Favourite Miyazaki film

xp to rob: haha yes... Only Yesterday not only explores urban/rural dynamics but also serves as propaganda for organic farming in Yamagata-shi haha.

i teach in an architecture school, and I daydream about someday helping run a creativity/inspiration/mental-reset film series. Kiki would always be in there, along with Mystery of Picasso.

What a cool idea! What else is on your list?

lily, that's insightful!

aw thanks Lily! haha the list usually gets about this far in my head and i just start thinking "man, kiki is so great" and get distracted.

might be the kind of thing that would be best if it polled multiple professors for ideas, or was a collaborative thing with students... different sensibilities, different ways of thinking about creativity and stuff.

maybe other art documentaries.... i haven't seen that many. the ones about Andy Goldsworthy (Rivers and Tides, Leaning Into the Wind), i find really soothing and maybe similar to Mystery of Picasso (where painting is a form of play and nothing is a precious masterpiece) since they're about impermanent art. the work is more meticulous and tedious in a way but seems restorative and meditative which i think is something a lot of students would like to feel. my kids this semester responded more than usual to the early Bauhaus period, heavily influenced by Arts and Crafts and Expressionist ideas about making --- they want to be off screens and working with their hands, they really respect it and certainly romanticize it somewhat. but i can also imagine some other kind of student really responding to something maximalist, saturated, dynamic, etc.

(i would also include Kedi, the Turkish documentary about street cats and their wonderful world, which sits alongside Kiki in my Letterboxd top 4.)

Rescreened tonight with my family and my wife has a theory that I think forks might entertain:

Kiki is celiac and her residence (the flour-coated storage room converted to bedroom) triggered the loss of her magic as well as depression, anxiety, loss of ambition.

i... i like this theory?
(she's going through puberty tho)

(also the mom in totoro is pregnant)

The mom in Totoro is the only survivor of the accident that killed the rest of the family, they are all dead

Some other theories: Tombo (or Osono's husband... or the man who works in the clocktower that the dirigible crashes into) impregnated Kiki and she gave birth secretly off-camera (but is all alluded to via Jiji and Lily) and suffers post-partum depression.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncs4AGA8Sfc

Ghibli have finally gone full CG. Not a direction I had expected (or hoped) they would ever go in.

It's a baffling decision given Miyazaki's previous hard-line stance on the matter. I always appreciated in previous films that they used CG in a limited way but which served the material - e.g. the movement of Howl's Castle. This just looks like a blatant attempt to compete with Pixar, Sony et al. Not great.

hmmmm...

Yeah looks like total shit compared to their usual work. Is that a proper trailer or an animatic type thing or...

https://www.awn.com/news/fans-already-disgruntled-studio-ghiblis-earwig-and-witch

I have a lot of time for his work on Ronja the Robber's Daughter (think Gillian Anderson tested out her Thatch impression on it!) but Goro M is shaping up to be a terrible custodian of Ghibli.

Supported completely by his father, Goro states, “I was the only one among the people at Ghibli who knows that method of creation… I made the anime with a young staff and didn’t consult with the old guys at all.”

This is super cursed and also the funniest goddamn thing I’ve seen all week pic.twitter.com/OOAblOwomM

— JR (@USofJR) February 24, 2021

I need to be careful who I share that with, but it *is* incredible

Howl's Moving Castle would be vastly improved by a special edition that replaces Billy Crystal with anyone else

no argument

is the Jar Jar Binks guy available

We've tried to get through the new one 3x I think? Longest we've lasted is 10 mins.

What new one?

is the Jar Jar Binks guy available

― so tonight that I might ramona quimby (f. hazel)

Donald Trump doesn't have much on.

What new one?

― chap, Sunday, March 21, 2021 6:52 AM (two hours ago)

scroll up to December 18th posts^^^

Finally watched Porco Rosso, one of the few I hadn't seen. Great, odd movie, Porco is a fascinating protagonist.

scroll up to December 18th posts^^^

― Jersey Al (Albert R. Broccoli)

Oh yeah I'd suppressed that trailer.

London folks - https://www.timeout.com/london/theatre/my-neighbour-totoro

i see your totoro and raise you kabuki nausicaa

https://gizmodo.com/studio-ghibli-nausicaa-stage-adaptation-returns-hayao-m-1848844119

(looking at that little clip, an ohmu nightlight would be good)

(finally watching cagliostro)

tintin, ape-ninjas, little 60s cars, flared orange 70s suits and haircuts, bond in marienbad, unexpected soundtrack

maybe absurd to say this about anything Miyazaki, but I think that one is underrated. I spent a while looking at gifs from it the other day, it's such a great classic cartoon

the girl seems a bit feeble (i'm only half way thru)

oic there's also an amazonian non-feeble girl

Cagliostro is of a piece with earlier Lupin III cartoons, if somewhat elevated

also the animation is crazy awesome

(in a ghibli movie? no way? lol)

but i really do love the like... kineticism of the animation in cagliostro, which feels like it's allowed to be that way for longer stretches of time than the films that came out afterward (i could be INCREDIBLY wrong about this)

The opening car chase in Cagliostro justifies cinema in itself.

yes kineticism is exactly what I meant by "classic cartoon," there's so much good physical action in it

I haven't seen anything else Lupin, is there stuff as good as this in it?

https://64.media.tumblr.com/43fccdd08d353354393473f8e74bbee2/tumblr_mlco9qWYma1qzqnxxo1_500.gif

that gif is the essence of lupin yes

I think some comparisons could be made between Cagliostro and the second Urusei Yatsura movie, Beautiful Dreamer; both examples of an auteur anime director (Oshii in the latter case) taking an established anime franchise and using it to, basically, do their thing. And thus they have fans among people who otherwise don't care much about those franchises, but get a much more mixed reaction from the fans (definitely more for BD, based on my experience).

lol i was LITERALLY about to bring up beautiful dreamer

i love learning that Beautiful Dreamer has a substantial non-UY fanbase!! i adored that movie in my teen peak anime fan days, but always figured it might be fairly impenetrable to the uninitiated.

in both those cases the director was very involved with the parent TV series though so like, the established thing that the movie is diverging from is also theirs

That's true, and from what I gather Oshii did get experimental with a few UY episodes before Dreamer came out. He did keep the characters true to themselves, and put them in a really surreal and bizarre story; in contrast, I have come across some complaints that Lupin and co don't actually act very much in character in Cagliostro. I can't really comment on that as I've seen very little Lupin media in general, except for a few episodes of that recent-ish Fujiko Mine series which looked cool, but which I couldn't really get into.

oshii’s patlabor 2 is another good example of this (worked on the series, took the movies in another direction but stayed true to the characters)

patlabor 2 also has this amazing meta-layer where it's like interrogating the original ova as a text

i gotta say i watched a lot of lupin when it was on adult swim and the characterizations in cagliostro never seemed that different to me

watching ponyo again, sorry to the the losers and the haters