71–80 of 105 posts
Might be in the minority, but I strongly disagree with the assessment that Miyazaki-san's final film "The Wind Rises" was not amongst his greatest. I re-view it every few months for inspiration and find it holds up quite powerfully with each repetition. Japanese anime does Italian neo-realism in epic scale. The engineer as the manifestor of dreams. War as a terrible catalyst of progress. Surreally creepy voice acting…
Might be in the minority, but I strongly disagree with the assessment that Miyazaki-san's final film "The Wind Rises" was not amongst his greatest. I re-view it every few months for inspiration and find it holds up quite powerfully with each repetition. Japanese anime does Italian neo-realism in epic scale. The engineer as the manifestor of dreams. War as a terrible catalyst of progress. Surreally creepy voice acting…
> LeMay also oversaw and championed the enforcement of the total blockade of Japan by filling the waters around its port cities with aerial-dropped mines, which, for example, caused shipping through Kobe to plummet by 85%. This campaign was dubbed, with a refreshing lack of hypocrisy, “Operation Starvation.” Thus, the starvation of little Setsuko/Keiko was not “collateral damage,” but a premeditated murder.
Newsflash: people kill other people in wars. Including civilians. Wow, I would have never imagined. And yes, you try to kill as many people as you can, because that's how wars stop, when the losses are big enough that you consider capitulation. Japan's military indoctrination gave the US not much choice anyway, since they were ready to fight till the last man.
> LeMay was instrumental in the US shift from high-altitude bombing with general purpose explosives to the low-altitude incendiary bombing of Japanese cities that resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and the famine-inducing ruination of the economy. He later became a tireless advocate for bombing Vietnam, as he put it, “back to the Stone Age,” and for bombing the whole world back to the Ice Age by launching a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union.
That's a complete misunderstanding of the thinking of LeMay. There are many documentaries/books about him, and you can read "Command and Control" if you want to get a good view of LeMay and why he acted like that during that period. Whether you liked him or not, he was a rational person. His idea of nuking the Soviets first came from the fact that for some time, the US had clear superior nuclear power vs the Soviets, and that one should not wait until the Soviets develop enough bombs to be able to destroy the US if they decide to strike first. If the Soviets had decided to strike first, it would have destroyed the US chain of command and left nothing for retaliation - that is why LeMay started the SAC program to have bombers constantly in the skies with nuclear weapons, "just in case". That program lasted until after the fall of the Soviet Union. And bombing the Soviets first when the US had a clear advantage (in the early 50s basically) would not have resulted in the whole world being destroyed, most likely only the Soviet Union would have paid a hefty price while the losses in Europe/US would have been less.
Seriously, don't write about History if you know nothing about it.
MAJOR SPOILERS!!! wtf! no spoiler warning at all. Grave of the fireflies was one of the few Ghibli films I hadnt got around to seeing yet. Plot is totally spoiled in the first few sentences. fuck you author!!
For what it's worth, that "spoiler" is a known fact less than 2 minutes into the film. As with all Ghibli films, the greatness is in the watching.
MAJOR SPOILERS!!! wtf! no spoiler warning at all. Grave of the fireflies was one of the few Ghibli films I hadnt got around to seeing yet. Plot is totally spoiled in the first few sentences. fuck you author!!
I mean, it's an 18-year old movie. What did you expect? That nobody ever talks about the plot of movies forever and all time? There's a time when we have to say "okay, people have probably watched it, it's safe to talk about it freely now", and 18 years is definitely more than enough time for that to be the case.
Huh, like people who are 15 years old who would not have watched it yet ? Do you think people watch all movies that came before them ?
> I mean, it's an 18-year old movie.
It's a 27 years old movie actually. Get your facts right.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nobody is more familiar with what a curse airplanes can be when deployed for evil than the Japanese. Airplanes dropped the canisters that burned their cities, the mines that starved their children, and the nukes that instantly made vast irradiated graveyards out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — for the first time in history visiting solar-temperature hell upon human habitations, and hinting at mankind’s full capacity fo…
> Economic sanctions are an alternative to war. And frankly one of the reasons I think they should be taken off the table entirely is because they are far too easy an alternative. At least in war, some of the victims have their faces broadcast on television. The victims of economic sanctions are never heard of except as dry statistics. > Are you suggesting we should have bombed Iraq instead at the time? Or just let S…
When her valley is invaded, the peaceful Nausicäa runs to the room of her ill and bedridden father. He's dead, surrounded by soldiers. She screams, seizes her father's sword, and enters a killing rage. Truly, even a young and sweet girl can feel hate and killing intent, and she may even act accordingly. Nobody's born an angel nor a demon, but we can all become insensitive or cruel. Just read Primo Levi or Herman Langbein to see how most people transform in a few weeks. Anyway, that sequence made me cry.
I'd also like to mention the opening of this movie, inspired from the medieval "tapisserie de Bayeux" that relates England's invasion in the XIth century. The ballet of robots along a burning city is incredibly beautiful and moving. How stunning that Miyazaki starts his first film with the artistic beauty of a war scene!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does one "preserve the balance"? Could you provide an example action you might take that is preserving this balance? I'm having trouble turning this into anything useful, other than a generic, general sort of "don't be hateful and rash; think things through; sides aren't perfect" kinda thing.
The word 'balance' is vague and overused, to be sure. Here's my suggestion for a kind of action: if you have to respond to aggression, make the response targeted and limited to what is necessary. For example, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the right thing to do was use the military force necessary to kick him out. It should have stopped there. It should not have continued with twelve years of economic sanctions…
It makes me deeply happy to see this here. Miyazaki's mind is truly unique (and by extension most Ghibli films too), nothing else quite compares (and as the author points out, certainly not Disney & co. despite being Ghibli's distributors in the West). I've introduced many people to Ghibli, a lot of whom would have never even considered watching an animated film (even less so a foreign one), and most came away truly…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, it's an 18-year old movie. What did you expect? That nobody ever talks about the plot of movies forever and all time? There's a time when we have to say "okay, people have probably watched it, it's safe to talk about it freely now", and 18 years is definitely more than enough time for that to be the case.
> I mean, it's an 18-year old movie. What did you expect? Huh, like people who are 15 years old who would not have watched it yet ? Do you think people watch all movies that came before them ? > I mean, it's an 18-year old movie. It's a 27 years old movie actually. Get your facts right.
That... I mean... That just proves my point more. Jesus. I'm sorry that I apparently made a blunder in my quick mental math and provided a more conservative answer than the truth. Stop making it sound like it ruins my entire argument, especially since my argument wasn't even based on the exact number of years.
Instead, my argument was that after a certain amount of time, it's pointless to worry about spoilers because enough time has passed to actually give a person a chance to have watched the movie if it interested them. Stupidly declaring everything a spoiler just makes it so that it's impossible to talk about a movie and have a real discussion, as this article does. If we worried about spoilers for a 27-year old movie, this article wouldn't exist.