Miyazaki and 'Mr. Bug'
Plus: news.
Welcome! We’re back with more from the Animation Obsessive newsletter. This is the agenda:
1) A Fleischer film in Japan.
2) Animation newsbits.
Now, let’s go!
1 – Vitality beyond words
In the ‘70s, Hayao Miyazaki got frustrated.
It was long before Spirited Away — before he was a household name. Back then, he was grinding on animated TV shows like Heidi: Girl of the Alps (1974), directed by his friend Isao Takahata. Miyazaki was an idea guy by nature, but he’d ended up as a staff artist executing someone else’s vision. And that vision was clashing more and more with his own interests.
Under Takahata, the projects became naturalistic, un-idealized. They weren’t cartoons anymore, Miyazaki said. He was desperate to get back to cartoons.1
The exact term Miyazaki used was manga eiga (“cartoon movies”). It was old-fashioned, as he knew. Hip people in the ‘70s preferred the loan word animation, or its abbreviation anime. He was calling back to his youth in the ‘40s and ‘50s, when films like Fleischer’s Gulliver’s Travels appeared.
“In Japan, around this time we still called such films manga eiga … not animation,” he noted.2
Miyazaki dreamed of reviving that era’s big emotions, cartoony motion, damsels in distress, lovable heroes and dastardly villains. People saw this stuff as naive, and he was no exception: it was a “fake world” built on “lies,” he said. But that fake world evoked the viewer’s “hopes and yearnings,” and called people to be better than they were in reality. For Miyazaki, the dated term manga eiga symbolized this lost style.3
So, he broke away from Takahata and directed the TV series Future Boy Conan (1978). His debut feature, The Castle of Cagliostro, followed in 1979. Both were attempts to create “cartoon movies.”
One movie was particularly on his mind. In ‘79, after Conan ended and before Cagliostro started, the press asked Miyazaki a question:
— What is Miyazaki-san’s favorite cartoon movie (manga eiga)?
Miyazaki: For someone like me who aims to create cartoon movies, the one that I think does it best is Fleischer’s Mr. Bug Goes to Town.
When people think of Fleischer, Mr. Bug Goes to Town isn’t usually what comes to mind. The studio is more famous for Popeye and Betty Boop — and for Gulliver’s Travels, its first feature. Mr. Bug was its second, and a crushing flop. Paramount poured over $713,000 into it, or some $16.4 million today. Returns were around $240,000.4
The film’s about a tiny society of insects — think A Bug’s Life. Hoppity, a grasshopper, is the aw-shucks hero; a bee named Honey is his love interest. Filling the villain role is a rich, older beetle who schemes to marry Honey himself.
Critics saw Mr. Bug as good enough, especially for kids.5 Still, although one of its characters is a Grumpy lift, this is no Snow White. Its story is thin and scattered. Many of the jokes don’t land, either, and a few were lowbrow even for the time.
But the film has fans for a reason. There are intriguing things about Mr. Bug. Unlike Disney’s features, its setting was modern, and its world is unusually concrete. It often feels like the characters really navigate these complex spaces, through cracks and between flower stems. And one writer detected a “flat and literal” quality to the characters’ movements, which gives them a sense of physical reality.6
It’s a rejection of the old Fleischer style, the freeform riffing of Swing You Sinners. In January 1979, when Miyazaki called Mr. Bug his favorite cartoon movie, he explained its appeal like this:
… the idea and the story’s composition are really closely intertwined, and also closely involved in creating a single world. For example, when the bugs scale the building, they crawl through the gaps between the bricks being laid one after another, and it does an excellent job of establishing this as the final journey that leads to the story’s end. Even with a single gag, it’s not something made up on the spot just so people will laugh, but instead something that would [naturally] occur if the character moved that way. It wasn’t a gag when they created it; while there may have been a desire along the way to make people laugh, it wasn’t just a tossed-off joke. I think that’s how a well-made film has to be. Some people will watch it seriously without laughing, while others will laugh. That’s why Mr. Bug is truly well made.
