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it-happened-one-fic · 2 years

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How Would Eternity Do? - Malleus

Author's Notes: Back at it with the Twisted Wonderland fics. I suppose I'm a little hopeless at this point. This one was written while I was listening to Lord Huron's song "Meet Me in the Woods." I did use the English nickname for Malleus "Hornton" rather than the Japanese one. Reader is gender-neutral as per usual.

Type: Romantic/fluff

Word count: 1477

I smiled quietly to myself as I set out into the dark trees that surrounded Ramshackle dorm. I’d seen the faint green lights that resembled fireflies and now led me down an old path through the window.

Truthfully, it probably looked like a scene out of a horror movie. A lone person traipsing through dead trees and a decrepit graveyard, following some strange lime green lights into the darkness that held…. Well, in a horror movie it would hold unimaginable horrors, but for me it just held a close friend.

Despite my surroundings I was perfectly comfortable, happy even, as I let the lights guide me down the unfamiliar path because I knew what these lights meant. They always signaled Malleus’s arrival.

Well, technically they signaled my friend, Hornton’s, arrival. But I had learned that ‘Hornton’ was, in fact, Malleus quite some time ago.

It had been months ago when I’d been walking to class with Ace and Deuce. Ace had pulled me to a halt and pointed out Hornton just before whispering in my ear, “That’s Malleus. He’s one of the top mages and the Prince of Thorn Valley.”

My eyes had widened at Ace’s hissed words but not for the reason he thought. Ace had only nodded, with Deuce mirroring the motion, “Scary looking guy ain’t he?”

I’d opted to ignore my companion's comment, instead thinking about how at long last I knew why my night-time visitor always seemed kind of lonely.

I hadn’t told Malleus that I knew his identity though. He seemed happy thinking that I didn't have a clue who he was. Judging from the rumors abounding in the school he probably thought I’d be terrified if I knew he was the one and only Malleus Draconia.

Even if he had told me his name when we’d first met I wouldn’t have been afraid of him though. After all, I hadn’t the foggiest an idea of just who Malleus Draconia was up until recently.

Sebek had been quite generous with his education of the great and powerful Lord Malleus while my other classmates had been quite generous with their warnings regarding Malleus. Had I not known better I would’ve thought they were talking about two entirely different people.

Luckily for Malleus, I’d received another education regarding his personality. I’d gotten to know the man himself and found him to be quite charming. Malleus was dorky, elegant, unimaginably powerful, and unimaginably petty. He was so far behind the times I feared there was no hope for him and he was a constant tease.

In short, he was a perfectly normal but perfectly marvelous young man that had a penchant for presenting himself as terrifying when he was, in fact, just lonely and rather awkward.

It wasn’t that I didn’t understand why others viewed him as terrifying. He was beyond powerful and that, paired with his pettiness, could be quite scary if one didn’t realize how affectionate and ridiculous he could be.

As I progressed through the woods the number of green lights only seemed to grow alongside my confusion. Usually Malleus would simply show up on the porch or in the front yard, perusing the gargoyles and grotesques around Ramshackle.

I didn’t know if I had ever spoken to him anywhere other than my front, side, or back yard. We certainly never left the view of the house. In fact, we usually never left the shadow of the Ramshackle.

The fact he had me traipsing through the woods was both confusing and a little exciting since it probably meant he had something to show me.

And sure enough I found the man himself, standing in the middle of a clearing alone. The only light was that of the moon and his strange dancing lights that so resembled fireflies.

He twisted, a fond smile gracing his features as those glowing green eyes found my form in the darkness. “Child of man,” He reached out, beckoning me closer with a single twitch of his long fingers.

I smiled and walked towards him, abandoning the shadows of the trees to meet him in the surprisingly bright clearing. I’d never seen so many of his little lights in one place before. It made me wonder what they were.

I reached out, poking one slightly which only caused to flit away and him to chuckle. I glanced, looking at the swirling lights, “What are these things anyway?”

He let out a quiet hum as he looked around the small lights that surrounded us, mirroring my actions, “I suppose your people would think of them as ‘faerie lights’ or perhaps ‘will-o-the-wisps.’” He met my eyes and smiled, a wicked sort of grin, “I believe your people also think they lead people astray. Were you not concerned, following their lead?”

I snorted at his not so subtle amusement, “Hardly. They were just going to lead me directly to you.”

His grin turned almost smug as he looked down at me and I felt myself starting to grin back up at him. I glanced around the clearing, spreading my arms to gesture to the odd little area, “So is this what you wanted to show me?”

His eyes went comically wide at my question and he looked around in an almost childlike manner before looking back at me, “What I wanted to show you…?”

I only smiled at his curious sounding tone before I started to explain, “Well, you didn’t show up in the front yard like you usually would and instead used your lights to lead me all the way out here. I just figured you wanted to show this place to me.”

He blinked silently at me before chuckling slightly and shaking his head, “I see…. No, this is just a place I like to go to… get away.

He tilted his head in an oddly catlike manner before continuing, “I suppose a small part of me might have wanted you to know its location so that you could use it should you wish.”

I nodded, turning in place as I looked around. It was sort of odd. A random clearing in the middle of the woods that had a tiny old dirt path leading to it.

It made me wonder what this place was supposed to be. There was nothing really here and it was quite obvious that it hadn’t been used for anything for a long time. Malleus had probably been the only person who’d been coming here at all.

“It would be a nice place to go when you’re lonely,” I mused aloud, thinking about how quiet it was here. Peaceful really.

“Do you get lonely often?” Malleus’s quiet question drew me out of my thoughts, causing me to turn and look at him. Before I could respond he continued, “You are often with our friends so I’d always thought….”

He trailed off, a strange expression on his face that made me sigh slightly, “You can be lonely even when you’re surrounded sometimes, Hornton.”

His gaze met mine mine, understanding flickering deep within his almost fluorescent lime green eyes, “Do you feel lonely when you are with me?”

His question caught me off guard. At first my eyes widened and then I frowned as I actually had to think about his question.

Truthfully speaking, I‘d never been lonely when I’d been with Malleus. But it was always just the two of us. The loneliness I’d been speaking of was that which occurs when you are in a group or crowd but somehow feel all alone.

To be fair, I didn’t know that I would feel lonely even if I were in such a crowd alongside Malleus though. He always seemed to place most, if not all of his attention on me. Even when he was talking about how fascinating a specific gargoyle was he still focused on me. After all, he always seemed to know when my mind wandered. Although that could just be him pouting because he didn’t think I was paying attention….

“No… I don’t think I have ever been lonely around you Hornton,” I smiled as I met his gaze.

A smug grin crossed his face and he leaned forward, sweeping into a sort of bow till his eyes were at almost the same level as mine, “Then you could always come to me when you are feeling lonely. I will be certain to comfort you.”

I found myself grinning at his words, but I shook my head, “I’m not going to waste your time like that Hornton. There is no way you have enough time to always keep me company when I’m feeling down. I mean really, do you realize how long that would take?”

His smile only spread, causing his eyes to crinkle slightly as a glimmer of mischievousness flashed through them, “How would eternity do?”

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zzzzzestforlife · 3 months

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zesty hi!!! how are you? hope you've been doing well and taking good care of yourself :D

congrats on the completion of your langblr challenge!! this is me dropping in to send you asks 2, 4, 12, 13 and 14 as a part of the celebration ^=^

megs!! 🥰 thank youuu, there have been a lot of ups and downs lately for no good reason but i feel like today is going to be a good day 😊

2 - if you could go on a long roadtrip anywhere, where would you go?

오직 한 개?? only one?? 짜, 어렵은 선택한, 하지만 일본에세 가고 싶어! okay, it's a difficult choice, but i want to go to Japan! 🇯🇵 그래서 내 일본어 배우는 동기를 모아도 거에요 ㅋ ㅋ so i can gather motivation to learn Japanese haha 😂

4 - best sing-along dance-alone in your room songs?

쉬운! easy! 다 세분틴의 노래들 Seventeen's entire discography 💃

12 - a book you recommend to anyone who will listen

The Midnight Library! 이 책을 읽고 내 인생을 바괐어! i changed my life after reading this book!

