Wow. I know nothing about video games, but this video sure makes me want to change that. The ball just keeps rolling on, gathering up everything in it’s path of destruction. It’s kinda glorious. And it kinda reminds of me the giant ball in “Raiders Of The Lost Brick“. Maybe “to destroy IS to create”.
Torn paper can be beautiful. Particularly when Charlie Parker is playing behind it. Here’s his KOKO with some swell work by George Griffin. (thanks MetaFilter!)
Foxy time travel. What is and what shouldn’t ever be. Butterflies and paper planes. What more can you ask for?
Why do Americans think animation is for kids? Most of my favorite films last year were animations. Animation works on so many levels and can truly tap into our subconscious. The freedom of form is exhilarating.
postscript: I saw the film. Charles Burns section is worth twice the price of admission!
When I was fourteen, when I was twelve, when I was seven, John was the one. But I never met him. When Jerry Levitan was fourteen he snuck into John’s hotel room with a tape recorder.
NAUSICA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND (1992) was the first film of Studio Ghibli (even before they were Studio Ghibili!). It’s got everything in it, from the first seeds of steampunk, robots, a great female youthful heroine, and an environmental message (plus another one of how aggression is often a cry for love…). We’ve watched it numerous times, have the figures, and our very own pet fox-squirrel.
The new film from Hayao Miyazaki will open in Japan this month. So the countdown for it coming stateside has begun. It’s already being called a classic.
The title character, Ponyo, is a girl fish with a human face who decides one day to leave her underwater home — and her school of smaller sisters — to see what lies on the surface. Riding on the back of a jellyfish, she is nearly trapped by a drift net, but escapes — with her head stuck in a glass jar. Sosuke , a boy who lives on a house on a seaside cliff, spots Ponyo in the shallows and rescues her. He is delighted with his new pet — and Ponyo is delighted to be in the human world at last. She says her first words, to Sosuke’s astonishment — and begins a transformation from half-fish to human.Meanwhile, her human father, Fujimoto, who lives in an undersea manse with Ponyo’s sea-queen mother, starts to search for her. With his long hair, beaky nose and tormented, bags-under-the-eyes expression, Fujimoto looks like a decayed aristocrat from a shojo manga (girls’ comic), but he possesses magical powers over the waves, which become like living creatures under his command. What can a mere kid, if one with a feisty mom he calls Lisa, and a good-natured, if mostly absent, ship-captain dad, do to stop him?
