osprey_archer | Entries tagged with animation: studio ghibli

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

D. K. Broster’s Couching at the Door, a suitably chilling short story collection for Halloween. Again, the creepiest story in the last section was the one with no magic. Cousins Ellen and Caroline are visiting Italy, only Caroline is spoiling the trip by reading the Baedeker loudly at every sight. Ellen, miserable, bitter, trampled-upon in this as everything else, wishes that she could have just one day without Caroline… and realizes that she can. All she has to do is kill Caroline!

“That seems excessive,” I gasped, even as Ellen strangled Caroline with a silk scarf. Thereafter Ellen jaunted off to Florence, had a lovely day despite concerns that Caroline might appear at any moment, and more or less instantly lost all her money. It’s unclear if Ellen is wholly incompetent because Caroline has tyrannized over her for so long, or if Caroline has dominated Ellen because she truly can’t look after herself on account of being just a touch insane, as witness her conviction that the dead Caroline will reappear and take over her life again.

I also read Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Trespassers, in which a brother and sister sneak into a neglected mansion, and find a wonderful old nursery full of delightful toys, and possibly also a ghost. Wonderful atmosphere, reminiscent of The Velvet Room. Goes off a bit into Problem Novel territory once the owners of the house show up. I enjoyed Grub’s doom and gloom attacks, as I was also a child prone to doom and gloom attacks.

Also Gerald Durrell’s The Overloaded Ark. This was Durrell’s first book, and he hit the ground not quite running, but certainly skipping along at a good clip. It’s not quite as funny as his later books (I only laughed aloud once) and the metaphors are not quite as astoundingly apt (though I did love the comparison of a bat’s nose to a Tudor rose), but still a very Durrell read.

And a surprise read! As I was checking the graphic novel shelves for Pedro Martin’s Newbery Honor Mexikid, I stumbled upon a hitherto unsuspected Hayao Miyazaki graphic novel, Shuna’s Journey, translated by Alex Dudok de Wit. Miyazaki wrote and illustrated this book in the early eighties, and it prefigures much of his later work: the hero and heroine who trade off saving each other, the fascination with strange machines and stranger creatures, the wide vistas of grass blowing in the wind.

What I’m Reading Now

Creeping along in Shirley. Caroline Helstone is madly in love with her distant cousins Robert Moore, who loves her too but has (I’m pretty sure) decided that a man in his position must marry an heiress, and therefore has crushed Caroline’s heart on the rocks.

What I Plan to Read Next

Mexikid is still checked out, so my next Newbery Honor book will be Daniel Nayeri’s The Many Assassinations of Samir, Seller of Dreams. I flipped through and it has charming illustrations.

Another round of recent movies! Quite like this format; I often don’t have a whole post in me about movies, but if you’re writing about three or four you don’t need more than a paragraph or two a piece.

My yearly rewatch of The Muppet Christmas Carol, a delight as always. I’ve seen this so many times that I can sing many of the songs, including “The Love Is Gone,” which was cut from the theatrical release then restored in the home video, a choice that baffles me since the last song in the film is a callback to this earlier moment… ah well!

This time I saw The Muppet Christmas Carol on the big screen at the Artcraft, and the increased size drew my attention to how much work the filmmakers put into the backgrounds. Not only are the sets beautifully made and detailed, they’re filled with extras (human and puppet both), so Muppet Victorian London feels so bustling and delightful and lived in. (Also, wouldn’t this be the best movie to be an extra in? Truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience.)

I’ve mostly stopped watching MCU movies, but The Marvels had a female director (Nia DaCosta) and an all-female lead trio, so I gave it a go. Kamala Khan is a delight, but like so many recent Marvel movies, this one didn’t give the emotional beats any time to breathe.

Also, let me be real with you, the Marvel movie I now REALLY want to see is the space opera rom-com of Captain Marvel and her husband-of-convenience, the Prince of the water planet where everyone sings and dances all the time. How did they meet! What political circumstances made a marriage of convenience necessary! Do they fall in love! The answer is “obviously yes, probably while facing silly peril, with many extras singing and dancing in the background.”

Last but certainly not least! I saw Miyazaki’s most recent film The Boy and the Heron in theaters on Friday. (I think this is the first time I’ve seen a Studio Ghibli film in theaters on release. Can this be accurate? Did I really miss Arrietty, when The Borrowers was one of the great obsessions of my childhood?)

