Laputa : Evoking and engaging with our sense of wonder

This is an accreting review of Laputa : Castle in the Sky (1986)

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11 May

This is an accreting review of Laputa : Castle in the Sky (Tenkû no shiro Rapyuta) (1986)

At @CamPicturehouse, Hiyao Miyazaki evoked and with engaged our sense of wonder - Laputa : Castle in the Sky (Tenkû no shiro Rapyuta) (1986)

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 11, 2016

Film references (identifying other films directed by Hayao Miyazaki¹) :

* Akira (1988)

* Howl’s Moving Castle (Hauru no ugoku shiro) (2004) [Hayao M.]

* Jupiter Ascending (2015)

* Princess Mononoke (1997) [Hayao M.]

* Spirited Away (Sento Chihirono kamikakushi) (2001) [Hayao M.]

* The Iron Giant (1999) [based on The Iron Man : A Children's Story in Five Nights, a novel by Ted Hughes, first published in 1968]

-> At @CamPicturehouse, Laputa : Castle in the Sky (Tenkû no shiro Rapyuta) (1986) would remind of The Iron Giant, but Hughes came first...

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 12, 2016

* The Matrix (1999)

* The Wind Rises (Kaze tachinu) (2013) [Hayao M.]


[...]

-> In 1726, when Swift first published what we call Gulliver's Travels, they still gave them snappy titles that smacked of verisimilitude.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 12, 2016

[...]


End-notes

¹ The following list is of motifs that will be familiar from these films (it is given non-exhaustively - simply to show that, as directors Wes Anderson or Woody Allen, for example, might have penchants or pet-themes that run through their films, even more so does Miyazaki, almost as if they are, as the case may be, running jokes, or leitmotifs) :

* Appearances / things not being what they seem (e.g. Princess Mononoke)

* Clouds / cloud formations (e.g. The Wind Rises)

* Flowers / blossoms (e.g. Howl’s Moving Castle)

* Flying-machines (e.g. The Wind Rises, and IMDb (@IMDb) lists Miyazaki's short film called Imaginary Flying Machines (2002))

* Gluttony (e.g. Spirited Away)

* Helpful eccentrics / outsiders (e.g. Spirited Away)

* Literary adaptation (e.g. Howl’s Moving Castle and the novel by Diana Wynne Jones)

* Noble blood / nobility in disguise (e.g. Spirited Away)

* Orphans (e.g. The Wind Rises)

* Powerful older women, behaving somewhat boisterously (e.g. Spirited Away)

* Railways (e.g. Spirited Away)

* The Industrial Revolution (in Western Europe) : factories, quarrying and the like (e.g. Princess Mononoke)

* Working / having to work menially to earn one’s keep (e.g. Spirited Away)


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Let's truncate like we did last summer !

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1 August

Did I bemoan boxset before ? Probably.

It now has a pair in crop top, not, as in crop circle, anything to do with what happened to Farmer Jack's wheat (or rye), but a mutational shortening of cropped top.

I have a theory, and it goes back to the debate that raged at the time of Swift whether raged should appear rag'd so that it was clear that it did not end with a separate syllable, -ed, as in blessed. Others argued not to have rag'd marked out as an exception, with all the others of its kind, but for 'blessed', as more unusual, to be rendered as we know it, blessed.

This, I believe, is what is going on here : in a marginally literate world, where so much is aural, boxed set has 'slipped' to the linguistically nonsensical boxset, and equally cropped top to crop top.

Laziness, ignorance, fashion - I don't really care which it is, but I despise it !


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Drays of doubt

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29 April

When there is a shortage of water in (parts of) the UK, let's spare a thought for those counties that, in past centuries, were so unshakable in their beliefs that they got stuck in a rut, and, not unlike the Wednesbury lot who (at my hands, too) get such stick for coming to that famously unreasonable decision that no one could reasonably have made*, were worryingly in danger of binding themselves in hide.

The drastic solution was to seed this rigid application of rules and principles (and to hell with the consequences), a bit as one might a patch of ice with salt. So government-sponsored orators would go around, on the back of waggons, proclaiming alternative viewpoints, and arguing for a Grey between the Black and White. (Dr, later Dean, Jonathan Swift - although not one of these orators himself - wrote scripts for them to memorize and employ.)

Of course, some counties were so entrenched in their views, that all this achieved nothing, and the orators were hanged or stoned, and thus - as no one has dared since to send anyone into the vineyard (oops! different topic, as that's a parable) - we have modern Britain, where angels fear to tread in such homelands of dogma, discrimination and dis-ease***.


QED


End-notes

* Yes, how that decision is described** is a bit like divorce, and the behaviour that is so unreasonable that the other party could not reasonably be expected to tolerate it, except that almost any marriage will have given rise to events that are sufficient to flesh out the required particulars for a judge to certify that a divorce can proceed - broadly speaking, first, last and worst, plus a few others.

It must be said, a soul-destroying task, both for the person drawing up those particulars, and for the one reading them, even if both may be (as, respectively, solicitor / legal executive and judge) paid to do it... Pay does not make pleasant the unpalatable, as Seneca declaimed - but it does help!

** If memory serves aright, it was something to do with licensing a cinema, of all things.

*** As Stephen Potter would have called it.


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