13 - a movie you recommend to anyone who will listen

Serenity! (but watch the Firefly series first! i happened to watch Serenity first without knowing there was a whole TV series that takes place prior to that) 이건 내 첫번째 중국어 배운한 동기해 거 같아! i think this is my first motivation to learn Chinese! 🌌

14 - are you good at keeping plants alive

아니야! no! i once killed a cactus lol 선인장 죽하다 ㅋ ㅋ 🌵

💌 ask game

#korean langblr #seventeen #studyblr #study motivation #langblr #친구 #asks #send asks #send me asks #ask game #get to know me #bookblr #movies #kpop #japan #japan travel #learning korean #language learning #langblog

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canmom · 1 year

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Animation Night 130: Hayao Miyazaki’s Aeroplane Movies

Oh that Hayao Miyazaki! We sure have a slightly complicated relationship to him here on Animation Night!

See for example...

Animation Night 70, where I talk about his early career and years as a Toei union man, up to the founding of Ghibli;

Animation Night 100 where I tell you about one of my favourite ever films Mononoke-Hime;

Animation Night 111 where we look at the fascinating My Neighbour Totoro-Grave of the Fireflies double bill of 1988.

Tonight, we’re going to look at two films, Porco Rosso and the controversial The Wind Rises, which indicate his particular arc through life in, honestly, a rather sad way. Putting them alongside each other to see what we learn...

If there’s one thing old Hayao loves, it is aeroplanes - particularly planes from the early-mid 20th century. No surprise, really: his dad Katsuji Miyazaki ran a company Miyazaki Airplane, which manufactured parts for world war II aeroplanes such as the infamous Zero fighter plane. (Put a pin in that one!) Despite working to arm the Imperial Japanese military, Katsuji was able to get out of actually serving in the war by telling his commanding officer that he didn’t want to fight when he had a wife and kid, which somehow got him discharged with just a lecture.

The young Hayao, born 1941, was therefore surrounded by planes, which were the source of his family’s comfort. He spent his earliest years fleeing from American air raids, suffering from digestive problems, and watching his stern, intellectual mother Yoshiko suffering from spinal tuberculosis (though she ultimately made it to 1983, at age 72). At school in the 50s, he took an interest in manga - which in those days naturally meant Osamu Tezuka; he also went to see drama films with Katsuji such as Meshi (1951).

In ‘58, he saw Toei’s Legend of the White Snake (白蛇伝 Hakujaden), notable as the first colour anime film, sneaking out from studying for his exams. The film had a profound effect on him. In Starting Point, he writes that he fell in love with the film’s heroine Bai-Niang, and yet gradually started to imagine how he might have done the film differently to better show the secondary characters.

Hayao went to university to study political economy with a focus on ‘Japanese Industrial Theory’, and at the same time, started drawing in earnest, cranking out thousands of pages of manga and spending a lot of time sketching and chatting politics with his middle school art teacher. The 60s and 70s were a high point of left-wing activity in Japan, the time of the Japanese New Left and the Anpo protests against the US-Japan security treaty (c.f. Toku Tuesday 33 on Nagisa Ōshima for a truly fascinating filmmaker who rose to prominence at this time!) So Miyazaki fairly naturally became a Marxist, and stayed such as he got his start working in animation, which I’ve covered in other posts.

So at this point perhaps we can see the curious contradiction that sits in so much of Miyazaki’s work: he genuinely loves aeroplanes and other kinds of military hardware on a kind of aesthetic level, and yet this sits pretty curiously against a worldview that went from Marxist to environmentalist and has no love of war or nationalism.

With all this in mind, let’s take a look at a few of Miyazaki’s early depictions of planes. First would be his work on episode 21 of Moomin (1969), by TMS entertainment. On this infamous episode, Miyazaki’s senpai Yasuo Otsuka called in his protégé to handle of all things a battle scene with planes and tanks - one which infuriated Tove Jansson, already dissatisfied with the tone of the adaptation, to the point that she pulled the show out of TMS Entertainment and A-Pro’s hands and gave it to Tezuka’s rival studio Mushi Pro instead.

(I can’t find any embeddable version, but I did get my hands on this episode eventually! Lain bless soulseek.)

This did not deter Miyazaki at all. In his work on ‘Green Jacket’ Lupin III Part I, which he co-directed with Takahata and Masaaki Ōsumi as well as animating several scenes, we start to see his love of mechanical detail shine through once more. Miyazaki’s plane obsession would shine through even more strongly with his direction of two episodes of ‘red jacket’ Lupin III Part II (1980), under the pen name “Tsutomu Teruki”, directing animators like the spectacular Kazuhide Tomonaga as @kbnet documents here. By that point his style had matured - the character designs and motion feel like something drawn in Ghibli’s early years, and the plane backgrounds are astonishingly dense with detail. The Castle of Cagliostro is by comparison relatively light on aeroplanes, but truly elevates Lupin’s car to a character - not to mention the film’s ridiculously elaborate finale where the characters battle through an enormous system of gears.

In between these two Lupin jackets came Future Boy Conan, where we start to see Miyazaki find more things to say about planes than “damn cool!”; a full of wonderful plane adventures, yet they also represent the sinister forces of industrialism which destroyed the world once and threaten to do it again.

In an essay from 1979 that opens the collection Starting Point, Miyazaki remarks on the qualities needed to animate a plane on Conan, giving a sense of his philosophy around animated machines - and his perfectionism:

Quite a few of toda’s younger animators plunged directly into this line of work because they were fans. But if I were to ask them to draw a picture of what they think a chaika (a flying boat in Future Boy Conan) would look like in flight, they would only be able to imagine what they had previously seen on past TV anime shows. And I wouldn’t be able to use their work as a result.

To draw a chaika flying in a truly original fashion, you would need to have read at least one book on the history of flying, and then be able to use your imagination to augment what you have read.

This is followed by an anecdote about Russian pilot, and builder of the first four-engine biplane, Igor Sikorsky - the man who for Miyazaki “symbolises the way men really fly”.

Miyazaki of 1979 seemed to have a lot on his mind about the relationship of humans to machines. He criticises the mecha shows of the time for a lack of focus on how the character creates and maintains the machine: “the protagonist should struggle to build his own machine, he should fix it when it breaks down, and he should have to operate it himself”. And true to form, when Miyazaki’s films portray machines, there is as much loving depiction of the maintenance as the actual machines in flight.

We’ll fast forward now, since I talked quite a bit about The Castle of Cagliostro, Nausicaa and Castle in the Sky back on AN 70, and Totoro back on AN 111. I haven’t covered Kiki’s Delivery Service yet, although you can trust we will before too long! No, the first film of interest to us tonight is a bit of an oddball in the Ghibli oeuvre; well known to fans of the studio but not quite as much of a household name. That’s Miyazaki’s flying pig movie, Porco Rosso (紅の豚 Kurei no Buta).

^ here’s your obligatory Yoshinori Kanada-animated background animation scene!

Porco Rosso is Miyazaki’s first movie to not just feature planes, but be truly overwhelmingly about planes. Set in a vaguely Mediterranean world, it expresses Miyazaki’s nostalgia for a lost era of flying before he was born, and yet it’s also tinged with the impending horror of the second world war and the recognition that the planes that Miyazaki loves so much are above all weapons.

Unlike many of Miyazaki’s movies, it centres on mostly adult characters and its narrative arc doesn’t really move to any sort of definite resolution; it’s more a portrait of the era, or rather, Miyazaki’s fantastical imagination of the era, in which there can be sky pirate families flying with dozens of children and, of course, a man can get transformed into a pig. The central character of the film, the eponymous Porco Rosso (so called because he’s a pig (porco) that flies a red (rosso) aeroplane), is an outcast due to his pig curse, but also perhaps because he insists on flying for himself rather than for the Italian military, a stance that is already becoming obsolete.

