A Tomihiko Morimi adaptation not by Masaaki Yuasa? Shocking. Well, not really, I mean, he’s only done, like, two, and those share a setting. Released a bit over a year after The Night is Short, Walk On Girl (2017), Penguin Highway in fact shares its screenwriter with both of Yuasa’s adaptations of the author’s work, as well as their ‘chief producer’. Not really anyone else though. It is in some ways another entry into the attempts to fill the vacuum left by whatever’s up with Studio Ghibli at the moment (hey, they had a film out last year; no one likes it apparently, but it did happen), though unlike the ones highlighted in the Lu Over the Wall article from a little while back, this one is not the work of some established industry veteran; instead it seems to be director Hiroyasu Ishida’s first feature film. Hell, it seems to be his first major commercial artistic work as director, having previously only cut his teeth on a handful of short films.

Aoyama-kun (voice of Kana Kita) is a precocious and egotistical little shit who lives in an isolated town. Aside from himself, his loves are a) learning via the scientific method, and b) a dental nurse with sizable cans who’s coaching him in chess and who’s willing to put him in his place (v/o Yu Aoi). Anyway, In this town, there’s a sudden outbreak of penguins, though it’s the Japanese countryside at the height of summer nowhere near the sea and therefore not conducive to penguins. These mystery penguins are marching through the joint from all directions, seemingly headed to some mysterious destination in the reportedly haunted woods. Aoyama and his nigh completely inept classmate, Uchida-kun (v/o Rie Kugimiya), venture forth into the woods to try and solve the mystery of these penguins, but are waylaid by local bullies, out for revenge on the former after a prank. The nurse sees the whole thing, but doesn’t help, because, eh, Aoyama is, as stated, a shit and has it coming, but to make up for it reveals where the penguins come from. The terrible truth is… that she makes them somehow. She doesn’t know why or the specifics as to how, but she can sometimes turn objects into penguins, which then waddle off into the woods for some reason that she’s also unaware of. While he promises to keep this under wraps, elsewhere daughter of a local university professor and generally much less useless classmate, Hamamoto-san (v/o Megumi Han), has discovered a strange floating orb seemingly made of water in a meadow on the far side of the woods and sets about her own scientific inquiry. Meanwhile, monstrous chimeras have started emanating from the shadows in the forest, and they hunger for penguin flesh.

So… despite invoking the obligatory Ghibli comparison earlier, this is very much not the sort of film Ghibli would make. That’s not like a bad thing or anything, but despite having the sort of aesthetic that many recent family friendly animated films coming from Japan have of late, the story itself, how it’s executed… it doesn’t feel in the same mould as that current branch of anime filmmaking. Obviously there’s been some recent nonsense on the interwebs about ‘Ghiblicore’, a nonsense short hand for the Ghibli house style (though really only Hayao Miyazaki’s; no one seems terribly interested in discussing Isao Takahata’s work, much less any of the other directors associated with the studio… except for Goro Miyazaki whose work people continue to confuse with his aforementioned father’s based purely on the surname attached (which, if I were cynical, I’d say is what the studio bosses want)), except not really because as many have pointed out it’s being used for “cosy fantasies that have no conflict” which is a colossal misrepresentation of the studio’s output on just about every level; ignoring the conflict question (actually let’s not: they all have conflict; sometimes it’s strictly internal such as in Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) and external conflict doesn’t always drive every scene, like how Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) and Spirited Away (2001) feature a lot of day to day life stuff, but it’s definitely there), it seems to reduce the whole thing down to aesthetic. As such, if you’re an idiot then I suppose Penguin Highway is plenty Ghibli-esque, but as an actual story it isn’t particularly. To be fair, this is perhaps true of most of the examples of filling-the-Ghibli-void films I gave in the aforementioned post on Lu, except for Mary and the Witch’s Flower (2017) which is by a bunch of former Ghibli staffers and is quite blatantly trying to capture their gestalt. The big recurring motifs in Miyazaki’s, and Ghibli’s in general really, work are a pro-environmental stance, an anti-war stance, and heroines who are at least as brave and capable and resourceful, etc., as any boy; the first and third there are especially prominent, but the anti-war stuff crops up a fair bit even in some where war isn’t a major factor. 

I’m digressing here, so back to Penguin Highway: perhaps indicative of this distinct difference in tone, you might have noticed a distinct lack of character names in that summary of the first act or so… or you might not have, I seem fairly inconsistent about whether I bother going into specifics in these, but anyway in a weirdly impersonal move for this sort of film we’re not supplied with actual names for any of the characters outside of one of the penguins that the children name. The kids get surnames, but they’re never referred to as anything beyond that, with their various relatives only being referred to by their relation to them (so Hamamoto’s father, for instance, is only ever ‘Hamamoto’s father’) and the dental nurse is only ever ‘the lady’. This is all perhaps a bit less weird in Japanese, where it’s fairly standard to call acquaintances and the like ‘[surname]-[honorific]’, with first name bases (much less honorific-less bases) suggesting a greater level of familiarity, or to refer to them by their title instead; ‘the lady’ is a pretty acceptable translation of what they call her in Japanese (‘oneesan’, which is literally like ‘older sister’, but in this instance would be something more like ‘miss’; it’s a pretty standard polite thing for children to call women older than themselves), but rather has this implication in English as if the children themselves don’t actually know her name which I don’t think is necessarily the intended reading of the situation. Regardless, it gives a sense of distance between the characters that no one is ever given a definitive name. It helps establish Aoyama’s aloofness, as well as perhaps a key element of the lady’s role in the story. That she is only ever ‘the lady’, never defined (in the most literal sense) by her relationship to anyone else, is indicative of her own bizarre status as a fantasy figure; a slightly mysterious and thoroughly unattainable woman with whom our burgeoningly pubescent central character is fixated on.

Oh, yes. Aoyama is very much the point-of-view character. The reference to the size of the lady’s breasts I made earlier wasn’t incidental. She’s victim of the male gaze quite literally, though it does have the decency to call out his ogling of her, as well as presenting that there’s more to her than just being the focus of his newfound sexuality.

I’m making this all sound dirtier than it is. The film, despite this angle, is pretty damn chaste; she remains covered at all times and it never directly brings up that he apparently views her sexually. Regardless, such considerations are not really the ones that Ghibli go in for. See, I tied that together.

Everything is presented in a low-key nostalgic tinged style, with this notion of the coming of age of a group of children on an adventure to discover something that the grownups seem to deem just a fact of life (indeed, they don’t seem all that concerned by much of what’s going on, at least until things start to get out of hand), but it manages to balance the stakes just enough for things adequately convey this seriousness of the situation from the children’s perspective and it presents them and their emotions and actions in a believable manner… for better or worse; again, Aoyama is introduced as a conceited little turd, though he does remain plausibly a child in his attitudes and behaviours rather than an adult writer’s conception of what a smart child is like (you know the kind); and this allows the film to land its various emotional beats. The result is an unusual mix of nostalgia, whimsy and philosophy that makes the final whole stand out amongst the competition.