These theories were on Miyazaki’s mind. In the same interview, he argued that a cartoon movie needs a “thoroughly believable fake world” that functions realistically, by its own internal logic. That’s largely true of Mr. Bug.
In The Castle of Cagliostro, you find a lot of this Fleischer film. Miyazaki’s new version of Lupin resembles Hoppity in the legs — he jumps like him, too. A wealthy bad guy tries to marry the young Clarisse, then gets his wedding crashed.
And the characters scramble through the gaps and over the ledges of the villain’s castle in a very real way. The shots emphasize the space, and Lupin and company navigate that space literally. Around the time Cagliostro began, Miyazaki wrote of Mr. Bug’s “superior spatial composition.” You feel the same in his film.7
Miyazaki wasn’t alone in his fascination with Mr. Bug. The movie got a second life in Japan. It was praised by Miyazaki’s colleagues — Isao Takahata, Yoichi Kotabe, Norio Hikone — and even by the puppet master Kihachiro Kawamoto. Once, a majority-Japanese group of animation people named it the 13th-best animated film.8
It’s never had that kind of acclaim at home. When Miyazaki went to America and told animation pros that he enjoyed this one, they trashed it.9 The reversal was interesting. After all: Mr. Bug failed, in part, due to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.
Mr. Bug was an unlucky project. The thing started because of the success of Gulliver’s Travels — an international hit. Paramount wanted another from Fleischer. But, because Gulliver had gone over-budget, the studio was significantly in debt to its distributor. That was only the beginning of the trouble.10
The world of Fleischer Studios wasn’t as lighthearted as its films. Company head Max Fleischer and younger brother Dave, who directed Mr. Bug, weren’t on speaking terms at the time. Max was stuffy and sometimes cruel, and he was famous for his line, “That’s so good you’d think I did it.”11 Dave, meanwhile, was a ‘40s scoundrel. He was having an open affair with his secretary, which enraged Max — and he’d turned into a serious gambler. Per Max’s son Richard:
… Dave’s office became a betting parlor, with a bookie, a direct wire to the track and a ticker. The gang that frequented Dave’s office would take the bookie out to dinner on Saturday nights. That really annoyed Max.
Miami Beach [where Fleischer Studios operated] was a wide-open town. Some pretty lavish illegal gaming casinos had sprung up, and Dave was a frequent customer.
Max’s review of Mr. Bug’s script problems got a curt response from Dave, who pretty much ignored his brother’s suggestions. Other crewmembers did their best: sequence directors were important to the film, and there’s strong animation in many scenes. Al Eugster, a Snow White artist, did lots of wonderful drawing for the dance between the villain’s two henchmen, for example.12
But the project was still cursed. In the middle of production, Paramount gave Max what can only be called a shakedown. It was the gangsterism of old Hollywood: under pressure, the Fleischers signed away everything. There are wild stories from the period — threats, broken laws, coverups.
Then, after months of advertising, Paramount abandoned its Christmas release of Mr. Bug in December 1941. Pearl Harbor was a key reason. The film was ultimately “dropped into an indifferent market in early 1942,” wrote historian Michael Barrier. Fleischer Studios closed later that year.
Yet it wasn’t the end of Mr. Bug. After the war, it reached theaters in occupied Japan during ‘51.13 It was airing on Japanese television by the ‘60s — which was how Miyazaki saw it, as a young artist at Toei Doga.
The animation was what grabbed him first. “I thought it had tremendous energy, and I started paying a bit of attention to Fleischer,” Miyazaki recalled. He once described Fleischer animation, in Mr. Bug and elsewhere, as a “mess” that’s “soft and flabby and has an indescribable vitality.” The film and studio would become major for him.14
Given its circumstances, Mr. Bug was destined to be flawed. Even Miyazaki came to understand its problems with time.