ANYWAY. This movie is set (the real-world portion, that is) in Japan during World War II, evoked with all the rich attention to detail common to any Studio Ghibli film. But soon enough Mahito finds himself summoned into another world, a strange dream-like place full of floating phantom ships, little round white creatures that float up into the sky, and militaristic parakeets.

I don’t know that this one will reach my personal top tier of Studio Ghibli movies, but it’s a fascinating film, clearly one that will reveal new facets every time that you watch it. (Beyond all else, I want more time to take in the stunning visual detail!) I’d love to see it again before it leaves theaters, not least because the brunch gang and I saw the dub, so of course it would be fun to watch the sub and compare.

One of my friends has acquired a kotatsu, and it's probably fortunate for her that she lives an hour and a half away or I might be planning to move into her living room for the duration of the winter.

Despite this unfortunate distance, we have agreed that someday we MUST have a kotatsu party, which will of course consist of sitting around the kotatsu, drinking tea, eating pastries (she apparently owns one of those three-tiered pastry dishes? Truly, this party will be the height of elegance), and watching a Studio Ghibli movie - preferably one featuring a kotatsu, although upon reflection we were not quite sure if there is such a movie.

Thus I turn to you, dear readers! Is there a Studio Ghibli movie featuring a kotatsu? If there isn't we might just turn to one with a general atmosphere of coze (My Neighbor Totoro, or perhaps From Up on Poppy Hill?), but of course the Peak Experience would be to snuggle under the kotatsu as the characters on screen do the same.

On my trip I managed to watch a number of movies that I’ve been vaguely meaning to see for a while, so I thought I’d toss out a few quick reviews.

Moonstruck first came to my attention on a list of movies for Mother’s Day, which frankly shows the paucity of movies about mother and child relationships: the mother in Moonstruck is a great character, but the movie’s not really about motherhood at all. Rather, it’s about love! passion! Italian-American identity! and Nicholas Cage chewing the scenery like nobody’s business. Everything is purposefully over-the-top, and I really enjoyed it.

I came into The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society with low expectations, because one of my friends told me she didn’t like it (although another told me she loved it, so go figure), which is probably the right way to approach it. It’s a solidly enjoyable period piece that doesn’t quite capture the charm or the voice of the book, although to be fair it probably would be difficult to capture the voice of an epistolary novel in a visual adaptation.

Also, I super got the impression from the movie that Dawsey was in love with Elizabeth, which I don’t remember being the case in the book. This is not a problem (in fact I think it adds a certain verisimilitude: why shouldn’t Dawsey have a romantic past?), but it did strike me as different.

I’ve been eyeing Mary and the Witch’s Flower ever since it came on Netflix streaming, intrigued by its Ghibli-esque aesthetic (the director actually got his start at Ghibli, where he directed Arrietty; Mary and the Witch’s Flower is the first film from his new studio). But in fact neither Paula or I really liked it: it’s scary, but without emotional depth, and the character development wasn’t as strong as it could have been.

This became especially surprising when I discovered that the story is based on Mary Stewart’s The Little Broomstick, because usually Mary Stewart’s books are good at that sort of thing. (It’s surprising that more of her books haven’t been made into movies: they’re so action-packed and picturesque that they ought to be easy to film.) Something must have been lost in the translation from book to screen.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Frances Little’s Jack and I in Lotus Land, in which the intrepid heroine of The Lady of the Decoration and her husband Jack return to Japan to recuperate after the stresses of the Great War. Jack manages to relax for approximately two days before the Red Cross summons him to Vladivostok to care for Russian war orphans, leaving the Lady on her own to gallivant through Japan. I often get a bit bored with landscape descriptions but Little’s are so clear and lovely (and, it must be said, concise) that I enjoy them. You could imagine this scenery in a Studio Ghibli film.

Little’s book also shares with many Ghibli films a fascination with work, particularly woman’s work. The Lady meets a female motor bus conductor, tours a paper run by women (“In the book binding business, the printing business, and in typesetting, Japanese women hold their own with the men of their kind,” (131) she comments), and admires the hard work and good spirits of country women picking tea or looking after the silkworms in a factory.

