New, but not Necessarily Improved

Some things belong somewhere special. And then there are these things.

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Yoko.

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In Which I Write About Miyazaki Movies

So, the Seattle Cinerama is going to show an anime festival. This triggered an email thread between the parents of several of my son’s friends about taking teen boys to see some of the movies. After a couple of parents expressed a desire to know more about the Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli films on the program, I found myself pounding away at the keyboard. Here’s the email I sent:

Because absolutely nobody asked for a really, really long email, and because I’m waiting for more information before I can write the case studies I’m supposed to be writing, here’s my take on Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli films. If, after reading this, anyone wants to borrow DVDs we might be able to make a deal.

I do think it’s possible to go wrong by just picking any one of his movies at random, especially for the adult and young adult viewer. Some of them are too lightweight and some of them are too dark and trippy. They’re all good, but if you started with the wrong one you might get the wrong impression and not go further.

Animation has a hard time with the mainstream American audience because it’s been mostly marketed as something for children here. But in Japan and other countries it is seen as a storytelling medium with its own strengths. I love Hayao Miyazaki movies like I love movies by directors like Hitchcock, Fellini, Ford, Welles, Kurosawa… They are just great storytelling and each bears the stamp of the director’s passions and personality.

Miyazaki’s great theme is reverence for the environment, and reconciling industrial human society with the need to protect our planet. This preoccupation is the essence of modern Japan, where Shinto’s old animist origins still persist alongside the country’s wholehearted embrace of technology and modernity. This theme comes through more in some of his films than others, but it informs all his stories to some degree.

His best-known stories are told from the points of view of young children, tapping into the liminal moments when we still experience many things as magic but are learning to apply logic and reasoning to the world we perceive. But that’s not the entirety of his work, and the cute factor shouldn’t be overstated.

So, here’s my recommendation for watching the ten Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli films on the Cinerama program that I’ve seen in an order that I think adults and teen boys would get the most out of. This is not at all the order they are being shown, but maybe it can help people make a choice.

(There are five being shown that I haven’t seen — the extremely highly-regarded Grave of the Fireflies, Porco Rosso, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Pom Poko and The Red Turtle — I’ll touch on them after the ordered list.)

Spirited Away. A modern family stumbles into the spirit realm, where the young daughter must work for her keep while simultaneously learning how to save her parents from the consequences of their materialism. The sequence of a river spirit flying over the land is visually stunning.

Princess Mononoke. This one is dark and brooding, and very, very good. It’s set in medieval Japan, where the forest is being cleared to produce iron to make firearms to defend the humans from the forest gods who are angry about the destruction of the forest. The cycle seems an endless spiral of conflict between humans and nature, even though humans themselves are part of nature.

My Neighbor Totoro. Miyazaki’s most-loved work, but teen boys might misinterpret it as being ‘kiddie’ if they haven’t either grown up with it or seen other Miyazaki films first. In post-war Japan a father and his two young daughters move to a house in the country close to the hospital where the girls’ mother is recovering from an illness. Mei, the youngest daughter, meets a giant forest spirit who she names Totoro and he plays an important role as her childish innocence leads her into danger. (I sought out an older DVD with the original English dub. The Cinerama will show the later Disney dub with big name stars. It’s fine, but I like the first version better.)

Ponyo. This one is fantastic, but boy is it a trip. Ponyo is a little fish who is the daughter of an overly-protective sorcerer father who dresses like a ‘60s Peter Max concert poster and the spirit of the oceans. She encounters a small boy and decides that she wants to be human too. Her decision unbalances time, a magical tsunami floods the town, and much more. It’s awesome.

The Wind Rises. Miyazaki’s last film before retiring in 2013. An incredibly great film with a slow pace that might not hold the attention of a teen boy who isn’t already attuned to the medium. (We saw it at the Cinerama on first release and Asa loved it, but your mileage may vary.) It is the fictionalized story of the designer of the Mitsubishi Zero, Japan’s iconic WWII fighter plane. As you might imagine, this is problematic territory for a post-imperial filmmaker and the Koreans in particular took offense. But the tone is neither jingoistic, nor overtly anti-war, which I think is part of its brilliance as a story. This is the tale of a man who personally opposed the war but loved designing flying machines, and by humanizing him I feel Miyazaki asks us all to take a look inside ourselves and reconcile our own passions with the unintended consequences of their expression.