So Porco ends up adopting a young aircraft engineer - a bishōjo character in the spirit of The Castle of Cagliostro - who is eager to see the world. The largest conflict in the film is Porco butting heads with an arrogant American pilot over the affections of Gina, a woman who runs a bar for pilots - yet the two are clearly more similar than different.

By this point Studio Ghibli is well-established, and Miyazaki can take his pick from some of the best animators in the entire industry. So we see not just Yoshinori Kanada, but also sakuga aces Mitsuo Iso(!!!) and Shinya Ohira(!!!), and with Ghibli money they can truly go all-out. All that attention to mechanical detail, the buliding of machines, is there. Events like the testing of an aeroplane engine are accompanied by incredibly complex multi-layered shots that only a drawing demon like Ohira could accomplish. Only someone whose grasp of 3D form is as precise as Mitsuo Iso could animate some of these shots of subtle wobbles in the pre-CGI era. And on top of that, the colour design of Michyo Yasuda is there in all its beauty, Joe Hisaishi truly came into his own with a score as wistful and nostalgic as such a film demands; it’s an incredibly accomplished work of animation.

But, planes though.

One of the film’s most memorable scenes - one which unites the two films we’re going to see tonight - sees Porco fly up high into the sky to a kind of flying graveyard of aeroplane pilots. It’s here we especially see the ambivalence that obsesses Miyazaki: he finds aeroplanes one of the most beautiful things in the world, idolises their pilots, and yet of course this period of aviation was an incredibly dangerous one, and moreover the aeroplane development was catalysed by war and soon would lead to a level of destruction never seen before in human history with the bombing campaigns of the second world war.

It would be natural to imagine that the workshop where Porco recruits Fio may in some way resemble the workshop run by Miyazaki’s parents - in spirit, as he imagines it, if not in detail. Like Miyazaki Airplane, this workshop in Italy cannot be doing anything but supplying aeroplanes to Mussolini, and indeed we see Porco utter one of the most quoted lines in the film when he tells his old air force buddy “I’d rather be a pig than a fascist.” even though this leaves him essentially a fugitive, on his own with a plane and a girl (like half his age I guess?).

^ This swarm of tadpole-like children was animated by Masashi Ando.

If you actually read Miyazaki’s comments about his dad, it seems a little different. Far from being lovingly crafted, Miyazaki writes, Katsuji would make defective parts and bribe officials to look the other way. He would go to nightclubs right into his 70s and ask Hayao if he’d started smoking yet.

At the time this film came out, Hayao Miyazaki’s father Katsuji would die only a couple of years later, in 1993. We can find a short piece that Hayao wrote about it in Starting Point (page 208-209, My Old Man’s Back):

...And after the war, he had no sense of guilt about having been involved in the military arms industry or having produced defective parts. In effect, for him war was something that only idiots engaged in. If we were going to war anyway, he was going to make money off of it. He had absolutely no interest in just causes or the fate of the state. For him the only concern was how his family would survive.

(...)

When he died two years ago, those of us who gathered together agreed that he had never once said anything particularly lofty or inspiring. If I have one regret, it is that I never discussed things seriously with my old man. From the time I was young, I always looked at him as a negative example. But it seems, after all, that I am like him. I have inherited my old man’s anarchistic feelings and his lack of concern about embracing contradictions.

So the actual reality of aeroplanes around Miyazaki had little to do with the romantic images we see in his films. But that ‘lack of concern about embracing contradictions’ seems important...

In 2013, 20 years after Katsuji’s death, Miyazaki would direct a new film, The Wind Rises (風立ちぬ Kaze Tachinu, lit. The Wind Has Written) - to date, his last film, although of course like clockwork he’s since come out of retirement to work on another one. Ostensibly, this film is a biopic of Jiro Horikoshi, the inventor of the Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter plane so vital to the Imperial Japanese war machine.

However, if you look into the details, you soon realise that the story present in the film - particularly its central element of Jiro love interest and eventual wife Naoko Satomi - is a complete fiction. Jiro Horikoshi did marry and eventually had five children, but there is very little information about them, even in Horikoshi’s own autobiography. An article comparing the film against it remarks...

The Story of the Zero Fighter is 80% plane design ideas, measurements and stories surrounding Jiro’s career. There’s so much focus on the construction of the planes there’s a measly 20% left for autobiographical material.

According to that article, Horikoshi’s autobiography describes his initial thrill at reports of the Zero’s success in the invasion of China, then later, the psychological impact of a bomb striking nearby and his gradual realisation of what a war actually meant. It’s an arc towards increasing horror at the measures the Japanese Empire was taking to win the war with it, particularly the announcement of the Kamikaze suicide-bomber tactic:

Jiro was approached by the press to write a short essay on the Kamikaze, but he declined. He found it too emotionally difficult to think when he looked at photographs of smiling pilots boarding Zero’s, knowing they were doomed to death. Sobbing, the only sentiment that encouraged him to put pen to paper was dedicating his writings to the families who had lost their loved ones in the war. In the haunted depths of his mind he wondered why Japan had not just given up the war, and why they had gone to such measures with the Zero’s.

Very little of this arc makes it into The Wind Rises. Nationalism is glimpsed only at the margins. In one trip to Weimar Germany, Horikoshi witnesses a Jewish man being pursued; later, he meats a privately anti-Nazi German man at the hospital who talks briefly about how foolish nationalism will make a country ‘blow up’, and his final oblique conversation with the dream-ghost of his idol, Italian aircraft engineer Giovanni Cabroni, about what it means to build planes when they will be tragically be destroyed.

Instead, we find Miyazaki draw in a different source for the primary character arc of this movie: a novel by Tatsuo Hori that also has the title 風立ちぬ Kaze Tachinu. Set in a sanitarium much like the one in which Horikoshi spends the latter half of the film, it tells the story of the relationship between a nameless protagonist and a woman dying of tuberculosis.

It seems an odd connection at a glance: why would you take this seemingly entirely unrelated novel and apply it to an actual historical person? To me, the most plausible answer is that this isn’t really a film about Jiro Horikoshi. Because recall that, of Miyazaki’s parents, his mother also had spinal tuberculosis, and his dad also made planes for the war. Yet, the Horikoshi of this film hardly resembles Katsuji Miyazaki either, who we’ve seen was far from a workaholic like the film’s Jori Horikoshi. Instead, this would better resemble Hayao himself. So instead, it seems to be using this historical setting as a kind of place to explore Miyazaki’s feelings about his parents, his own craft in animation (wedded to the technical industrial world as it is)...

Inevitably that’s a pretty fraught thing to do! More so than any of Miyazaki’s other films, the film sparked a lot of controversy, mostly for how it handles the topic of the war. You could argue that like, OK, do you need a movie to moralistically lecture you on how invading most of Asia was bad? Must it rub our faces in the atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy to be a worthwhile movie?

One answer is that with the amount of modern nationalism and historical revisionism out there, it might not go amiss for national hero Hayao Miyazaki to take a stand there! But honestly it’s more that, with such subject matter, seems to go out of its way to avoid showing what the Zero was actually used for. The main tragedy, as far as Horikoshi was concerned, seems to be that so many pilots of this beautiful aeroplane die; that his pursuit of engineering beauty was corrupted by worldly matters like a war.

Which isn’t necessarily a completely inaccurate portrait of the real Jori Horikoshi’s attitude to his creation. The quote that inspired the film was “All I wanted to do was to make something beautiful.” But then this film goes out of its way to emphasise Horikoshi as a caring family man, a wholly sympathetic character, when to much of the world, Jiro Hirokoshi is a symbol of....

That. (And that’s the low estimate. It could easily be four times higher.)

But let’s look at how it relates to old Hayao and the contradictions he talks about living. If not to the same degree as old Isao Takahata, Miyazaki is an infamously exacting and demanding boss, heavily correcting nearly every cut that passes his desk. He’s spent his life working at a frankly kind of insane pace and expects his employees to keep up. Studio Ghibli has at least one dead body on its hands. Yet if you look at his films, they’re all about freedom and romanticism and the importance of enjoying nature. In Totoro, the dad is pulled away from his desk to play outside by his children. Probably not a good idea at Ghibli.