I also read another Newbery Honor book, Amy Timberlake’s One Came Home, which I didn’t particularly like because it follows a plot I rarely enjoy, wherein the hero or heroine’s (heroine, in this case) loved one (sister) supposedly dies, only the heroine is convinced that she is ACTUALLY ALIVE and sets out on a quest to prove it

This is a quest with two possible endings and IMO neither are very satisfying. It’s a bummer if the loved one turns out to be dead and the whole point was to teach a lesson about The Finality of Death, but it’s also sort of irritating if the protagonist is 100% right and the loved one is in fact alive. I mean come on.

However, One Came Home does at least avoid the most annoying ending, where the loved one purposefully faked their own death and is therefore basically a psychopath (somehow, no one ever takes this in a “so in a way they ARE dead! The decent human being the protagonist always loved never really existed!” direction), and there is a lot of stuff about passenger pigeons, so there are enjoyable elements.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m still thrashing through the Iliad. I am so bored of descriptions of soldiers dying gory deaths. As far as I can tell their armor only actually works if a god purposefully strengthens it right at the moment of impact.

I’m also reading Susan Coolidge’s Eyebright, which starts out as a tale of young Isabella Bright (I. Bright… Eyebright) who lives in a small town in New York and entertains her friends with imaginative adventure stories. At one point her school takes a field trip to the local Shaker settlement, a turn of events that delighted me beyond words.

And then I guess Susan Coolidge got bored because she killed off the heroine’s invalid mother, bankrupted her father (the bankruptcy is unrelated to the mother’s death; it just kind of all happens at once), and now Eyebright and her father have moved to his one remaining possession, a tiny farm on a small island off the coast of Maine.

I always find nineteenth-century plotting sort of fascinating because authors will just do stuff like this. You start off reading one book and it takes a completely weird turn and then suddenly the author is resolving a difficult plot problem with a volcano eruption, as Frances Little Does in Jack and I in Lotus Land. (Don’t worry. It’s a small eruption - just large enough to show the comparative mettle of the heroine’s protegee’s two suitors.)

What I Plan to Read Next

Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn! I am excited because (1) Daphne du Maurier!!!, and (2) there is a miniseries based on this book which is directed by a woman (and therefore fits my project) AND stars Jessica Brown Findlay, who played Lady Sybil on Downton Abbey. I quit the show mid-episode when it became clear that Sybil was about to die. Nothing I have heard about it since has made me regret this decision.

It hasn’t been much of a month for movies, I’m afraid. Aside from the new Thor, I only saw two other movies, and both were rewatches.

I nearly skipped Miracle on 34th Street because I’ve already seen it and didn’t like it much the first time around; but it was showing at the ArtCraft and I thought it might cheer me up to go.

And in fact I did have a nice time. I liked the movie better this time around, possibly because I went in with rock bottom expectations, and also having an entire theater laughing at the funny bits really draws out the humor in a film. (A few years ago, I went to a theatrical screening of Winter’s Bone - which is not a funny movie - but it has a few funny moments, and I found it almost jarring when the theater did laugh, because when I had watched it on my own I found it so intense I wouldn’t have dreamed of laughing.)

And I also rewatched When Marnie Was There, which I watched a year and a half ago and never posted about - and then last June I read the book it was based on, and never posted about that - because it’s difficult to write about things that are important to you, I guess. Young Anna is an outsider with no idea how to form connections with other people: she’s not even sure that she wants to connect with other people, although there’s some clear sour grapism going on here, because she also clearly thinks that it’s impossible. They’re inside the circle. She’s outside. The gap can’t be bridged.

And her friendship with Marnie, a girl her age who lives in a wonderful mansion on the edge of the sea, becomes an anchor for her that helps her create other emotional ties to people and begin to feel at home in the world.

The movie and the book are both good - although quite different in some ways! - Marnie & Anna’s friendship is emotionally intense in both book and movie, but in the movie it has a more romantic vibe.

( Spoilers for the movie )

Julie owns a box set of classic Universal Monsters films, so we attempted to crammed as many of them into October as we could, although in the end we only managed two: the 1932 The Mummy and the 1931 Dracula, both of which feature women mind-controlled by the eponymous monstrous man into some sort of romantic relationship. I guess that’s just the most terrifying thing in the world in the 1930s? From the perspective of 2017 neither of these movies seemed particularly frightening (which is good, because I’m a total baby about horror movies).