From Up on Poppy Hill. A sweet period piece, directed by Hayao’s son Gorō, but his dad co-wrote the script. High school students in early ‘60s Yokohama fight the head of their school who wishes to tear down the building housing student clubs and develop it as commercial property. The girl and boy at the heart of the struggle develop feelings for each other, but stumble across clues suggesting they may be connected in other ways as well. Is their love meant to be?

Kiki’s Delivery Service. A sympathetic allegory about the challenges teenaged girls face in establishing their own identities. Teen witch Kiki moves to a new town and discovers she can make a living as a broomstick-flying delivery driver. She meets a boy who likes her, but isn’t sure what to do about it. She becomes so depressed she can’t fly anymore. Will she regain her magic?

Castle in the Sky. A steampunky tale about a girl abducted by air pirates who falls from their airship and lands in a mining town. There she is befriended by a boy who helps her on her quest to find the city of Laputa, which floats high in the sky thanks to the power of special crystals. Fights and adventures ensue. It’s the first official Studio Ghibli film and is a lot of fun but in my opinion isn’t as focused and realized as their later work.

Howl’s Moving Castle. This is Miyazaki’s anti-Iraq War movie. It’s got all the right elements (primarily a magic steampunk castle with legs) and the right themes (pro-feminism, a critique of modernity, the importance of caring for each other), but didn’t click with me. I should try it again.

Arriety. This is an adaptation of the Borrowers books. I never read them, but I had friends who loved them. It’s a perfectly fine movie, but it is what it is. Best for younger kids, I’d say.

Of the ones I haven’t seen, the top of the list is Grave of the Fireflies, which is by Studio Ghibli but not directed by Miyazaki. Roger Ebert considered it one of the best war films ever made. It’s not light and fluffy. The story is about a brother and sister struggling to survive in the last months of WWII, dealing with starvation and American bombs. It’s supposed to be emotionally devastating, which is why I haven’t watched it yet. It might be best with a theater full of other people sharing the experience.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is the last film Miyazaki made before founding Studio Ghibli on the strength of his work. It’s a fantasy film that deals with the human impact on the natural world. I really should have seen it already.

Porco Rosso is supposed to be a lot of fun, and combines Miyazaki’s love of airplanes and dirigibles with a talking pig pilot. I expect cuteness.

Pom Poko wasn’t directed by Miyazaki, and it has a reputation for being so steeped in Japanese culture that it’s hard for Americans to fully follow. On the other hand, there’s certainly amusement to be had in a movie about magic raccoon dogs with prominent testicles, right?

The Red Turtle is a Ghibli co-production with a Dutch company. It’s a shipwreck story told with no words and it lost the Animated Feature Oscar to Zootopia. It’s supposed to be really good.

If you made it to this sentence I applaud you for your stamina. I did mention earlier that I’m a bit of a fanboy, right? I also used to get paid to write about entertainment and pop culture topics, and can go on and on about them, as you can plainly see.

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I have some questions for the candidates

I still haven't filled out my ballot, mostly because I'd like some more information regarding the Presidential race.

Specifically, when they say "taco trucks," does that mean they will all be full-sized catering trucks, or there will be a range of sizes? This is important to me because I preferred the "taco trailer" that used to park near our house to the taco truck that parked next to it.

Also, while I am fine with having them on every corner, it does seem like it would be more practical to start by having one at every intersection and then phasing in the others over time. Will the taco truck rollout be instantaneous or incremental?

Speaking of rolling, it's unclear if the taco trucks will be permanently located on the corners, or if they will only be there during business hours. If they all come and go at the same time, it seems like that this is not going to be good for traffic at all. The problem could be alleviated somewhat if the taco trucks could fly and had vertical take off and landing capabilities.

So that's what it gets down to. My choice for president will be the one that I think has the greatest likelihood of phasing in a program of taco helicopters of various sizes, first at every intersection and then at every corner. Any other approach is foolish and impractical. But both have been maddeningly unspecific and won't discuss the issue publicly. How can I be an informed voter under these circumstances?

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Hello, my name is.

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The Mystery of the Shells

Years ago, before my wife and I were married, we lived in an apartment that was too classy for us. Built in the 1920s, it was all coved ceilings, woodwork, and leaded glass.

