Porco Rosso [DVD]

Description

Product Description Acclaimed Japanese animated feature from Studio Ghibli. Set in the 1930s, the film follows Porco Rosso (Shûichirô Moriyama), a talented fighter pilot who is turned into a pig by a magic spell. Adapting well to his porcine transformation, Porco sells himself out as a pilot for hire, until a big shot American flyer arrives, looking to make a name for himself by shooting down the Crimson Pig. With his feisty sidekick Fio (Akemi Okamura), Porco gets his battered plane back into shape for the big showdown. desertcart.co.uk Review Porco Rosso (The Crimson Pig, 1992) ranks as Hayao Miyazaki's oddest film: a bittersweet period adventure about a dashing pilot who has somehow been turned into a pig. Miyazaki once said, "Initially, it was supposed to be a 45-minute film for tired businessmen to watch on long airplane flights... Why kids love it is a mystery to me." The early 1930s setting enabled Miyazaki to focus on the old airplanes he loves, and the film boasts complex and extremely effective aerial stunts and dogfights. In the new English dub from Disney, Michael Keaton as Porco delivers lines like "All middle-aged men are pigs" with appropriate cynicism, but his voice may be too familiar for some Miyazaki fans. Susan Egan makes a curiously distant Gina, the thrice-widowed hotel owner bound to Porco by years of friendship; Kimberly Williams is more effective as the irrepressible young engineer Fio. Porco Rosso may be an odd film, but Miyazaki's directorial imagination never flags.-- Charles Solomon