I also saw a bunch of movies in theaters this month! Going to theaters by myself is my new favorite thing. Two of them I have already posted about, but I didn’t manage to get to Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, which is about the creator of Wonder Woman and the two women who were the loves of his life and also in love with each other (at least according to the movie; there’s apparently some debate about how they felt about each other IRL) and all lived together in a love triangle in suburbia after the whole thing got the Marstons fired, on account of how the young lady was one of their students when they were both psychology professors.

...Frankly this sounds super unethical but hey, they seem to have been happy together, so I guess that worked out in the end. The sex scenes were hot like burning (there is one scene where Elizabeth Marston is wrapping a rope around Olive - not even tying her up, just wrapping it around - and Olive makes this sound - ) and I thought it was just really well done, overall.

Also, my mother and I went to see Ponyo on the big screen at the ArtCraft. (She’s never seen a Studio Ghibli film before! I may be able to entice her into watching Arrietty with me: she read The Borrowers to me in my youth.) I do like it, but it’s never been my favorite Ghibli film: I just can’t get over the essential weirdness of the fact that the sea sorcerer and the sea goddess decide that it’s a good idea to let the fate of the earth hinge on the faithful trueness of Sosuke’s love for Ponyo. Sosuke’s great, but - he’s five! How many people are forever faithful and true to the person they loved when they were five? Is Ponyo going to turn back into a fish if Sosuke’s attentions wander?

Other movies I saw this month: Steel Magnolias! Which has been on my radar forever as one of the famous movies about female friendship - I’m always seeing it “Movies about Female Friendship” lists like the one where I found Ghost World - and, unlike Ghost World, the female friendships here are actually strong and positive and really the main point of the movie, so that has restored some of my trust in those lists.

Having said that, it’s not really my kind of movie - I think you could classify it as a weepy and that’s just not my thing - but nonetheless I’m glad I’ve seen it and finally have it off my Netflix queue.

Also How to Steal a Million, an Audrey Hepburn movie that I first saw in high school and adored, and watched again this month and… did not adore as much. Not that I disliked it, but it did not cause the same enormous upwelling of delight that I remembered and I am concerned that this means that my sense of joy has gone into a state of hopeless atrophy.

I’ve already posted about most of the movies I saw in September (trying to prevent the backlog that overcame me after August! I still haven't posted about Menashe), but here a couple about which I didn’t have quite as much to say.

First, The Women’s Balcony, a delightful Israeli film about a small orthodox Jewish congregation in Jerusalem after the women’s balcony in the synagogue collapses halfway through a bar mitzvah. The collapse injures the rabbi’s wife and sends the rabbi into a state of nearly catatonic shock, which creates a power vacuum… into which steps a charismatic young ultra-orthodox rabbi, who sees this as a chance to win this comparatively lax congregation (the women don’t wear head-coverings) over to his views.

It’s a real ensemble picture - a portrait of a community as much as a portrait of any of its individual characters. I really enjoyed it, but then I’m fascinated by anything that offers a keyhole view into the lives of the highly religious.

I also popped over to the theater to see Lego Ninjago, of which I perhaps expected a little too much on account of how much I loved Lego Batman. It’s good goofy fun (with mechas!), but the father-son reconciliation plotline needed to give more weight to the destruction Garmadon caused - not just in his son’s life, but to the city of Ninjago - in order to have real emotional heft.

And I rewatched My Neighbor Totoro! Because Julie had not seen it *gasp*, which clearly needed to be corrected as soon as possible. It’s still a delightful, delightful movie - a perfect melding of fantasy and reality, with fantasy elements that seem to grow right out of the beautiful landscape, and the whole thing grounded by one of the most realistic depictions of childhood I’ve ever seen onscreen. Mei is such a four-year-old, oh my God.

I saw lots of movies in April! Among them, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (I know, I know. How have I made it twenty-eight years on the earth without seeing it?), which was quite fun, although I think my favorite part of the movie was the bit at the beginning where young Indiana Jones steals an artifact from a bunch of artifact stealers (“It should be in a museum,” he says indignantly) who then chase him onto a circus train to try to get it back.

Why a circus train? And what circus needs an entire train car full of snakes? Who knows! Who cares! It’s awesome, that’s what it is!

(Seriously though. Where are all the circus performers? There’ve got to be some Night Circus type shenanigans going on here.)

