Date: 2007-05-04 18:44 Subject: [movies | child] Whisper of the Heart, cardboard and weather Security: Public Tags: anime, child, movies, portland, videos

We have rented The Cat Returns [ imdb ] for the second time, as the_child liked it so much before. She also passed up both Porco Rosso and Spirited Away for Whisper of the Heart [ imdb ], which I am currently previewing.

Before we went to Mike's Movie Madness for the rentals, we'd run an errand over to Morlan Plumbing for some cardboard for the_child's third grade class to use in making backdrops for their end of semester play coming up. (Unfortunately I shall be in Omaha when they perform the play.) We were driving across town with the top down, the Genre car loaded with cardboard, as rain sputtered and spit above us. the_child confidently stated that as we got closer to the school, we'd be out of the rain.

Sure enough, she was right. She began to expound her theory about the weather, that there were "weather points" around the city, and that the rain and the sunshine changed places there. I asked her what made the weather points. She thought about that, then said, "It's just something the weather does."

On the other hand, she was right about the weather itself.

Date: 2007-05-04 06:06 Subject: [personal] Friday, the weekend's zygote Security: Public Tags: anime, books, movies, personal, stories, videos, writing

Don't forget the question thread from yesterday. I probably won't start posting answers before this evening, due to Being Busy. No link salad this morning either, though feel free to send cool stuff along as you find it.

I did not finish the Dark Towns story I was working on yesterday, but I made some nice progress. Postponed some social plans from last night in favor of lying about and twitching, which seemed like a nice way to catch up on sleep. I'll be renting some more anime today to watch with the_child tonight and Sunday — probably Porco Rosso [ imdb ] and Spirited Away [ imdb ].

Also, reading Bruce Taylor's Edward in manuscript right now, as I am writing the forward. That's always an interesting thing to do.

Off to the day job now.

Date: 2007-04-26 20:04 Subject: [movies] Kiki's Delivery Service Security: Public Tags: anime, child, culture, movies, process, writing

the_child and I just watched Kiki's Delivery Service [ imdb ]. (This is the recent Disney dub, not sure if there was an earlier English dub.) She liked it quite a bit, though it didn't steal her heart like My Neighbor Totoro [ imdb ] did. I suppose I feel more or less the same way.

What I found interesting was the world-building. Not the explicit plot-driven stuff, but the visualization. The automobiles were 1930s/1940s. The trains were 1950s. The aircraft were 1920s/1930s, except for the Rutan-inspired human-powered ultralight, which was very late 20th century. The city seemed like something out of 1913, right before the First World War, if the Austro-Hungarians had been blessed with ports on the Côte d’Azur. There were television antennae on the houses, but the phones seemed much earlier. It was a nostalgic Ruritanian never-never land of cherry-picked technology, architecture and sociology, yet still recognizably anchored in our world.

All of that was utterly lost on the_child, I'm fairly certain. Sharp as she is, she doesn't have a sense of period yet. She was simply following the story. But for me, it stood in marked contrast to the very careful period setting of Totoro, or by the same token, the fabulist setting of Castle in the Sky [ imdb ], which made no pretense of correspondence to mundane experience. The mood of each movie, for me as an adult viewer, was heavily influenced by these stylistic choices.

I love that sort of thing in fiction, and I delight in seeing it done well in movies.