Then there are all the family relationships, all the way from the panda in Panda Kopanda to the mother in Ponyo. But Hayao Miyazaki was a distant father (he writes in Starting Point that his children were basically raised by their mother), and infamously callous to his son Gorō when he attempted to direct a film that Hayao didn’t think he was ready to handle.

Can we analogise animation to an aeroplane? It is beautiful in much the same way as an aeroplane is: elegant shapes, the technical coordination of many disparate parts to achieve an effect that would perhaps otherwise sound far-fetched (a flying machine? a picture that moves?). What’s the cost of animation? Well, thankfully nothing comparable to killing millions of people. But it is not a light undertaking. It is something that does eat lives. Is that a comparison that Miyazaki would have had in mind? I doubt it, honestly, but it’s what occurs to me faced with this film.

Thus I read the film’s Jori Horikoshi is a strange emotional blend of Hayao Miyazaki himself, an idealisation of his father or perhaps the sort of man he wishes his father was, and the real man who invented an effective fighter plane which helped enable his country to pillage most of Asia. And the rest of us? Well, the person working through these contradictions is Hayao Miyazaki, at the head of one of the highest concentrations of skilled animators the world has ever seen, so it’s going to be shared with nearly everyone. Would it probably have made more sense to do this in something like a manga, instead of a high profile movie? ...Well, I think so. But that’s not what happened, so we have this movie.

Inevitably for a late Ghibli movie, this film is crazy good looking. No Yoshinori Kanada anymore since he died in 2009, but Shinya Ohira is still alive, and he is absolutely capable of handling a Kanada-like background animation sequence. One of the most breathtaking sequences is the portrayal of the Great Kantō Earthquake by Atsuko Tanaka and Taichi Furumata, which combines both brilliant multiplane shots and unbelievably complex full background animation scenes of waves rippling through houses and streets. Tanaka also handled these mindblowing shots of cloth flowing in the wind as Naoko paints that form the film’s major recurring image.

The film uses slightly more digital compositing effects than the 90s pre-digital Ghibli films. For the most part the colours are just as lush as those older films, and there’s even very effective use of CG with handpainted textures now and then; Ghibli weathered the transition to digital a lot better than many studios.

And yet, despite all of this, it is a movie that leaves me feeling pretty unsatisfied, like a lot of late Ghibli movies. Hayao Miyazaki has said that he’s attempted to move away from familiar kishōtenketsu structures and try something novel, but when I watch films like Howl’s Moving Castle, I’m left wondering like... what did all of that amount to, in the end? For all its spectacle, what is this film even saying that Porco Rosso didn’t say... honestly, say better?

Maybe I’ll find an answer on a rewatch. It’s... far later than I planned to start, but if you’re willing to join me, please hop into twitch.tv/canmom and we’ll watch Hayao Miyazaki’s two big films about planes! And I’ll show you the Moomin thing too.

#animation night #hayao miyazaki #animation #anime #the wind rises #porco rosso

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reveluving · 2 years

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sweet spot ; andy barber x reader

summary: Andy learns more about you through your connection with the Wilson’s.

warnings: fluff (slow burn)

a/n: hi this series is still alive, I just have issues like time, writer’s block & laziness,,, not proofread too so my apologies for any mistakes!

˚ · . series m.list

˚ · . gorgeous rose divider by the amazing @firefly-graphics

‘anyone would pay for these treats any day. no, he was not saying that because of his own feelings,’ ;

It's been two months since you last spoke to Andy and you don't know if you should be glad or disappointed. Glad, because you're able to suppress your feelings (and inappropriate thoughts) for the man but disappointed, because seems like 'next time' progressively seemed more like an empty promise.

Sure, you were able to bid him goodbye or at the very least, the smallest talk whenever he was free enough to pick Jacob up from school. Worst of all, you could feel his gaze whenever you walked away, and on more than one occasion, too! As weeks become months, though, you thought you were too hopeful for your own good.

Until now.

Saturday rolled around and Andy had just dropped Jacob off at the Wilson's. Thankfully, Sam was able to talk it out with Andy.

'Relax man, I'll keep a close eye on them. You, on the other hand, should go check out the area. Feel free to stop by Sarah's bakery, it's not usually busy at this time,'

Thus, that's where he's heading to. The drive didn't take long, though Andy did take his time mapping any area that he hasn't covered before. A couple of retail stores, including a Japanese convenience store that he thought Jacob might like to check out.

Not long after his little survey around town, he finally reached the Wilson's family business.

'Home of the best Louisiana-style sweets in town!'

Tempting.

He took a look at the interior from the window, silently approving the homey decor and mouth-watering pastries in the display counter. Sam wasn’t lying when he mentioned the lack of traffic before lunchtime. In fact, it was deserted. If it wasn’t for the ‘open’ sign hanging on the door, he would’ve turned back. He could only hope this wasn’t a prank of Sam’s before making his way in, prompting a soft 'ding' from the entrance.

"I'll be with you in a minute!" Sarah called from the kitchen, unaware of the man her best friend’s been gushing about since you first met him. He didn’t think much of it, opting to take a closer look at the treats before him until he heard a familiar voice at the other end of the room.

“Y’know, the least you can do is help me with these cookies,”

“Don’t be such a baby, you can handle two little trays,” Sarah snorted before exiting the kitchen, smiling at the newcomer, “Hey there! Sorry 'bout that. Kinda short of hands today but I’m so glad it’s not peak hours,” She sighed before clasping her hands, “Now, what can I do for you?" She squinted her eyes, "Though, excuse me for my boldness but I don’t think I’ve seen you before,”

“Well, I guess you could say I'm a first-timer,” He smiled politely, “Your brother told me you make good coffee here,”

“Oh!” Sarah snapped her fingers, “Barber, right? Sam's told me all about you,” She paused, realizing the situation, "Well, not just Sam," She ignored the questioning look on his face with a cheeky smile, "You’ve come to the right place. Anything caught your eye?”

Andy eyed the list of best-selling drinks on the menu board behind her, “I'd like a cappuccino, please,"

“A cup of 'ccino and… any sweets?” He pondered for a second.

“Mind giving me some recommendations?”

“Not at all!” She moved away from the cashier and pointed at some of the displays, “Today’s pies are pecan and cherry. Or if you’re feeling a little fancy, we have pralines to go with your drink,” She cocked her head to the empty spot labelled ‘chocolate chip cookies’, “There’s the classic, too but we’ve only finished baking it. Speaking of,” She turned her attention to the kitchen door, prompting her new customer to do the same, “How’re the cookies back there?”

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” You groaned, leaning against the door to open it while holding a tray of fresh cookies in both hands, “Just give me a-"

It was amazing how you didn’t drop the tray at the sight of Andy standing in front of the counter. You didn’t even have to look at Sarah to know she was enjoying this moment. She was literally the first person you told after your first encounter with him at the gym, thinking she was the best candidate to hear it all. Only to have the colour drained from your face when she came to you, saying that Andy's a new colleague of Sam's.

“Andy!” You suddenly felt underdressed — a white cami dress. Perfect for the afternoon but now? You wished you brought that one cardigan with you, "Uh, fancy seeing you here!"

"I could say the same about you," He looked down at the floor, hiding the lil' smile on his face, "Colour me surprised, though. You're not in your tracksuit,"

Sarah stifled a laugh — she could see you rolling your eyes without even having to look at you. Sam would always act surprised whenever he'd bump into you outside the school premise in anything but a sportswear.

"Ha-ha, no wonder you and Sam are officemates," You arranged the cookies orderly, not having the guts to look him in the eye, "I have other clothes too, y'know?"

"Thankfully," You gawked at your friend's jab at your fashion sense. She leaned over the counter to 'whisper' to Andy, "I'd be worried if that one white tracksuit was the only thing she owned,"

You pouted, feeling betrayed that your best friend and your 'crush' were making fun of you. Andy found it amusing how you mouthed a 'fuck you' at Sarah, who seemed unfazed but rather entertained to see you bashful in front of the man you've been gushing about.

