Itsumo Nando Demo (いつも何度でも) Sprited Away| Version |  |  |  |  |
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| All | x2 (76) | x1 (92) | x2 (202) | x1 (229) |
Taiko 0 R, Taiko 3DS 3, Taiko Switch
134
Anime -> Anime/Kids
sentocWe're back to the copyright-shelved song series showcases about Anime works, baby! While, again, we can't just revive the whole page with the Studio Ghibli songs in Taiko, seeing as nothing bad has occurred by talking about similar cases under the SotW mantle we can just continue talking about them here instead, continuing with today's track of quite the illustrious animation project. Given the title and some minor elements in common with Touhou games, I can even pass this piece as a hidden theme tie-in!
Known in Japan as Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (千と千尋の神隠し, lit. 'Sen and Chihiro's Sprited Away') and distributed by Toho, Sprited Away is the 12th animation movie from Studio Ghibli, premiering in Japan on July 20th in 2001 and is one of the company's films with Hayao Miyazaki (宮崎駿) as its director and producer. Moving out to a new neighborhood with her parents, the young Chihiro (千尋) and her parents happen to take a wrong turn and reach a branch of the spirit world, inhabitated with the Kami spirits from the Shinto folklore. There, the three stop by a seemingly-abandoned amusement park with a food stocked restaurant and a bathouse, a place where Chihiro's parents get turned into pigs and is undercut from the outside world by the riverside's flooding. Through a number of encounters, Chihiro gets accustomed with the people working at the bathouse and -at the price of a kanji in her name- manages to get employed by the witch Yubaba, as a way to search for any lead to turn back her parents into humans and leave the world of spirits.
The renowned Miyazaki's spark of inspiration behind the movie's making was the will to make a movie for his family friends' daughters that spent their summer vacations together in a mountain cabin with his family, resulting at first in two rejected movie drafts and eventually a successful third one, based around one of the bathouses avilable in Miyazaki's own hometown and starring a young female protagonist whose looks and behaviour were based on the then-10-aged daughter of Seiji Okuda, Sprited Away's associate producer. Soon after the movie's release, Miyazaki's long-time friend and Pixar animator John Lasseter was estatic to the friend's movie to the point of managing to bridge both him and Disney into Sprited Away's distribution in North America for the year 2002, with the same Lasseter serving as executive producer and with the aid of many other talents from Disney, including Beauty and the Beast co-director Kirk Wise and Aladdin co-producer Donald W.Ernst as the English release's director and producers respectively. Even to this day, Sprited Away is one of the all-time grossing juggernauts among animated movie, being the highest-grossing theatrical release in Japan to this day with 30.80 billion Yen and managing to even surpass James Cameron's Titanic. Despite the initial low marketing push for the movie overseas, it's also the second highest-grossing Anime movie worldwide with 355M $ at the box office, only second (and by 3 mere millions at that!) to 2016's Your Name. A winner of Berlin's Golden Bear in 2002, Sprited Away is also the only non-English animated movie to date that managed to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature for the ceremony's 75th edition in the same year.
Alongside Hayao Miyazaki's treasured summer memories, the creation grounds behind Itsumo Nando Demo (lit. 'Always with Me/No Matter How Many Times') was also an integral part to what gave to the animator's Sprited Away project its own cornerstones. The song was composed and performed by Youmi Kimura (木村弓), a singer and lyre performer from Japan's Osaka prefecture who has been a close fan of Miyazaki's animated movies, to the point of her personally shipping him a copy of her album after being truly moved by one of his earlier works, 1997's Princess Mononoke. In the reply through missive, Miyazaki thanked the performer and revealed to her that he was working on a new movie project by the title of Rin the Chimney Cleaner (煙突描きのリン), one of the two that would eventually get scrapped before Sprited Away's creation; in the hopes of aiding Miyazaki's project with one of her songs, Youmi Kimura made Itsumo Nando Demo with the help of her friend Wakako Kaku (覚和歌子) for its lyrics. Despite the Rin movie idea being scrapped, Miyazaki really liked Youmi's song and frequently listening to it during the movie production made him realize how the inner-peace theme of the track went hand-to-hand with his movie's protagonist Chihiro/Sen and her 'coming of age' story based on finding her inner strength, molding the moral of the movie itself and in turn, making it possible to finally feature Itsumo Nando Demo as the ending theme of the very same movie. It was also quite the hit for critics as well, seeing how it managed to reach the Gold status at the 43rd Japan Record Awards!
This has been the current Taiko rating generation's very first native 1-star Oni song, one that is also very different from many others in the lower difficulty ranks of the ongoing times with its Kat-predominant chart that is fully dictated by the 3/4 beat metric and features no big notes at all. Bearing only 27 notes more from its own Muzukashii note chart, following the lyrics and minding one's energy for the drumroll markers is a task that almost anyone can strive to as the first stepping stone to understand what it takes to join the Taiko big leagues between energy and tempo-handling skills for the days to come.
