Globe nominations brought welcome news for the Finnish actor Alma Pöysti, who wrangled a spot in the best actress in a motion picture, comedy or musical race for the acclaimed seriocomedy Fallen Leaves (all four films amassed 14 nominations in total).
Between Germany’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Japan’s Drive My Car, the bilingual Korean American immigrant narrative Minari, the homegrown South Korean smash Parasite and Mexico’s Roma, the best picture slate has heard out non-English voices for the past five years. It was during the telecast of Parasite’s standard-toppling gold rush that its director Bong Joon-ho advised viewers: “Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” He addressed a real and longstanding aversion to foreign art among English-speaking audiences, either due to a perceived “you-must-be-this-highbrow-to-ride” intellectual requirement or a simple reluctance to spend a movie reading. But he also issued his urgent statement just as that mistaken notion had begun to dissipate, and the American viewing public started to acclimate to the idea of looking at sentences on a screen.
Whether in the form of subtitles or closed captioning, words have crept on to televisions in increasing numbers, a rising tide that’s also lifting global art film’s boat. With Korea-mania in full swing in the States, everything from Squid Game to soap operas has been normalized as part of the average content diet, and that’s just one part of an overall commitment to worldwide production at Netflix. With studio hubs springing up in major cites around the planet, they’ve got a vested interest in breaking down language divides. (And this all feels downstream from the widespread embrace of anime in younger generations, who have long since divorced the likes of Dragon Ball Z and Neon Genesis Evangelion from their nerds-only origins.) Irrespective of the tongue being spoken, growing swaths of viewers watch everything with captions as a matter of course, ensuring they catch every syllable of writing while compensating for uneven sound mixing that sometimes buries dialogue tracks under sound effects or background scoring. A tendency developed at home now reverberates outward into the neighborhood multiplex, where the big-budget spectacle still reigns supreme, albeit with a wider diversity of national themes and aesthetics.
This was always supposed to be the promise of a globalist economy, that everyone would have access to the best of everything; it just took a while for tastes to catch up with the internet’s explosion of availability. American moviegoers should expect more box-office anomalies along the lines of this windfall for Ghibli and Godzilla, or last year’s blockbusting case of RRR fever, to the point that they’re no longer studied as abnormal at all. And a more well-rounded generation of consumers will be better off for it, palettes expanding along with their vantage on unfamiliar cultures. In his mass-destructive way, Godzilla acts as goodwill ambassador, bringing with him a message of peace: once the lights go down and the music comes up, everyone speaks the universal lingua franca of toppling skyscrapers, scrambling civilians and laser-breathing monsters.
