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Movie Analysis

Ever wondered what was up with No-Face from Spirited Away?

An in-depth, topical look at how Credence Barebone from Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, born of a difficult and repressed environment, is being pulled by various parties in his society for their own ends.

Studio Ghibli's From Up on Poppy Hill is about a time of great change in postwar Japan and how the characters choose to navigate that change without entirely losing their connection to the past.

Short Fiction

Sputnik's Passage. Just a short existential story about everybody's favorite satellite.

Night Driving. Because sometimes you catch an odd, wistful feeling on half-empty roads at night and can't shake it.

Misc

And for a bonus here's a Mega Man X vgm cover of Storm Eagle's stage music I recorded. And some very amateurish instrumental rock music I composed back in the day.

Gwayne is the best. The most normal character in this show. The little Baratheon ruse had some nice action, more believable than Daemon or Aemond soloing the Red Keep and Harrenhal. Also enjoyed his talks with Daeron and then Ormund. Those were my favorite scenes this episode.

Obviously I still have some disagreements over the writers insisting on Alicent remaining a major player, forcing them to get her to betray her sons and do other weird things, but I guess we've already crossed that bridge. It's interesting the similarity between the names of Alys and Alicent considering the show chose to give Aemond serious mommy issues.

There's a nice little callback to S1 when Alicent grabs the same arm where she wounded Rhaenyra. Then there's this nice little gesture where Rhaenyra tugs at her sleeve, which says so much.

I wish they hadn't changed Criston's character so much. His death would've been more impactful had he actually been the Kingmaker. And they should've included the famous book quote. At least they finally showed him being the greatest warrior of his time before they took him out. I wish the writers had let him die with his armor on though. Also the Blacks hiding in the woods should've rushed the field earlier instead of letting their fake dead people die for real in an even match first. That was stupid writing and tactics.

The sleeve tug says it all. Pretty close to where the old scar would be.

I don't know if this is the writers having a bit of fun with themselves or just mere coincidence, but one of Corlys' lines about sea trade can also

I really liked this episode.

Though I liked season 1, it did rush through things. I would've liked to see more of Rhaenyra and Alicent growing up together and the ill will slowly developing over time before we got a final time jump. Or seeing Jace spend more time in the North.

I wish this show's pacing was like this episode more often. It's a fantasy show with money behind it. We don't want a summary, we want to soak in the world. Spoilers below.

Kids would talk about how weird and gross she was to her face or in hearing distance. And that was just the start of the bullying.

The only specific saga to her weirdness I can remember is that once on the playground at recess she picked up a stick and bit it lightly sideways for a second (think Bugs Bunny and a carrot). Tale of her doing that got around quickly and was played up. I never really thought she was that weird except that all the other kids kept saying she was. I really can't remember why else she was weird, but the reasons were probably dumb anyway. And it bled through to other classes in our grade too who could interact with her at recess. The bullying eventually evolved from talking to silence. She was being shunned pretty bad.

This might be main character syndrome but the way I remember it, I was the last kid to sort of treat her normally. Maybe not quite her last friend... maybe just her last real acquaintance. But one day I started shunning her too, no real reason, just because everyone else was, so at that point no one was really talking to her.

One day at the start of the school day my teacher called the attention of everyone in our class and informed us that because of the bullying, Brandy's parents had decided to pull her out of our school and transfer her to a different school so she could get a fresh start.

I was wondering what you think of

“To what extent does Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away use fantasy and the manipulation of time and space to explore identity as an evolving construct shaped by memory, emotional reconciliation, and the journey from childhood to maturity, and how does the creator use medium-specific techniques to portray the tension between escapism and emotional truth?”

Would love to hear your perspective, especially since your writing shows such a strong grasp of the film’s deeper themes. :)

Thanks in advance, and hope you’re having a great day!

That's a very fancy question. Almost sounds like a homework question. :P I don't think I can cover every aspect of it but I'll take a quick crack at what I think I can answer. Because reading it did make me realize something about how the movie functions, so thank you for the question. I'm specifically interested in speaking of the genre-specific techniques of fantasy rather than the medium-specific techniques of animation.

There are dual narratives occurring in Spirited Away--a grounded narrative and a fantastical narrative.

The beginning of the movie shows us the beginning of Chihiro's grounded story: Chihiro, a 10-year-old girl, is moving. That's a scary time when one feels unsettled. Doubts about if one will like a new place, a new house, a new school, whether they will make any friends or be ostracized, unfinished business or friendships left behind in the old place (having a favorite teacher can feel meaningless when you are learning that life means you sometimes have to leave favorite persons behind), etc. The list of doubts goes on and on for a child who doesn't have adult problems like paying the bills to worry about. A child's social life is almost their world entire. It really gets the butterflies going in the stomach.

