Favourite Miyazaki film

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH2q9ZJMaAU

Miyazaki's manga Shuna's Journey is beautiful. Every panel a work of art. I highly recommend everyone check if their libraries have it. It got reprinted last year in an English translation.

Finally saw this last night with my brother JoeStork. We both felt sort of shell-shocked at the end of it and then, as we talked about it, came down on the side of really liking it. Also we both absolutely loved the giant murderous parakeets with their hilariously dumb faces and their huge butcher knives.

I was impressed by how long and grim the first part of the movie - the real-world part - is. There's such a long stretch with very little dialogue and this feeling of unresolved jangling grief hanging over all of it, and the almost silent sequence with his first day at school and everything that follows it is so horrifying in its intensity while telling you almost nothing about what is actually happening in Mahito's mind. Other than, of course, that he is desperate. And it's telling that he goes straight to self-injury rather than tell his father what happened to him. This is a child who has learned to keep his thoughts to himself and not to ask for things. (And frankly I wouldn't try to talk to that dad either. What a dipshit. Why do both of these perfectly nice-seeming women feel the need to marry this dude?)

Anyway, it's so rare for anything to be paced slowly these days, let alone something aimed at children, and Miyazaki does this without even offering the rewards of, say, the slow and quiet parts of Totoro, so that there were moments where I thought, "This is beautiful in a grim way but I don't know if I can put myself through watching it again." And yet I ended up feeling like it was essential to establish the stakes of the movie, how much Mahito needs to be able to save someone.

I liked how understated the reveal is that Mahito does indeed save his mother, just as the heron promised he could - that the year where she disappeared into the tower and the time that he is spending there are happening simultaneously, and that when she leaves through a separate door at the end, she is returning to her life in the real world.

ponyo

Shoulda called it Disturbance At Heron House

ha!

It's coming on Netflix, right? I want to watch it again. It has stayed with me. I think it's pretty great.

Oh, boo hiss, that's only outside the U.S. It'll be on Max here with the rest of the Ghibli films. Well, I'm sure we'll renew our Max subscription at some point.