"You two know each other?" Andy asked, pointing between you and Sarah.

"She's teaching my boys," Ah, makes sense, "She teaching your kid, too?"

"Jacob," He nodded, "Same class, right?" You wordlessly nodded when he turned to you for confirmation, "Small world,"

"Well, Reve Road is a small neighbourhood," You chuckled, remembering each and every time you'd bump into a student or their parents around here, "If you know the Wilson's, there's a high chance you'll know this café,"

"And if your kid goes to Reve High, there's a high chance you'll know Ms (L/N) here," You narrowed your eyes when Sarah butted in, and smoothly, at that.

You've never seen her like this before.

Did she have an ulterior motive?

Who knows?

"Now," She straightened up, "You two can catch up and whatnot but first," She pointed at the freshly baked cookies, "Is that a yes?"

Well, you made it, didn't you?

"Two, please,"

"There you are," Sarah's sudden appearance jolted you out of your thoughts. You took the chance to flee to the storeroom with the excuse of 'the espresso machine's running low' when Andy began paying up for his order. Now, you're just hiding in here till who knows when, "Why’re you hiding in here?"

"You know exactly why,"

"You're right, I'm sorry," Her smugness told you she was anything but, "I can't help myself! I've never seen this side of you,"

"And that is?"

Did you really want to know the answer?

"Well," She drawled and acted like she was thinking, "Like a schoolgirl?"

She turned around, ignoring the deadly glare by taking a bag of coffee beans before throwing it at you.

"Here," You swiftly caught the bag, shooting her a confused look, "You did say the machine's running low on beans, and you were right. Sooo… have fun!" She ran out of the room before you could even have a say in it. You gave up — even if you stopped her, she had other things to do whereas you were pretty much done.

Except for Andy's coffee, that is.

You tried not to tear the bag in your hands from your crumpling habit, taking the last few seconds you have to pull yourself together before brisk walking back to the counter.

But, all that pep talk became useless when the first thing you were greeted with was Andy himself. He wasn't far from the counter, meaning his seating was the closest to the espresso machine.

Great!

You thought in utter horror.

"Everything okay back there?" His eyes darted between your face and the bag of coffee beans.

"Mhm!" You could only pray you wouldn't make a fool out of yourself by forgetting how to make a simple cup, "Had a tough time looking for these in the storeroom,"

Andy watched how you skillfully worked the machine, topping it all off with the serene atmosphere despite being the only customer at the moment.

"Seems like you and the Wilson's go back a long way," He piped up but his eyes were still focused on the extracting process.

"You're not wrong," You reminisced, "I used to work as the barista here, for a few months before getting an offer to teach in school. That was like, what, two years ago? Now, I'm just helping out whenever I have the chance," You shook your head slowly, "Man, time flies real fast when you're having fun,"

Andy hid the melancholy in his heart by chuckling with you. He wished he could say the same about himself for the past two years. Everything went fast for him, too, but not in a good way.

At all.

"What about you?" His eyes met yours, like, really met, finding an unexplainable comfort in your concerns, "How are you finding the neighbourhood?"

"Pretty good," More than good, actually, "Peaceful, lots of stores nearby, nice neighbours too. I'm just glad Jake's doing well so far," Silence took over, other than the constant drips from the machine, "He… is doing okay, right?"

"Of course," You didn't hesitate — partially to lessen his sudden worry but you weren't kidding about Jacob. Quiet, sure, but a fast learner, in both his classes and his managing role, "I'd say he's catching up real quick, considering how he's never learned our syllabus before. But, he's a little more open with the basketball team,"

"How so?" He patiently waited, seeing that you’ve finished preparing his cappuccino and straightened up in his seat when you're coming over to serve it.

"His friends. Other than AJ, I see that he's really close to the Maximoff twins. Good boys," You carefully placed his cup next to the basket of cookies, "So, I'd say he's doing more than okay,"

"That's good," You gave yourself a pat on the back for successfully reassuring him without needing to lie.

But, you took the risk of asking the next question.

"Things didn't go too well at your old place?" You could only hope you weren't overstepping any boundaries.

"You could say that," He replied curtly and though he didn't seem apprehensive, you didn't want to push your luck. He seemed like a man who didn't take snoopiness too lightly, either.

At least you knew your assumptions were right.

"Well, whatever the reasons are, I'm glad you two are doing well now," You didn't have to elaborate, not when Andy himself found it endearing to hear it from you.

"I'm glad too," You caught him whispering under his breath. Fearing for the awkwardness that could kick in anytime soon, you motioned to the cookies in front of him.

"Are the cookies good?" He appreciated your efforts to keep the conversation going and nodded.

"Very," He finished the half-eaten cookie, leaving him with just one, "My compliments to the chef,"

"Ah, well, you know the Wilson's," He could tell you were hiding something, only for both of you to jump at the voice behind you.

"Her recipe, by the way," Sarah's head was peeking out of the kitchen door just to place a tray of pralines on a random spot before disappearing yet again.

"This is your recipe?" He questioned you, funnily enough, through a mouthful. Andy shouldn't have been surprised after hearing your little history with the business' family, and yet he was.

"Yeah…" You twiddle your thumbs, feeling small under his interest, "Call it a contribution?" In reality, those cookies were one of the store's bestsellers but you never liked taking all the credit. Humble, is where it's at, after all.

"They're really good," He repeated. Other than trying to woo you, they were actually to his liking. Not too sweet, crispy on the outside and gooey on the inside, "I might buy some for the boys later,"

"I mean, you don't have to pay, y'know? Since it's Sarah's own sons, plus yours," You tilted your head.

"Call it a contribution," He repeated your words, plus, anyone would pay for these treats any day.

No, he was not saying that because of his own feelings.

The next hour went smoothly, with you suggesting to him the best restaurants in town and which neighbour to watch out for. Sarah, too, joined in from time to time, thankfully without trying to put you in the spotlight anymore.

Unbeknownst to you, it was because she had pretty much succeeded in the job.

Soon, the café was getting busier as lunch hour was rolling around. Families, especially, and not wanting to overwhelm you with entertaining both him and the customers, plus, Jacob's message that he and AJ had completed their work, he decided to take his leave.

"Thank you for the coffee, and the cookies, of course," He thanked you as soon as you were free from an order, "I'll see you around?"

No phone numbers. Not appropriate.

Or just not yet.

"You know where to find me," You smiled softly before rushing off to the storeroom for more sugar. Begrudgingly.

Man, he hated to see you go but loved to watch you leave.

Especially in that dress.

Seeing how Sarah was standing behind the register without any customers, Andy swooped in to purchase the cookies.

But, he didn't have the time to say a word when Sarah slid him a filled-up paper bag.

"Our treat," She raised her hand, knowing he was going to protest, "Ah-ah! It's free of charge and that's that. There's a separate bag in there for you and Jacob," With that, she left him with his thoughts and cookies to attend to the customer by the display counter.

Andy accepted the gift hesitantly, mentally thanking both you and Sarah before exiting the café and off to the Wilson's.

He couldn't help but smile throughout the drive, finding whatever that happened for the past couple of hours very… enjoyable? He learned a lot about you but at the same time, more questions began popping up and no doubt if whatever you and him had continued, you'd be learning about him too.

It was only a matter of time, is all.

˚ · . f i n . · ˚

˚ · . taglist: @wanniiieeee @whiskeytangofoxtrot555 @0mrs-evans0 @sophiaedits @innerblizzardbird @knifevsstageprop @marvelmenwhore @nasawho @tastingcevans @liecastillo

#— reve's reverie 🌹#andy barber x reader #andy barber x you #andy barber x female reader #andy barber #andy barber fluff #andy barber fanfiction #defending jacob #jacob barber #chris evans #chris evans fluff #chris evans x reader #chris evans x you #future mrs barber series

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denimbex1986 · 9 months

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'Before the bomb, the destruction of humanity was strictly the purview of the non-human. Whole civilizations told stories of floods or plagues sent by the gods designed to wipe everyone out. People could imagine mass weather events or catastrophes that might end the human race, but in those stories, our role in our own destruction was indirect, at most. No person could just push a button and end it all for everyone.

