In short: Goshu the Cellist (1982)

aka Gauche the Cellist

Japan in what I believe to be the early Showa Era. By day, young Goshu is taking care of his little country hut and garden, by night he walks into the city and becomes part of a small, Western-style orchestra. They mostly seem to be accompanying silent movies, but they are also rehearsing Beethoven’s 6th Symphony (also known as his Pastoral Symphony) for a performance coming up in just a few days. Goshu is the regular victim of their conductor’s hissy fits, who seems to follow the truly classic tradition of classical music that says the best art is produced when you squash people under your feet.

In the nights before the great performance, Goshu is in turn visited by different talking, somewhat anthropomorphic animals – a cat our protagonist treats very rudely indeed, a cuckoo who isn’t faring that much better, a tanuki that helps him figure out some of the nuances of rhythm and a mouse mother and her sick child who bring out Goshu’s compassionate side and explain the healing power of music.

Made over the course of six years and barely clocking in for more than an hour, future Ghibli co-founder – and long time creative partner of Miyazaki – Isao Takahata’s Goshu is a particularly lovely and artful piece of anime. I find the contrast between Miyazaki’s work and what Takahata does here particularly interesting. There’s a clear, shared sensibility when it comes the fantastical and a sense of wonder, but where Miyazaki’s work tends to have a strong plot to hang the wonder on, Takahata would here clearly be happy to have none at all, reaching a mixture of wonder and metaphor in different ways. Of course, this is a film that’s not just about music but one that’s striving to be like music itself, so narrative really isn’t the point here at all; even program music (like the 6th in the kind of interpretation the film is working from) is not really narrative music, after all.

There’s a floating quality not just to the visual depictions of music and music making here – at times via simple yet also simply beautiful visualisation, at times through a look at music as a physical process producing wondrous things in the mind – even the Showa streets scenes (wonderfully contrasting with the pastoral world Goshu so fittingly inhabits by day) have this quality. Takahata, and therefor his audience, has the ability to look at opposites with the same eye of wonder and joy.