Narrated by youngest daughter Nonoko (voiced by Naomi Uno), My Neighbours the Yamadas details the humorous misadventures of the Yamada family. Hardworking dad Takashi (Toru Masuoka) struggles to assert his authority in a boisterous household where mom Matsuko (Yukiji Asaoka) grows ever more absent-minded, elder son Noboru (Hayato Isobata) struggles vainly to pass his college entrance exams, and gutsy Grandma Shige (Masako Araki) who proves, like her granddaughter, to be the only one with any common sense.
Whereas Hayao Miyazaki remains a superb classical storyteller, his Studio Ghibli partner Isao Takahata is arguably the more experimental artist. Under his guiding hand My Neighbours the Yamadas proved a radical departure from anything Ghibli’s animators had ever done before: with characters drawn in a deliberately flat, simplistic, almost childlike scrawl across near blank backgrounds, in keeping with the art style favoured by Hisaichi Ishii, creator of the original newspaper comic strip and the similarly styled anime Go For It, Tabuchi: Violent Pennant Contest (1980) and Fabled Underground People (1989). The Ghibli film was actually a revival of a popular 1980 television series first aired on Fuji TV, but differed somewhat from its source. Originally the Yamadas centred on retired couple Yoshio and Ine, who lived with their daughter Yoneko, her husband Komugi and their four children (in later episodes the pair added another baby to their lively brood).
Takahata wisely pares down the Yamada clan but retains the manga’s deft way with combining social satire and heart-warming pathos. Not really a narrative, more a series of comic vignettes offset by surreal flights of fancy and sagely haikus penned by Japanese poets, the film manages to be both a sly send-up the traditional image of stoic, docile Japanese households, and a paean to family values. Through humorous episodes (the Yamadas panic when they accidentally abandon Nonoko at the shopping mall; Matsuko’s overuse of ginger in the family’s miso soup causes an outbreak of short term memory loss; Takashi’s nervous encounter with a rowdy biker gang whom Shige eventually puts in their place) and more poignant scenes (Shige visits a lively-seeming old friend in hospital who slowly admits she is dying; a humiliated Takashi daydreams he is the vintage superhero Moonlight Mask (filmed as live-action features in 1958 and 1981)) we see how, whether young or old, the Yamadas are all fallible. They bicker, make silly mistakes and goof around, but rally around each other where it counts. It is an honest portrayal of Japanese family life on the cusp of the twenty-first century where traditional deference may be eroding, but love endures. “Acceptance is the key to surviving”, says Takashi in his nerve-wracking wedding speech, which concludes the zany domestic satire on a steadfastly traditional note.
Both the stream-of-consciousness story-structure and the unorthodox artwork alienated some of Ghibli’s western fans and the film was not a huge success in Japan either, where the Ghibli faithful opted to wait for the DVD rather than flock to theatres. Nevertheless, it is a lively, amusing, inventive and intelligent work, best seen in the original subtitled Japanese although the dub offers a rare chance to hear James Belushi in a Ghibli movie. And the seemingly simplistic visuals are often outstandingly intricate, notably Nonoko’s lengthy fantasy about how her parents married and started their family (which somehow encompasses a journey across the ocean waves, inside a high-tech submarine and aboard a pirate ship, a bobsled ride around their wedding cake and an encounter with a giant pink sea snail!) and the finale wherein the Yamadas fly on multicoloured umbrellas singing that karaoke standard “Que Sera Sera.”