That changed when the world realized how nuclear power could be harnessed. Now, we could level whole cities, or more, in the blink of an eye, and scientists knew there was a chance we could accidentally light the atmosphere on fire. For the first time in human history, the power to destroy the planet was in our hands. There was no stuffing the evils back into Pandora’s box. (Following the Trinity test, which proved the capacity of the bomb he’d spearheaded, J. Robert Oppenheimer famously quoted the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” He didn’t just mean himself.)

Oppenheimer is an audacious inquiry into power, in all its forms The discovery that any of us, theoretically, can annihilate the whole of humanity — perhaps by accident or on a whim — induces a whole new level of existential angst. There’s the fear of sudden death, of course. But then there’s a deeper dread, the sense that something in the balance of the universe has shifted. With a deity, you can petition and hope for forbearance. But look, we all know what humans are like.

Even if a person can push that threat of total destruction out of mind for a while, it provokes an ambient anxiety, a permanent mental load. The movie industry has always been both a shaper of fears and a reflection of them, a means for dealing with reality at arm’s length, through a big screen. The bomb, and the world that brought it into being, has flooded back into pop culture in recent years, from Manhattan to Asteroid City to Oppenheimer. But that’s just the continuation of a long history: no wonder that in the Cold War years just after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, filmmakers were obsessed with the events that could turn “mutually assured destruction” into just “destruction.” The movies understood the grave danger and the pitch-black farce of it all.

Which is how we got movies like Fail Safe (1964), a somewhat plodding but haunting Sidney Lumet drama in which a technology failure sets off an international incident that ends in mass destruction. Characters throughout the film espouse varying and somewhat academic views on whether a nuclear war, and the mass deaths that would ensue, would be a necessary evil to exterminate Communism. Yet rubber meets the proverbial road when a computer issues an erroneous order to strike; by the end of the movie, we’re watching ordinary people get exterminated in a nuclear bomb explosion.

There were many movies like Fail Safe during the Cold War, somber dramas that understand the weightiness of the destructive power now in the hands of fallible humans. The 1966 pseudo-documentary The War Game, for instance, portrays the effects of an all-out nuclear war on ordinary citizens — most notably, by the end, children whose futures have been obliterated before their eyes. Nearly a generation later, films like The Day After (1983) and Threads (1984) were still at it. Meanwhile, Japanese filmmakers dealt over and over with the grief and psychological trauma of a country that saw the bomb firsthand, developing everything from the Godzilla films to Barefoot Gen (1983) and Grave of the Fireflies (1988) to process the complexity of the ongoing wound.

While many movies took an appropriately grave stance, there was a bleak comedy to it all, a sense of total absurdity that shone through perhaps the most famous nuclear film of the Cold War: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 barnburner. In Strangelove, doctrines of mutually assured destruction and the wielding by powerful men of powerful weapons are cast in slyly phallic terms, suggesting that if humanity wipes itself out it will be mostly because of some horny, insecure men. The film once more ends with footage of detonating bombs (for which it uses footage of actual bomb tests, including the Trinity test). A less satirical but still light touch pops up in WarGames (1983), about a teenage hacker who accidentally gains access to a DoD mainframe computer that simulates nuclear war and almost starts World War III. (Ronald Reagan was reportedly obsessed with WarGames.)

During the Cold War, the threat of nuclear war in films was literal, not a metaphor (Strangelove’s phallic fixation notwithstanding). Mutually assured destruction was something you just knew about, as an average person on the street; it was something you could both fear and joke about, fodder for gallows humor and nightmares. A couple of generations of kids had been trained in how to hide under the desk in case of a nuclear blast, just as their children and grandchildren would participate in active shooter drills decades later. The president was on TV proposing policies to shoot weapons out of the sky from space. The ability to wipe out humanity felt concentrated in a couple of words: A-bomb, H-bomb, thermonuclear warfare.

Yet somewhere in the last few decades, “nuclear warfare” has fallen out of most people’s consciousness, at least on a daily basis. I was in the second grade when the Soviet Union was dissolved, and I never learned to hide under my desk. Activists, military strategists, and people whose jobs depend on thinking about nuclear warfare know that the threat is hardly gone, but the ordinary person on the street, when asked what worries them most about the end of humanity, is thinking of different matters.

There are always exceptions to the rule, of course; several guys living off the grid on the fringes of New York City in the new season of How to With John Wilson cite “nuclear war” as one of the things they feel safe from. (Nobody could accuse them of perfect logic.) But even the movies have abandoned nuclear warfare as the scary way to raise the stakes in a blockbuster. Now it’s comic book villains or climate change, or (as in the recent Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One), sentient AIs gone rogue.

Curiously, though, as a culture we’ve started to circle back around to the Manhattan Project — perhaps, you might say, as a way to process the present. We live in the world that Oppenheimer and his team created, a world that seemingly would have eventually been created by someone, whether American or German or Soviet scientists. It’s a new stage in human history, in which we have the power previously reserved for the gods. And plenty of us are thinking about it all the time. The feeling of doomsday lingers thickly today; the real question isn’t whether you feel as though the world is ending but how you think it will end and why, and what you plan to do about it.

In the midst of this, the origin of this power is worth reexamining, both as a moment where the cat permanently escaped the bag and a metaphor for a lot of other “bombs,” some that are slowly detonating. There was, for instance, the excellent TV drama Manhattan, which premiered in 2014 and explored the lives of the scientists and their families at Los Alamos. The Hiroshima bombing was the backdrop for a painful (and controversial) sequence in Eternals (2021); the question of atomic destruction and the survival of man is threaded throughout Alan Moore’s Watchmen comic (1986) and its adaptations as a film (2009) and as a TV series (2019).

Even more recently, Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City presents a story of Cold War-era dread, with bomb tests occurring in the background every so often. The feeling that destruction could be around any corner is what powers the film, which ultimately is a reflection on how we use art to set ourselves apart from existential angst and grief and process it at arm’s length. And then there’s Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s R-rated juggernaut that’s less a biopic and more a movie about power and its production, from the atomic level to the geopolitical.

Part of the reason Oppenheimer is so successful, and so brilliant as a document of our time, is that it latches onto exactly this fact about the detonation of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and then Nagasaki. These were not events that stand in isolation as acts of war. They are events with long, long fallouts, decades of people whose lives and health and families and existence are scarred by having been targeted, and others whose geographic separation from the events allowed them to pretend a psychological separation, too.

Yet the stories we tell about the nuclear age betray us. We are afraid. At best, we learn how to avoid thinking about it too much. Any apocalypse, however, is a moment of unveiling, and since then we have lived through wave after wave of new apocalyptic discoveries, to the point where we’re just waiting to see which one will be the big one. The stories we tell evolve a little, but what they tell us is all the same. We have become gods, and also, the bringer of death.'

#Oppenheimer #Bhagvad Gita #Manhattan #Asteroid City #Dr. Strangelove #Stanley Kubrick #Fail Safe #Sidney Lumet #WarGames #Christopher Nolan

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keeganhogan · 1 month

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Hana-Bi

Kitano Takeshi’s Hana-Bi is a beautiful film. The thing that stuck with me the most throughout this film was the gorgeous soundtrack. Every single moment that the orchestra swells, the flutes chime in, everything is filled to the brim with life. I don’t think I’ve ever been so compelled by a soundtrack upon first listen like I have with this film. Upon further research it was no surprise to learn that the composer was none other than Hisaishi. The opening song evoked similarities to that of The Merri-Go-Round of Life.

Getting into the film, I was impressed with Kitano’s acting and directing. From gorgeous shots of the Japanese landscape, contrasted with close ups of a firefly on a leaf in the snow, to lingering shots on various pieces of artwork, this film is extremely artistic in many aspects. Kitano is able to convey profound emotion without speaking a single line, something that not many actors can accomplish so effectively.