The film seemed to grow in his mind over the years, up to January 1979, when he called it his favorite example of the cartoon-movie style. But that May, at a screening in Tokyo’s Ogikubo area, he had the chance to rewatch it. And something was off.15
“I returned home feeling very satisfied,” he wrote, “but the more I thought about it later, the more I was overcome with disappointment and frustration.”
He still had good things to say about the film — its ideas, its use of space. But he found himself “consciously look[ing] away in disgust” at its ending. Even the climb up the skyscraper, which he’d praised before, now seemed absurd and unrealistic to him.
“My new conclusion is therefore as follows: Mr. Bug Goes to Town is both wonderful and incredibly stupid,” he wrote.
That screening took place just as Miyazaki was starting The Castle of Cagliostro — the disappointment of Mr. Bug was fresh in his mind. He wanted to make something that could live up to his perception of cartoon movies. As he wrote:
Both those who make cartoon [movies] and those who love them tend to have a certain immaturity to them, and they tend to go easy on each other. But I’d like to see effort put into filmmaking sufficient to withstand the bare-knuckled criticism that I’m providing here.
Miyazaki did it with Cagliostro, released just a few months after he penned those words. The film is naive — it’s supposed to be — but it holds up to critical viewing. He and his team made a goofy, earnest, thrilling film with rock-solid fundamentals. It fulfills the promise he felt in Mr. Bug. For proof, just look at Cagliostro’s huge impact, including on Pixar.16
Miyazaki has always been an artist in flux. His change of opinion about Mr. Bug is just one example.
In the ‘80s, he abandoned the willful naivety of Cagliostro and Conan. The same artist who’d claimed that cartoon movies “aren’t meant to expound on complex themes or theories,” and aren’t even meant to be art, made something as weighty, pointed and violent as Nausicaä.
“I am always betraying the path I took in my previous film,” he admitted later. “After the action-adventure film ... The Castle of Cagliostro, I made Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, in which people die.”17
Some have called Nausicaä a cartoon movie, but that’s hard to square with its content. It’s not like the cartoons of Miyazaki’s childhood.18 We’re given no lovable hero, no straightforward villain. And Nausicaä is the opposite of Mr. Bug’s Honey character.
He was doing something new. His influences, though, never fully left him. Miyazaki didn’t throw away The Snow Queen or The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep — or Fleischer’s second feature. In the late 2000s, when Ghibli re-released Mr. Bug in Japan, Miyazaki endorsed it. Anyone trying to animate, he said, should watch this film.
Even he was still getting inspired. In the power of Mr. Bug’s exuberant, endless movement, Miyazaki felt something he’d been missing in Japanese animation. Artists weren’t able to cut loose, to draw scenes that moved and moved and moved. He missed the energy of Fleischer’s work. “[W]hen the chance arises,” he said in 2009, “I think we’ll have no choice but to create our own Mr. Bug.”
Consciously or not, Miyazaki and his team put that exuberance into The Boy and the Heron (2023). It moves and moves and moves with an “indescribable vitality.” He’d taken from Mr. Bug in his first movie. You still see it in his last.
The Boy and the Heron isn’t manga eiga — it’s a surreal art film, and the most difficult, cerebral thing Miyazaki’s made. But there are elements in it of another time in animation. It’s channeling something old, a feeling that Miyazaki got long before Spirited Away.
2 – Newsbits
In Mexico, I Am Frankelda reportedly debuted in sixth place at the box office on Thursday, with a strong rise to fourth on Saturday. Analyst Edgar Apanco forecasts an opening weekend above 12 million pesos (more than $650,000).
The yearslong mess of Warner Bros. Discovery continues in America. It’s now up for sale, and the government is trying to steer the company into the hands of its powerful allies at Paramount Skydance.
The Sourcebook of Sherlock Hound, a large collection of materials from the series, was released in Japan.
