Anime, You Say?

There's so much I want to put on this thing, but so little time and each bit is unrelated to the other, and none of it is really related to movies. So I'll write a straight up, no nonsense entry about movies, or at least I'll try. Last week, Sunday night to be exact I watched Tonari no Totoro by Hayao Miyazaki. As I've explained before, I don't understand the genre of anime, but I watched this for a few reasons. The first being that the video shop is running out of Japanese movies for Ali and me to watch unless she wants to watch samurai films. The second reason is that Ali said I had to watch it, and the third reason being that the guy who wrote Totoro also wrote the 2003 Best Animated Feature with Spirited Away. I haven't seen that one, and I may not see it on account of I've seen enough Japanimation thanks to Bobby and his Saturday morning cartoons back in the... way back when. These films aren't technically what I consider Japanimation, but they're close enough. After some assurance from Ali that there was no cartoonudity in Totoro, we rented the new deluxe DVD version. Don't bother. The second DVD is just storyboards for the film with dialogue laid over top. Save the money and get the single DVD. If you're interested, Ali also recommends Neko no ongaeshi, or in English The Cat Returns. Hmmmm, Dr. Seuss? Mebbe, dunno.

Any skepticism of Totoro was quickly erased by the opening landscape. It was so realistic. Imagine if I had an HDTV... The movie is pretty short, about an hour. Ali thought that it was part of a series, and after watching this one I wanted to see the others. Well, there is no series, or there was no series. The film came out in 1988 and might possibly have been ahead of its time or on the vanguard for all that Pokemon/Sailor Moon tripe that soon followed.

Totoro is about a family that moves to an old house in the country. I like to think its Tohoku, but it could be anywhere. In any event, its close enough by bus to an urban area with a college/university. The father is a lecturer and the mother is in hospital. Allegedly, this is partly after Miyazaki's childhood. The two daughters, Mei and Satsuki have fun exploring their new home and getting over the rumours that the place is haunted. Mei copies everything that big sister Satsuki does, and while Satsuki is off at school, Mei finds a tunnel in a hedge. She follows it and discovers Totoro. Totoro is a big friendly troll who travels around Japan on a big cosmic ten-legged cat bus. Mei tries to explain to her sister and father about Totoro, but they don't believe her. She eventually convinces Satsuki, and the two dance around the magic camphor tree.

The mother is scheduled to come home from the hospital, but complications cause her to stay longer. Mei decides that she is going to go to the hospital and give her mum some of the food they had planned to eat at her welcome home dinner. Mei goes missing, and the town frantically searches for her. I started to wonder what kind of cartoon shows kids going missing, and at this point I can't remember how they find her (it was last week afterall), but she comes home safe and sound. We never see the mother come home from the hospital, but it is implied in the closing credits where they show stills of the family together in the new house.

For some reason, Ali cried over this movie and that's what makes it the best anime movie I've ever seen. At first I thought she was crying because we watched a woman collapse earlier in the day. Neither of us did anything, but Orange Peel saved the day. J called an ambulance, but OP was there for the very important social work needed to deal with a shock. Like a pro, or like someone whose talked quite a few friends down from a bad trip, OP calmly told the daughter to relax and wait for the ambulance. A third guy who didn't stick around long actually caught the woman from falling on the floor. At first I thought she was having a seizure, which is why I didn't approach. Apart from cramming a wallet in the mouth and turning the head to the side, I was always told to let seizures happen when and where they must - not that I'm a first aid guru. Well, it wasn't a seizure and OP sure let me and J know how she felt about our hesitation. The ambulance came and the crew checked out the woman who was fine now. They knew her, and apparently the same thing had happened to her a few days before. I saw where this was going, but I guess I was more upset by the daughter's reaction. None of us had any appetite now, so we left the restaurant, and I'll probably never go there again. I went there in search of a dairyless carbonara I heard tell of at Blue Lotus, but I passed on it. J had it instead, and said it was pretty good with his warm(!) beer. I did a bit of research on this place before going. My old boss told me that she knew it and that I would like it. "Very European", she said. Yeah, if European means loud and crammed in somebody's basement. It shows how much she knows - I didn't like it, and the service was pretty disorganized.

But that wasn't what made Ali cry. It turns out she had a touch of home sickness accompanied by a bit of a realization that she could never be a kid again, but she didn't know how to explain it and she would never admit that she missed her kid sister.