The theme of the inescapability of fate and the powerlessness one feels in the face of it is strong in this film. After Nishi suffers so many indescribable losses and painful events, despite his ability to take out multiple yakuza members like John Wick and easily rob a bank, in the end he cannot bring back his daughter or save his wife from her illness. Death is also very prominent, as Horibe attempts suicide after becoming paralyzed. Nishi also, in a way, attempts suicide, always facing impossible odds and a string of questionable actions that he knows he will not be able to run away from forever. But, in the face of losing everything he loves, he would rather do what he can to have the best life possible with his wife in the time they still have left together. It is in the inescapable face of death that Nishi and his wife live to their fullest.

The combination of violent scenes of death and beautiful scenes of relaxation and life paint a poignant picture on the nature of human existence. We strive for love and happiness in the moments that Nishi shares with his wife, but those scenes are always underscored by the inevitable truth of their loss and fate that they are condemned too, which does not allow the viewer to fully experience that joy. Nishi is the same, however, only really showing lots of emotion in his acts of violence. Throughout the film, he embodies a walking corpse, a man so defeated and scarred by loss that it seems he has no true emotions of reasons for continuing. Kitano’s portrayal of Nishi plays into this fantastically, as his rigid slow movements and void facial expressions capture this state of being expertly.

Horibe’s story is somewhat opposite to that of Nishi, as after his failed suicide attempt, Horibe rediscovers his will to live in painting. His paintings embody the essence of life, nature, human being. His story starts towards death and rises up, while Nishi’s plummets towards death. In this dichotomy Kitano expresses his true feelings about life and death, not as opposites or separate entities, but inevitably intertwined, defining each other. Both characters have intense interactions with both life and death, yet their paths are vastly different.

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worldwright · 6 months

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Good evening !

Today was a great day -as in I went for one hour to my university, one hour with my classmates and russian prof (of russian). I was shacking in anxiety -and I couldn't find my meds for this EVEN IF I PACKED THEM URGH

BUT BUT BUT, it was nice to be back and speaking and writing in russian. That said, finishing Yuri On Ice today was funny x) Oh do they love throwing little words in russian (and wtf, why is there a french guy speaking in the last episode ? i just fucking laughed at that, it was sooooo robotic of him to talk like this omg) and I will NEVER say that my accent is good, it's very french, but oh man. Their accents were funny - it's fine, russian isn't from the same linguistic group as japanese, like, at all. But for me, someone who sees on a weekly basis russians (and sometimes ukrainians, or my (half ?) serb classmate and my half-slovenian classmate -they're the ones with the best accent by far for quite obvious reasons, and apparently my (half ?) chechen classmate is good, but I never really hear him talk so. iirc ive already told you about how my region -and by extension my town- has a good amount of slavic/slavic descendant people and yes i know chechens are caucasian, not slavic but it's because of the (directly or indirectly) USSR that slavic people are here -before or after it. anyway, that's france for ya), it's extremely funny

BUT OMG I UNDERSTAND BETTER WHY PEOPLE WENT CRAZY OVER YURI ON ICE

AND OH THE JJK EPISODE OF YESTERDAY. OOOOOOOOOH I LOVED IT SO MUCH AAAAAAAAAH

Have a great morning my friend !

THE EPISODE OMFG. I LITERALLY HAD TO PAUSE TO CATCH MY BREATH WTFFFFFFFFF

my partner was like "lol megumi is for sure not gonna have lasting trauma from thissss :)" and Yes For Sure but First !!! he actually has to figure out who the Fuck that guy even Was LMAO. I think he suspected something from the way he ran over to the body....... but lol We Don't Have Time To Unpack All That 👍

also it was SO MEANNNNN of them to end the episode where they did like Bruh !!!!! Let Us See The Goddamn Summoning Ritual

I mean I know we will next week but . come onnnnnnnn

language classes sound fun!! at least if it's a language ur actually excited about learning lol, my high school Spanish classes were just kinda a drag and I wish every day that I'd taken Japanese...

and yea it's so fun to hear a language in a show that you know and the actors clearly don't 😂 like I know they don't have time to properly learn an entirely new language for a few sentences but sometimes I simply do not process those words as English, man... in the show Firefly they were speaking cowboy English with all the cussing in Mandarin 🥰 my partner said it was very amusing to hear lol

I think I actually have a free weekend??? what am I gonna do with myself.......... I've got some chores to do but after that..... maybe I'll hop on a random bus and see where I get

have a wonderful Friday, friend!!

#pen pal

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crescentblossom66 · 1 year

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Hello. As you know, I love your work and I love your ocs just as much! I can't tell you how happy I was when you mentioned Hokusai's work within your work. So let me thank you first for that!

Now, if it doesn't bother you, may I ask you a question about Toshihiro? As I recall, his way of speaking is influenced by haiku, right?

✉️

(1)If the little cuckoo doesn't sing, I will kill it.

(2)If the little cuckoo doesn't sing, I will make it sing.

(3)If the little cuckoo doesn't sing, I will wait for it to sing.

(4)If the little cuckoo doesn't sing, I will let it go.

These are the most famous haiku in Japan. There are four very famous warlords in Japan, they lived in the same era, and all four have different personalities. A poet wrote haiku about the case when they kept a little cuckoo as a pet and its little cuckoo did not sing as they expected.

(1)represents a short-tempered and brutal personality that is quick to kill those who do not get its way.

(2)represents the ability to think out of the box and accomplish what others think is impossible.

(3)represents the ability to persevere and wait for an opportunity to present itself.

(4)represents a character that is very considerate of one's friends, but is cruel to one's enemies.

Which of the above describes Toshihiro? If he does not fit any of them, how does he treat his little cuckoo?

Sorry for the long message. I look forward to your work. Have a good day!

First off, thank you for your support and your kindness. I always like to receive asks and the like, so don't feel bad about sending one, short or long. I always enjoy reading your comments in the tags too, they make me happy. This is a long answer.

1. Creation and design

Now to the topic, after @R3d1ke gave me the ideas for the names, that I never would have thought of by the way. I would have likely given them more western names which would have clashed with what the Nyakuza are supposed to represent in the first place, a Japanese cat mafia. I decided that one of the characters should be more Japanese themed, if that makes sense. I kind of created Toshihiro based off of the good stereotypes we Germans have for the Japanese, politeness, kindness, honor and a serious demeanor are associated with them here, so I decided that he should show those traits...at least on the outside.

He is supposed to show a front of a kind and polite, but a bit eccentric cat that loves art, which isn't entirely inaccurate, more on that later. His design, in my mind at least, you know that I can't draw well, was based on the same concept of a polite Japanese man. He wears a kimono, the pattern on it is inspire by the waves of The Great wave of Kanagawa'. To make him more interesting, I made him speak in haiku like the firefly NPCs in the level 'Spooky Swamp' in one of my favorite games of all time 'Spyro: Year of the dragon” which is the third installment in that series. The characters there have their text boxes show three sentences; the first one has five, the second seven, and the last five syllables again. It made his sentences hard, but fun for me to write and gave the character more personality, it was especially hard to not make the sentences to...simple, for the lack of a better word. Toshihiro was still supposed to sound like a sophisticated man, and not like a toddler that just learned to speak.

I'm really happy that you as a Japanese enjoyed that character, as I was trying to make my characters more diverse and interesting. Nozomi being a mix out of the crazy scientist and cold and calculated secretary archetypes, and Maemi being a non-binary character for example. I just hope that I didn't put anything that could be offensive in there, I know that my little fanfics don't reach a lot of people, but I do care about the few that read them and want them to be comfortable. I do have a tendency to write heavier subjects into my longer stories though, there is no good story without conflict after all.

That covers his creation and design.

2. His personality and backstory

As mentioned earlier, Toshihiro's outward appearance and demeanor reflect how we perceive the Japanese in my country, he is dignified, polite and kind, but that is mostly a front for his more...violent behavior. In reality, he is a calculated and very dangerous cat that annihilates every obstacle in his path. This can be seen in how he easily saw through Bow's diguise and knew that they were coming for him, so he sent his underlings out to deal with other adversaries while he wanted to take care of Bow personally. His underlings, by the way, are based off of ninjas as you see them in modern fiction, stealthy and deadly, I gave them weapons to reflect that too in form of the shurikens and kunais they use. The former being more of a ranged weapon while the latter is more of a melee weapon if I remember that right.