Voice actors in Chile went back on strike over late payments by the dubbing studio DINT.
A series called Pino & Shinoby is being co-produced in Japan and Italy. On the latter side is Studio Bozzetto, founded by the very well known Bruno Bozzetto. The project is getting featured at Japan’s TIFFCOM in a few days.
In Ukraine, a project worked with military veterans to produce animated shorts, as part of an art-therapy and reintegration effort.
The famous One Piece flag became a protest symbol in Indonesia earlier this year. Anime News Network reports new sightings in America and Madagascar.
Journalist Tadashi Sudo highlighted data from France: The Most Precious of Cargoes was a success in theaters last year, and 60% of its attendees were 50 or older.
Russia’s government blocked access in the country to MyAnimeList.
Last of all: we wrote about the cutout animation of Gianini and Luzzati — beloved by filmmakers from Yuri Norstein to Federico Fellini.
Until next time!
Miyazaki explained this in his January 1979 interview for Future Boy Conan: Film 1/24 Special Issue. It was one of our main sources today.
Quotes from “Speaking of Conan,” also in Starting Point 1979–1996. Yasuo Otsuka pointed out the willful naivety of Miyazaki’s manga eiga in Animage (August 1981).
Figures from Michael Barrier’s Hollywood Cartoons, an important source.
Reviews for Mr. Bug appear in The Art and Inventions of Max Fleischer and Animato! (Spring 1997), both useful today.
In Hollywood Cartoons, Barrier used the “flat and literal” language as an attack on Mr. Bug. The movement forces us to treat the characters as literal, physical entities, which he hated: for him, it raised “impertinent questions.” He asked, “As the insects climb a building under construction, over what must be many months, what do they eat?” To Barrier, that was the end of the discussion. To Miyazaki, it was clearly the beginning.
A quote from “Thoughts on Fleischer” in Starting Point 1979–1996. We used this one a lot.
The named artists’ praise for Mr. Bug appears on Ghibli’s official site for the film. It was selected as number 13 in Best 150 World and Japanese Animation Films (Hikone named it one of his favorite films in his section of the book).
Miyazaki related this story in a 2009 interview about Mr. Bug, included in the booklet for the film’s Ghibli Museum DVD release. A key source.
The success of Gulliver is explained in Richard Fleischer’s book Out of the Inkwell, used a lot today.
Max Fleischer’s cruelty, and this quote, are discussed in The Fleischer Story.
The Japanese premiere date for Mr. Bug appears in 王と鳥―スタジオジブリの原点 (The King and the Mockingbird: The Origin of Studio Ghibli).
The location of the Mr. Bug screening was mentioned in Film 1/24 (November 1, 1980), where “Thoughts on Fleischer” was originally printed.
Cagliostro’s impact on Pixar is discussed in the Ghibli ga Ippai LaserDisc box set booklet and the foreword to Starting Point.
From “I Want to Fill the Space Between Myself and the Audience,” collected in Turning Point 1997–2008.
As noted by Carl Gustav Horn in his essay for the American release of Seraphim: 266613336 Wings, there’s a revealing moment about Nausicaä, and the cultural shift away from manga eiga, in the animated mockumentary Otaku no Video (1991).
The film includes a fictionalized scene from the premiere of Nausicaä, as fans sit in line. An older guy asks what they’re doing:
Character 1: We’re in line for a movie, an anime film.
Character 2: What?! You’re in line to see a cartoon?! Why don’cha wait till it’s less crowded? …
Character 3: It’s not a cartoon! It’s anime!
I always love these types of pieces. It's so fun to watch the back and forth impact of countries' art on each other. Influence bounces back and forth across cultures and time… It’s beautiful! I would have never suspected Miyazaki was so endeared to Mr. Bug but now it seems so obvious! I need to do a double feature of it and Cagliostro ASAP!
Great story of evolution of an artist. Always open to change and yet able to see and work toward flashes of brilliance and recognizing it in others.