Porco Rosso opens with a dogfight in the skies that is at once evocative of old war movies and yet seemingly from a completely different world altogether. This dogfight involves air pirates, a group of kidnapped kids, air fortresses, and a cacophony of slapstick action making the fact that our titular hero in this air rescue, …
One thing that becomes increasingly clear to anyone who has spent any time watching anime is that our Western understanding of animation is severely limited. While in the West, animation is usually confined to being a genre strictly for the kids and no one else, in Japan (and much of Asia) it is treated merely as …
By the time Kiki's Delivery Service came out, Studio Ghibli's penchant for finding magic in ordinary things was quickly becoming the studio's calling card. Yet, as seems to be the case with most animation studios, the critical success of Ghibli's early work did not translate into commercial success (perhaps pairing the melancholy My Neighbor Totoro with the soul-crushingly …
"Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 18:3) I first showed My Neighbor Totoro to my oldest child when she was two. It wasn't the first movie I had attempted to show her, but in all my previous attempts she only ever …
Continue reading Hall of Fame #5: My Neighbor Totoro (Studio Ghibli #3)
I'll be honest: the thought of returning to Grave of the Fireflies caused me enough anxiety as to make me nauseous. And don't get me wrong, it's not because the movie is bad. Instead the reason I had only seen this movie once prior to this review is because it is easily amongst the most emotionally devastating …
Pazu, a young boy tirelessly working in a mining town, is thrown into an adventure when Sheeta literally but quite unexpectedly falls out of the the sky into his life. This moment sets off a breakneck-paced romp through the skies as Pazu and Sheeta find themselves drawn into a conflict between corrupt governments and rascally …
Generally speaking I don't cry in the movie theatre. Being teased relentlessly in childhood for being a crybaby has, for better or worse, trained me to develop stiff upper lips and emotional dams that rarely flood over (we can discuss how unhealthy this is for me another time). But one of the few occasions that …
Continue reading Studio Ghibli #0: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
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