The Toshihiro in the story is a cold-hearted individual, who was once a kind and innocent soul, but his father and his peers tainted his character.

Bow in the story quickly realizes that something sinister and dark hides behind his eyes, something traumatic, and she isn't wrong. When he was a child, Toshihiro witnessed his father kill his own mother brutally, he was too young to properly remember that now, but that trauma is subconsciously still with him. Toshihiro was fond of art his whole life and really enjoyed drawing and painting, yet his father wanted him to take on the family business, like many parents of large companies want their first-born kids to do. He, however, wanted to become and artist, a dream that his father quickly destroyed by making sure to burn all his art supplies, so he could only ever draw at school. He didn't have it easy there either as the other kids made fun of him for speaking formally and more like a person much older than him would, that and the fact that to them he was the spoiled rich kid. His classmates bullied him and at home he was terrorized by his father...so when one day Empress found him on the streets and talked to him back when they both were roughly teenagers and told him to just do whatever he wanted to do, he took that to heart. He worked on improving his art, cutting the ties to his father as soon as he could. He later joined Emrpess's gang of cats, being deeply loyal to her for helping him. Toshihiro is known to be a bit of a freespirit, but he always completes his missions with perfect results...He just underestimated Conductor's accuracy and perseverance in the end.

While he was with the Nyakuza, he was polite to his allies, but emotions and feelings other than anger and coldness were simply...lost due to the trauma and the poor treatment he endured, he simply couldn't be compassionate anymore, that part of him was destroyed by both his father, and the cruel children that ridiculed him.

3. How he would treat that little cuckoo

Being that his compassion has been practically beaten out of him, he would likely kill it for not serving its purpose. His former self would have patiently waited until the cuckoo would sing its song.

In summery, he does care for his allies to some degree, but can no longer feel empathy. His sense of loyalty binds him to Empress, as he feels he has to repay the dept he owes her.

He kills his enemies with no remorse, he has some twisted sense of honor though, as he prefers to use his wit and more conventional means to beat his enemies. Kind of like a samurai refusing to wield a gun even if it was the more effective weapon, as his honor and pride wouldn't allow him to even if he died.

Well, that certainly was a long ask to answer, but I had fun going into depth and fleshing out my characters more. I kinda wished that I had thought of those three (Nozomi, Toshihiro and Maemi) earlier, but I'm never too confident in writing any Ocs into my works, because I don't know if people can engage with the character and find them fun to read about.

If you have some time, could you tell me how you felt when you read my attempt and including a Japanese-themed character? Was I offensive or did I do an okay job and made him fun to read about, even if he was just there for 2 chapters? I might try to include more Ocs in my stories if people like them.

Thank you for your ask and your nice words again, it meant a lot to me. I always love your art, even if I only reblog sometimes and not write anything in the tags, I will try to write more in the tags next time. Have a good day or night!

#answered asks #ahit oc

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j4m3s-b4k3r · 2 months

Text

Heroes & Monsters

I kept seeing something moving quickly out of the corner of my eye. But it had always disappeared whenever I looked up & out the window by my lightbox.. After a few of these annoying distractions, I stopped working, and stared intently out the window. Until.. I saw weird SCI-FI NINJAS acrobatically battling a SPACE MONSTER on the rooftop across the road. Wha?!

I had no idea what I was looking at! Colleagues explained that this was a shoot for a popular Japanese action/sci-fi TV show called SUPER SENTAI. I was in Tokyo, working at TOEI Animation studios. Their live-action studio was nearby, and they were simply shooting stunts on the rooftops of the mall across the street. (This same show would soon take the world by storm, renamed as - POWER RANGERS!)

Mystery thus solved, I turned my attention back to my work. Which was also about spandex-clad heroism - a 50th birthday animated series of SUPERMAN. With character designs by the great Gil Kane (I later discovered that another fave comics artist worked on the show too - Jim Woodring).

I’d looked for animation work when arriving in Japan, with no luck. Despite having a working holiday visa, and several polite interviews at studios. Anime gurus were unimpressed by my career working on terrible Saturday morning cartoons..

So I did the inevitable. English teaching. That, and a few illustration gigs, financed my own studies at a Japanese language school (recommended by pal Martin Ramsay). I enjoyed learning Japanese in the mornings, with afternoons free to explore Tokyo, before teaching English classes in the evenings.

Then, Sean Newton told me of a short animation job at TOEI in northwest Tokyo. My background in American Saturday Morning animation was suddenly an advantage, because TOEI’s client was Ruby-Spears in LA. I continued teaching the evening classes (till the semester ended) but had to stop my own Japanese lessons, sadly. However, I jumped at the chance to work in a Japanese animation studio.

I'd done Layout supervision in Taiwan, and oversaw inbetweening and reshoots in Korea. For the TOEI job, I was to help the Ruby-Spears on-site animation supervisor with fixes & reshoots. This gig even came with an apartment, in a building owned by TOEI mere blocks from their studio.

TOEI animation studio was created in 1956 (with roots in an earlier studio, Nihon Douga Eiga founded in 1948). Many anime masters got their start at this great studio - Osamu Tezuka began at TOEI, as did Hayao Miyazaki & Isao Takahata. The list of famous anime titles produced there is long indeed.

Since arriving in Japan, I often went to anime movies, trying my hardest to follow the language. Which was usually a fool's errand, as my Japanese vocabulary wasn't extensive, but I could follow the fantastic visuals. It was a great year for animation. I'd seen "TOTORO" in April. "GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES" had come out in May. Even western animation was fun, with "ROGER RABBIT" in June. I was utterly floored by "AKIRA" in July.

Anyway, there so many great projects in production around that time, that it was hard to get experienced animators interested in SUPERMAN. I am not sure what precisely was attracting talent when we needed it. Possibly TOEI's own DRAGONBALL-Z? or Kawajiri’s DEMON CITY SHINJUKU (which dropped later that year).

Trying to pump up enthusiasm for SUPERMAN, my boss had episodes of the 1940s Fleischer/Famous Studios cartoons sent from LA. He assembled animators in a screening room, and spoke excitedly about the history of the SUPERMAN character, and the classic cartoons - “This is what we are going for!” The lights dimmed and he rolled tape. The very first thing on screen was the title..

THE JAPOTEURS. I flinched. Uh, oh..

What followed was several minutes of absolutely the most racist stereotyping of the Japanese. Yikes. I'd seen some of these classic SUPERMAN cartoons before, but not this one. It was perhaps the first time that I saw a feel-good pop-culture icon used as a propaganda tool.

All the other shorts on that tape were about catching bank robbers, or fighting robots built by a criminal mastermind. Beautifully designed & animated action-escapism. Just what the supervisor had intended to show. If he'd previewed the video, he could have shown an inspiring action-animation banquet. Minus the insulting racism appetiser.

The lights went up, and he awkwardly apologised that these these cartoons were made during World War 2, when Japanese were the baddies. This mea culpa was made more awkward & prolonged as it had to be translated, sentence by embarrassing sentence.. If the intention was to get the Japanese crew excited for the poster boy of Truth Justice & The American Way.. well, that screening had the exact opposite effect, sadly..

Our main liaison with the crew was an absolutely lovely man, named Mr Otani. I imagine that he did serious damage control after that.. Otani San had worked at TOEI for many years, and knew everyone (he even had tales of working with Miyazaki). Anyway, I think it's largely due to this well-loved man that a crew finally assembled to finish the show.

By the standards of 1980s Saturday morning cartoons, the show came out pretty well, but is perhaps the least well-known of all the animated series of SUPERMAN. I wasn’t on the project long enough to get a screen credit. Which didn't bother me. It was years before I realised that screen credits on cartoons even mattered. That changed years later, when I applied for a US work visa..

ha ha!

#animation #toei animation #superman #power rangers #super sentai #illustration #japan #anime #saturday morning cartoons

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