We also celebrated Earth Day with a double feature: Ferngully and Once Upon a Forest. I had of course seen Ferngully before - I think it was more or less required viewing in the nineties - and I must say the animation no longer seems as impressively lovely as it did to me then. I think I also kind of mixed it up in my mind with the scenes where Pocahontas shows John Smith around the forest and it’s all so breathtaking and then there’s a song, because I kept expecting that to happen and it didn’t.

Once Upon a Forest, meanwhile, is about a trio of forest creatures who go on a quest to find special herbs to save their friend who has been poisoned by humans, and learn important lessons about friendship & discovery. They make a weird flying machine! It’s cute.

I liked having themed movies, and have been trying to think of thematically appropriate movies for Mother’s Day and/or Memorial Day - well, I suppose any appropriately sad war movie would work for the latter? Will have to think about this.

Other April movies include:

Only Yesterday, which I believe is the final Studio Ghibli movie that I hadn’t seen. It’s sort of two movies in one: Taeko is heading out to the countryside for a summer farming vacation, and as she goes, she’s also reminiscing about her fifth-grade self, which - taking into account cultural differences, of course (and this film must be a real nostalgia trip for people who grew up in Japan in the sixties) - nonetheless reminded me of my own experiences in fifth grade. Taeko’s conflicted anxiety about menstruation (the director and producer are both men. How did they know that?), her confusing relationships with the girls in her class (are they her friends? Her enemies? Friends who don’t know how to be good friends yet?), the way she seesaws between trying to be grown up and being very bratty indeed.

It’s an odd, meandering, thoughtful film, not very concerned with having any kind of plot, not in terms of action and not even, perhaps, in terms of character growth - although on second thought, perhaps yes? Certainly there’s character exploration, character unfolding. Good food for thinking with.

(And upon reflection, there is one Ghibli film I still haven’t seen: Grave of the Fireflies. But everyone always says “Grave of the Fireflies will make you cry LITERAL BUCKETS of tears!” and, you know, that’s just not something I want generally. I’ll wait until the opportunity to see it foists itself upon me and then I’ll bow to my fate.)

9 to 5: Three women (Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton, and Lily Tomlin) all work in the same office under a domineering and incompetent male boss; they get their revenge on him, and it is at once delicious and hilarious. Why hadn’t I heard of this movie before? Why do I always seem to end up hearing about movies with multiple female stars through the grapevine and only the grapevine because no one ever mentions them anywhere else?

This is a rhetorical question. I’m just feeling salty about it.

On Golden Pond, which stars Katherine Hepburn! Sixty-something and as lovely and feisty as ever. This is a movie about an older couple, Norman and Ethel Thayer, who are joined at their holiday cottage on Golden Pond by their semi-estranged daughter Chelsea - played by Jane Fonda, the real life daughter of Henry Fonda, who plays the dad. This makes me super curious about the Fondas actual relationship. Were they drawing on life?

I hope they weren’t drawing on life too much because that would make Henry Fonda a pretty rotten dad. Norman is an emotionally unavailable, crotchety old man who never quite knew how to connect with his daughter, but probably should have realized that teasing her about her pudginess was never going to bridge that gap.

Norman and Ethel are very well-matched, though; it struck me as an illustration of the fact that “Is this the man I want to spend the rest of my life with?” and “Is this a man I would want to be a father to my children?” might well have opposing answers.

I intended to post more assiduously about the movies that I saw this year, and then… I totally didn’t, oops. So here are the movies I saw in 2016!

They are a beguiling mixture of animated movies and stuff from the American Film Institute’s Greatest American Movies of All Time, because my friend Myra has made it her goal to watch all of them and who am I to turn down the chance to check things off a list?

1. In the Heat of the Night. This is an excellent movie, but I admired it more than enjoyed it. Netflix calls it a “riveting study of racism that still strikes a chord,” which is accurate - near the beginning there’s a scene where Virgil Tibbs (our hero, played by Sidney Poitier) gets arrested because there’s been a murder in the town and he’s a strange black man sitting the train station - and therefore painful to watch.

2. The Flight of Dragons. This movie is a HOOT. It’s a Rankin/Bass movie from the 1980s, and it’s about a guy who gets enchanted into the world of a D&D-type board game that he created, and has to fight the powers of an evil sorcerer and also win the heart of a fair maiden, who is incidentally a character he created to have all the qualities he has ever wanted in a woman.