The least classy thing about the apartment was what happened every single Saturday morning the entire year we lived in it. Around the drain in the bathtub there would be traces of dirty water, and in the dirty water would be a handful of pasta shells scattered about. Every single Saturday without fail the pasta shells would be there.

There were never any other plumbing problems in the apartment, and the shells were a mystery. We imagined an elderly tenant living on one of the floors above, whose only joy in life came late Friday evening — pasta evening. That’s when this hypothetical person would cook exactly a handful more shells than they could eat, only to wash the extras down the kitchen sink as if the vintage pipes had been magically fitted with the gnashing teeth of modern garbage disposals.

It didn’t really explain why the shells abandoned their journey to the sewage treatment plant and came to rest in our bathtub, though. Clearly, there was some sort of higher intelligence at work. A level of intelligence that has never before been observed in any semolina-based foods.

Time passed, years became decades, and the shells in the bathtub faded somewhat into hazy recollection. But today, as I stood in the shower watching the water flow into the drain, suddenly it came back to me. I could almost see the shells from that long-ago apartment making their way into the bathroom of my current home. They’d rise up the lip of the drain, and delicately reach one of their legs out to touch the porcelain beyond the metal ring... hold on a minute...

Pasta shells don’t have legs!

There it was. The mystery solved. I had stumbled across the answer while standing in the shower.

Pasta shells are empty by design. They come out of the box devoid of contents. Each one is a blank slate, a pastula rasa.

What other shells have no real contents, but move of their own volition? Shells that are temporarily inhabited by hermit crabs.

Let it be known that on this date I, by process of reasoning and deduction, have determined that the plumbing of the Buckley Apartments is inhabited by trans-dimensional hermit crabs that flicker into solidity every Friday night when their environment is flooded with pasta shells, offering them the hope of escape to a permanent home in our universe. They slip their bodies into the shells, for protection and crawl up the drain of the bathtub in apartment #112. But there, inside the tub, they discover a horrible truth.

Sea shells offer soft-bodied hermit crabs the protection of sturdy carapaces, a temporary home that can withstand the hard knocks of life in the sea. But these trans-dimensional crabs allow themselves to be misled by the form of the shells and mistake their function as a result.

Cooked pasta shells offer no protection at all. In truth, they are a beacon proclaiming edibility. Many a human would happily dine on pasta shells filled with crab. But in the wee hours when the mystery of the shells became manifest, there were never any humans around to observe, much less devour. And humans would have eaten the shells too.

No, obviously the only rational explanation is that the bathtub in that apartment is home to some sort of trans-dimensional and completely carnivorous seabird that only fully becomes part of our universe when a meal presents itself — in this case, soft-bodied, trans-dimensional hermit crabs that the bird plucks from the shells it disdains and swallows whole.

I look forward to sharing this discovery with my wife, as it will finally explain a mystery that has long puzzled the both of us.

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I Killed It

The wi-fi did nothing to me, but I was driven to destroy it by my perverse urges. 

Voices in my head whispered “Log in to the router… Enter random numbers in the subnet mask field, whatever that does… Muck around with the SSID, even though that sounds like something a Nazi asks you to present as your train approaches the border and freedom, driving you to desperately struggle with him beside an open door and certain death for whichever one of you loses the fight and is hurtled onto the tracks…" 

Anyway, I guess I’ll restart the router now. Maybe that will work.

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The Visually Similar Images Series

For quite a while I’ve gotten more pleasure than a human ought from using Google Image Search for random images I find on the web and browsing the “Visually Similar Images” it returns. Now I’m finding myself doing the Image Search with my own pictures, and posting screen grabs of the things Google thinks are visually similar.

Because I think too much about copyright and ownership, I'd like to make it clear the big images are mine but none of the smaller images in the screen grabs are. The screen grabs themselves are derivative works, but I'm not intending to do anything with them other than illustrate What Google thinks looks similar to the images I've uploaded.

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1889.

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Have a seat in the big chair.

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We suspended the television from the ceiling by chains until it recants its heresy.

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Photos from the station

This morning at the Beacon Hill station I killed some time taking pictures while waiting for the train. A couple security guards ambled onto the platform while I was way off at one end trying to frame a shot of the overhead lighting and sprinkler system in a way that would make them look like the engine room of the Nostromo. The way those guards looked at me it was like they thought I was scoping out places to secrete sarin canisters. 

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Scourge of the space lanes.

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What is it 4?

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Vanishing point.