Chihiro's a well-behaved child. She certainly doesn't lash out strongly at her parents. But it's possible she feels a sense of inner betrayal from the people who are supposed to make her feel safe and happy (now, granted, parents can become problematic helicopter parents if they shield their kids from all surprises in life, but I digress). They are introducing her to the uncomfortable feeling of uncertainty now through this move, perhaps the first major shakeup of her young life. She'll have doubts about her place in the world. Perhaps in her old life Chihiro was a girl whose best friend was Mindy, or whose favorite teacher was Ms. Tanaka, or whose favorite cubby for her personal effects was the lower left one, or whose favorite tree in the park was the leaning one. But now she is unmoored. Who is she if those things from her old life cannot be used to define her anymore? This ties very well into how the antagonist Yubaba takes people's names, changing our protagonist to Sen for the majority of the film as she struggles with that question.

This is the central growth arc of the entire movie--Chihiro accepting this move and that life will throw the unexpected at you. That change is the only constant. In the English-language version, she definitively succeeds and at the end of the movie has become more emotionally mature or resilient. She can live with and move past the unsettled feeling that life will present her at times. Because she conquers herself, she does not need to become some rebellious or sulky adolescent at the end of the movie taking things out on her poor parents, who, after all, are just making the best decision for the whole family. She will approach her new home in earnest, instead of looking for things to dislike about it. There will be no trouble adjusting.

I find that the fantasical narrative of the movie supports the grounded narrative. How? By utilizing the fear of the unknown, which unlocks a similar psychosomatic sensation to feeling unsettled during a big move or other life change, in both Chihiro and us the viewers.

When we as viewers or readers enter a fantasy world, we don't quite know what to expect. We have to learn the rules of the new fantasy world. By navigating that unknown world, we too get an unsettled feeling as we witness day turn to night and strange spirits start to move about the bathhouse. They're visually spooky. We don't know what their deal is, whether they are dangerous or friends, if you die here do you die in the real world, are we stuck here forever, etc. The unknown creates in us an unsettled feeling that mirrors Chihiro's own unsettled feeling, in both her grounded (I have to move) and fantasical (holy cow my parents are pigs now how do I get them back!?) narratives. This is especially true for Western audiences unfamiliar with Shintoism or other aspects of Japanese folklore such as the very idea of being spirited away to another realm to learn some lesson.

Boy oh boy when you open up a Bear episode and it's an hour long you know you're in for a treat, the best the creators think they've got, and this delivered. Just banger after banger.

I wasn't a fan of the start of this episode.

A romantic relationship for Carmy isn't a bad thing for a show like the Bear. It doesn't have to be all restaurant for Carmy. The themes of the show are also about how to work through trauma. And being able to have a healthy romantic relationship can also feed that theme.

They just did a bad job writing it with Claire, who's just so perfect and all the other characters will tell you about how perfect she is too. They should've written a character who feels realistic. The writers cooked her up in a lab, not kitchen, to be the peace for Carmy.

And therein lies the problem. We don't say that Jimmy represents Charity for Carmy. Or that Luca represents Grace. Or Marcus Fidelity. That's because they're their own grounded people not defined by Carmy, not so easy to be boiled down to one thing. Claire is not like that. Claire very much is constructed for Carmy.

My personal favorites from the Femme Fatale art book by Toshiaki Kato (1943-1996).

Someone made this comment on another website defending AI art: "it is a tool. Only the result is important, not the path. The biggest trait of artist is knowing when to stop, when the art is finished, and his satisfaction with the piece is showing the level of his talent and artistic intelligence. The attempts which artist throws into trash, the way he knows what looks and feels good, his taste, is actually what makes a great artist. Not the type of brushes he´s using."

It rankled me so I responded with this:

The path is important. If you look at art progress pics it shows a certain human determination to push through when one's skills are not there yet, to slowly hone one's skills over the years until they are finally capable of the vision an artist has in their head. That's very human and it's what AI artists lack in their art.

Taste is an important part of an artist's mind or heart, but when it comes to an AI artist I'd hesitate to call it talent on their part. They are not the artist themselves. They are not the ones who are making the brushstrokes. If anything they are more similar to patrons of Renaissance Italy, only they are commissioning AI instead of a human being. Yes, the taste and commissions of those rich patrons were a vital part of the art scene, but they were not the artists themselves making it happen. In the same sense, it is the AI that is actually creating the art, not the AI "artist."

I have taste which feeds into my appreciation of art, but I am content with that. I would not say that that taste makes me an artist. Because I don't put in a prompt and pretend that I am the creator, slapping my name on a piece I didn't work for. It was the churn of computer processors and memory that labored for AI art.

There's a huge difference between a real artist scrapping ten pieces of artwork that don't meet their standards and an AI artist "scrapping" a hundred pieces of artwork that don't meet their "standards." There's nothing to the AI artist scrapping artwork. They're not killing their darlings. The scrapped pieces of work are nothing personal to them, they feel absolutely no ownership of these failures.

Never failed; never tried. The AI artist has never dared to sit with failure.