He literally wins the boss fight by yelling out the names of different branches of science. “Astronomy! Psychology! Sociology!” The wizard cannot withstand this onslaught! Highly recommended for a drinking game.

3. The Garden of Words. I watched this movie because I saw some completely gorgeous stills on Tumblr, and it is, it really is a gorgeous movie: lots of beautiful scenes of falling rain rippling through the leaves and across the pond in a park.

I didn’t like the story as much as the animation - I think partly because the title led me to expect a magical garden, and it’s not a fantasy story at all - and also because it’s about a high school student falling in love with a teacher (although he doesn’t realize she’s a teacher, and she’s not his teacher - but she is a decade older than he is), which makes it uncomfortable.

4. The Wind Rises. This movie upset me, not because of any of the political content - I remember there was some controversy about whether making a movie about Jiro Hirokoshi, designer of the Zero fighter plane, glorified or at least swept under the rug Japanese imperialism - but because the second half of the movie is pretty much 100% about Jiro’s girlfriend/eventual wife’s slow agonizing miserable death from consumption. Beautifully done. DID NOT EXPECT. DO NOT WANT.

5. Miracle on 34th Street. Classic Christmas movies bring out the Grinch in me; I didn’t like It’s a Wonderful Life and I don’t particularly like this one either. It’s one of those heavy-handed “Believe in the miracle of Christmas!” films, and the kind of belief it peddles seems shallow and cheap to me, and also I thought the film browbeat the heroine for her lack of belief and it annoyed it.

6. Raging Bull. This is one of those “Let’s explore masculinity!” films that litter the AFI Top 100 list. I drag my feet about watching them because I never expect to like them, but in this case I actually did quite enjoy it in the end. Scorsese makes his boxer protagonist human and rather tragic without exonerating him from the fact that he’s actually a pretty awful husband; there’s something small and sad about the story, the inverse of a usual sports movie of triumph.

7. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. This film is an experience utterly unlike any other film I have ever seen, and I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing or just, like, a thing. But I totally recommend seeing it if you’re at all interested in the history of film or art or just enjoy an infusion of head-spinning weirdness in your life from time to time.

8. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Everyone told me this movie was a devastating trip down cynicism lane, so I was actually kind of disappointed when I saw it. So much less betrayal than I expected! I mean, yes, there is that one guy who is a traitor mctraitorsin, but he’s also clearly becoming unhinged, which is less devastating than a guy who betrays all his supposed friends while totally in his right mind and is not driven mad by his conscience afterward.

9. Bonnie and Clyde. After I saw this movie I meant to learn more about the historical Bonnie and Clyde, which I didn’t end up doing (note to self: must resurrect this project), but the fact that I wanted to is testament what an intense and vivid picture the movie paints of them.

10. My Neighbors the Yamadas. I loved this movie! It’s a very odd movie, more a bunch of vignettes from the life of a pretty average family than a cohesive storyline at all, but there’s such emotional truth to them - the Yamadas are in many ways not like my family, but at the same time watching the film reminded me of my family, the sense of life as a lot of small moments together. A sweet gentle film.

11. The Swan Princess. I think I missed the critical viewing window for this movie. My friends who saw it as children gush about it nostalgically, but it dragged for me, even though it’s only about 75 minutes long.

12. Thumbelina. I know I watched this movie this year, but I can’t remember a darn thing about it. I really expected I would like it, too; usually I love things about tiny people. (The Borrowers!)

And now for three movies that are most quite different! From Up On Poppy Hill is a gentle, picturesque period piece about Japan in 1963, which focuses on the first post-World War II cohort’s coming of age. It is perhaps the only animated film I’ve seen that has no magical elements, but there’s a gentle, nostalgic glow about the story and the settings that gives them a sort of magic of their own.

The most picturesque setting of all is the Latin Quarter, as the high school students call their clubhouse, a creaky three-story building with stained glass windows and a cobweb-encrusted chandelier. The building is redolent with character, by which I mean “so much dust that the dust may well have become necessary to the building’s structural integrity.”

The school, presumably out of concern that all that character has made the place a fire trap, wants to tear it down. But a few of the students band together to do battle for their Latin Quarter. Although our heroine, Umi, is busy with home responsibilities, she becomes embroiled in the struggle to save the clubhouse as she grows closer to one of its architects, a boy named Shun.

