(no subject)

[telophase]

cerusee links to roundtable criticism at The Hooded Utilitarian of Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou. Very interesting!

(And I got a link out of it to an article about why the movie Amelie isn't all it's cracked up to be. [short version - whitewashed France, minus immigrants.])

Comments

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

Pesky social change!

The whole rolling-back-change-for-the-new-pastoral idea doesn't make me love YKK one whit less, but it's something to mull over, for sure.

I meant to link to both the YKK roundtable and the Pluto thing in not-quite-dead manga_talk, but I need to condense my accompanying text a wee bit.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

It doesn't surprise me at all - Progress vs. Nature with Nature, however it's represented, being better than humans/progress/whatever is a fairly frequent theme in the manga I've read. This is a different way of looking at it - a quiet supremacy, rather than a violent takeover.

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

I wish that whoever talked about Miyazaki had discussed Princess Mononoke in addition to Whisper of the Heart and the raccoons thing; Princess Monokoke has some really interesting commentary on the enroachment on nature by humans and technology that's less bleak and hungry for the lost, pure past than you might expect.

Nausicaa, too, I think, but I never got around to finishing it, so I'm going by the ending as described to me by a friend. (I gotta get on that.)

I can't remember--is the global warming thing in YKK discussed explicitly, or do we just guess at it from hints? Is it implied to be a natural climate shift, or something that humankind has brought on itself (using, of course, technology, therefore making the whole thing attributable to human development)?

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Yeah - PM is a complex movie with no easy answers, and I love it for that. Nausicaa is less complex, IIRC, but I have a vague feeling that the movie doesn't have Miyazaki's originally intended ending, but he had to shorten and simplify it for budgetary or other reasons. (ETA: I never read the manga.)

I think the YKK catastrophe is never really explained, and we have to gather what happened, and it's never really clear what the ultimate cause was. OTOH, it could probably be interpreted either way - either humanity caused the catastrophe, or that nature was reasserting itself.

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

I sort-of sat through the movie but didn't pay attention, so my friend was explaining how the manga differed--it's apparently much more complicated then the movie.

She said the movie was envisioned first, and the Miyazaki began the manga because he was told he had to have a script before they'd to the movie; the manga took much more time and story to finish, and his political stances changed in the fifteen years or so from when he began the project. So the movie may have had his originally intended ending, but later, he changed his mind, and took the manga elsewhere.

Her description of the manga ending sounded more in the PM vein--a recognition of the complex forces at work here, a refusal to write off human presence and human technology and modernity in favor of pastoral nostalgia--yes, modernity can be ugly, and yes, we have lost some good stuff along the way we may not ever get back, but it's what we have to live with now, and life like this *is* better than death.

[snarp]

The manga is very different - it's sort of an extended, analytical version of the things going on in the background in Princess Mononoke. As in, in PM we see some of the good Lady Eboshi does, and by extension some of the compromises necessary for the Abandon-All-Technonology fantasy, but it's more implied than explored. The Nausicaa manga goes a lot deeper.

Quelle cochon

[bitpig.livejournal.com]

Re Amelie: Ce critique est plein de merde. As a longtime Francophile, experienced traveler of France, and a someday-resident of that nation, I can say unequivocally that the "cliche, time-warp '50s France" that Monsieur Hipster Reviwer so casually disdains is the real France. Nobody in their right mind wants to watch a movie about the quasi-human immigrant vermin currently infesting that country, almost all of whom should be shipped back to their countries of origin tout de suite.

Re: Quelle cochon

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

A link to Roger Ebert's review of The Class, which has been getting good reviews from people like The Onion and The New Yorker, and which is considered a candidate for the Palme d'Or. (http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090204/REVIEWS/902049991)

Re: Quelle cochon

[snarp]

It would be appreciated if you would be a creep someplace where other people, engaged in entirely non-creep-related activities, are not obliged to stumble across it.

Re: Quelle cochon

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

You know, I'd just assumed that that was meant to be a parody of a horrifically racist person, until I looked at his journal.

Now I feel ill.

Re: Quelle cochon

[snarp]

Yeah; I had to read it a couple times, then click on his bio, before I realized he was serious. I kind of wonder if he's secretly, like, performance art.

Re: Quelle cochon

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Yes and no. I know him in real life* and he does hold strongly right-wing opinions, but he doesn't align with the Republicans, but farther right: he's a monarchist.

ETA: To explain the "yes" bit - he does carefully craft his posts in an attempt to provoke outrage, although he's stopped doing it so much on LJ in recent months.



* Hence why he's on my f-list. He balances out longshot14, who I also know in real life. If they were ever in the same space, the collision could produce warp drive. I know him through the convention circuit down here.