For all that there’s a touch of the soap-operatic about a particular part of the storyline, it’s a very peaceful movie to watch.

The Merry Gentleman, on the other hand…is actually a surprisingly quiet movie, which I did not at all expect from the description. It’s about the friendship between Frank, a suicidal assassin, and Kate, who just escaped from an abusive relationship. After committing a hit, Frank considers jumping off a roof, only to fall backward onto a rooftop when Kate sees him and shouts for him not to do it.

She didn’t get a very good look at his face, so she doesn’t recognize him when he shows up at her apartment later and helps her carry her massive Christmas tree inside. It is, in an odd sort of way, a Christmas movie: the “merry gentleman” of the title is a reference to the Christmas song, and ideas of hope, love, and redemption thread their way through the movie.

I sometimes had a sense that perhaps the director was just tossing religious imagery at the wall to see what stuck, but I think the fact that it doesn’t add up to a coherent thematic argument, that there isn’t an answer, is perhaps the point. It’s in keeping with the movie’s other choices: it’s an interesting movie, but also a deliberately frustrating one. We never learn why Frank is assassinating people (or why he’s suicidal. Is he suddenly suffering from scruples?), or much about Kate’s background, and we only get hints at the things that make them tick.

( And if anyone has seen it, want to talk about the ending with me? )

I also watched The Mask of Zorro, which is definitely not peaceful but does tend to the picturesque. I don’t have a lot to say about this movie, except that it would have been a clear improvement if Elena cut up Zorro’s shirt during their sword fight. Just think how much more exciting the horse-chase would be if Zorro’s shirt blew away from his chest at appropriate moments!

Becky came down to visit me and see Despicable Me 2 this weekend. Her visit was awesome! But the movie itself, not so much.

First: I thought the minions were adorable in the first movie, but they really get too much screen time in this one, and it made the movie drag. Their scenes seemed flabby: they neither advance the plot nor get any character development - one might object that the minions can’t talk, but then, neither could WALL-E or EVE in WALL-E, and they had had a full-blown romance.

Second: I think Gru’s love interest Lucy was supposed to come across as adorably awkward, but she tended to strike me as embarrassment-squicky awkward, which made her scenes rather painful. Moreover, a lot of the humor in the movie revolved around romance, and it just struck me flat. I particularly disliked the scene at the beginning, with the busybody woman trying to set Gru up with her ugly friend. Haha, ugly women, their existence is hilarious!

Mostly the movie strengthened the impression that The Lorax gave me of Illuminations Entertainment: their work is cute and fun and flashy, but that’s a pretty wrapping that only half-hides the fact that their stories are soulless.

***

A few weeks ago Emma and Rick and I had an argument about Most Feminist American Animation Studio, with them on the side of Pixar and me on the side of Disney, partly to be contrarian, and partly because - Pixar. We are talking about the company that didn’t make any movies with a female lead for more than two decades, right?

Sure, they have some great female characters (Dory! EVE! Ellie! Never mind she dies in the first ten minutes of the movie...). But the female characters are woefully outnumbered by male characters, and until Brave it was always, always the male characters who were the center of the story.

Whatever else Disney does wrong, it’s the only major American animation studio that has a commitment to making films with female main characters who are the center of the story rather than a love interest or a sidekick, and who drive the forward motion of the plot. Films that are specifically aimed at girls.

I tend to think this makes people more willing to criticize Disney - that making stories for girls puts a target on their back, because culturally we’re more willing to criticize things that are aimed at women. Look at the scorn heaped on romance novels.

In any case, thinking back now, I think the whole premise of our argument was flawed: both Pixar and Disney have strengths in their portrayals of female characters, but they also both have such massive blind spots that it’s rather silly to argue about which is more feminist. The correct answer is clearly “neither.”

And perhaps also “Why should this contest be limited to American animation studios?” Because if we open it up to include the whole globe, then clearly Studio Ghibli wins hands down.

parallelsfic nominations are upon us again!

parallelsfic is a summer fic exchange for Asian fandoms, kind of parallel to Yuletide? I think that’s where the names come from.

Last year I didn’t get to take part because it was basically all anime fandoms and I knew like two of them, which was sad. But this year! This year I was proactive and nominated basically every Asian fandom that I love, although this forced me to confront the tragic fact that I haven’t seen any new Bollywood movies for over a year. They do take a certain amount of time commitment.

(Part of the reason I always try to sign up for

parallelsfic is because I yearn in my soul for a Dostana OT3 fic. I realize that Dostana itself ought to fulfill this yearning, but nonetheless I am greedy and want more. I mean, just look at this.

"But when you smile for me/the world seems all right..." Doesn’t that look amazing and fun and like it should have the most enormous fandom?)

Also also! I nominated all my favorite Studio Ghibli movies: My Neighbor Totoro, Ponyo - there appears to be no Ponyo fic in existence, even though it is full of underwater magic, I do not understand - Arriety, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Spirited Away, and Princess Mononoke.

(I also recently saw The Cat Returns, but I actually didn’t like that so much, because the heroine spends most of the movie being tossed helpless on the winds of Fate.)

ANYWAY, the point of this is that everyone should sign up, even if the only Asian fandoms you know are Studio Ghibli, because a Studio Ghibli exchange would be awesome.

You guys you guys YOU GUYS, Miyazaki is making a Borrowers film! I've loooooooooved the Borrowers since I was a wee little child, and I love Miyazaki films, and this has the potential to be the BEST THING EVER!

(And it may finally wash the putrid taste of the horrible, horrible live-action Borrowers film some ridiculous person made a few years back. OH THE PAIN.)

I learned of this development while watching the previews for the new Muppet movie. It had the best previews. One for Brave, which seems like a less inventive story than I expect from Pixar, but we'll see when it comes out; and another for Mirror Mirror, which stars Julia Roberts as Evil Queen in Snow White.

Presumably there's also a Snow White bopping around somewhere. But the preview was all Julia Roberts all the time, and I am just fine with that.

And the Muppet movie itself? It was cute. Didn't blow me away like Muppet Treasure Island, but it wasn't a waste of money.

What did blow me away? NEW WATERFORD GIRL. AWESOME MOVIE. I must write a post extolling it.

Watched Kiki's Delivery Service yesterday. I liked it very much - not quite as much as Totoro, but still very much: all the loving detail that went into designing the city, and the random artist-in-the-woods who Kiki meets (I so want an art cabin in the woods. Never mind the solitude would drive me off my tree in a week), and Kiki herself and all her friends.

One of the things I really like about Miyazaki films is that they cast such a broad net for friendships. Kiki is friends with the kindly pregnant baker, and the sweet grandmother who sends her on a delivery - not just people her own age (or even her own species; she's also got a talking cat).

( Spoilers )

On a completely different note: a poem I ran across this evening, and quite liked.

Vade Mecum
by Billy Collins

I want the scissors to be sharp
and the table to be perfectly level
when you cut me out of my life
and paste me in that book you always carry.

I love My Neighbor Totoro. I love it I love it I love it so much that I have nothing coherent to say about it and must instead list all the things that I love.

I love Totoro and the soot sprites and this magical world that lives alongside the mundane - neither creepy nor sappy, but uncanny.

I love Satsuke and Mei's father, kind and zany and always there; and I love their mother, who gets little screen time but becomes a palpable presense anyway - and as an individual, this mother, not just a generic missing mother figure.

I love Kanta, so shy he lends Satsukea and Mei his umbrella and runs off into the rain without speaking. I love that he and Satsuke become friends - real friends, not boyfriend and girlfriend to be.

And most of all, I love Mei and Satsuke. Four-year-old Mei, adorable and funny and sometimes so sad - some days there's nothing in the world as hard as being four. Her old sister Satsuke, mature but still very much a child: lively and imaginative, easily embarrassed and easily affectionate. I love their love for each other: the strength of the bond around which the warmth of the movie wraps.

So much love!

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Wednesday Reading Meme
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Wednesday Reading Meme
November Movies (When Marnie Was There)
October Movies
September Movies
April movies
Movies of 2016
A Few More Movie Reviews
Despicable Me 2
Parallelsfic nominations
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A Certain Slant of Light

otherwise known as Jin's journal

Entries tagged with animation: studio ghibli

Wednesday Reading Meme

Recent Movies

Kotatsu!!!!

Movies from My Trip

Wednesday Reading Meme

November Movies (When Marnie Was There)

October Movies

September Movies

April movies

Movies of 2016

A Few More Movie Reviews

Despicable Me 2

Parallelsfic nominations

Mooooooovies

Kiki's Delivery Service.

My Neighbor Totoro