I’ve been watching: Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)

• Another Studio Ghibli anime film. This one is about Kiki, a 13-year old trainee witch who spends a year away from home in a new city, as is tradition for 13-year old witches-in-training. The film follows Kiki as she learns to support herself and live independently in a strange new place, utilising her unique talents as a young witch to start a flying delivery service. A central theme is Kiki’s own insecurity and vulnerability in being in a completely new environment, and the film follows the challenges Kiki faces both socially and economically: finding accommodation, starting and running a business, making friends, and adjusting emotionally to her new circumstances.
• Kiki is a wonderful character, an exuberant and spirited young girl whose youthful joy and purity and passion won’t fail to warm your heart. I certainly found myself smiling the whole way through this film, just because Kiki positively radiated joy and love and warmth that I couldn’t help but smile along with her. She’s no one-note caricature though—she has her moments of melancholy, anger, sadness and insecurity, and those moments make the pure warmth she exudes at other times so much more gratifying. It’s another testament to Studio Ghibli’s ability to create fantastically engaging and sympathetic characters, one of their undoubted strengths.
• Unlike the last Studio Ghibli film I watched, Only Yesterday, this film is a return to the storytelling style that I believe Studio Ghibli is so successful at. Because of its characters and its plot, it’s principally directed at a young audience, but at the same time the themes and dialogue are intelligent and resonate with a more grown-up audience. It has the same appeal that I’ve written about before of a film that’s ostensibly a children’s film that is capable at the same time of whetting adults’ more grown-up narrative tastes as well as bringing out the inner child in them.
• It’s beautifully written and produced, and I think it’s a wonderful film. I chose it because of its reputation as one of Studio Ghibli’s better films (I’m basically just touring through their greatest hits at the moment), and, unlike last time, I wasn’t disappointed by any means.

I’ve been watching: Only Yesterday (1991)

• The latest in my tour through Studio Ghibli’s anime films is Only Yesterday. It’s about Taeko, a 27-year old woman from Tokyo who spends a short holiday with her brother-in-law’s family in the countryside, in the course of which she experiences a series of reminiscences from when she was a ten-year old girl, causing her to reflect on her life and what she wants for herself. She befriends her brother-in-law’s brother, who helps her figure out how she feels and what she wants for herself.
• I think this has been the Ghibli film I’ve liked least of the five-and-counting that I’ve watched so far. It’s not a bad film as such, it’s certainly excellently scripted and well-made in general, but it’s not really to my taste, and I can’t say I liked it. Which is weird because it’s supposed to be one of the most acclaimed of Studio Ghibli’s films.
• Maybe it’s just that I don’t get it. Maybe I’m not old enough to get it—unlike Studio Ghibli’s typical output it’s targeted at an adult audience rather than a child audience. It deals with themes of nostalgia, wistfulness, modern alienation, insecurity—themes which I perhaps lack enough experience in life to properly be able to relate to yet. Certainly I didn’t get the ending at all because [SPOILERS] I can’t understand why anyone, especially someone of Taeko’s age, would want to give up a life in a city like Tokyo to be a farmer’s wife. It sounds perfectly dreary to me, I have to say. But then again, I’m from a big city and can’t imagine any other kind of life.
• The parts of the film I enjoyed most were Taeko’s reminiscences of her 10-year old self, of childhood memories of growing up, puberty, childhood romance and the quaint frustrations a 10-year old experiences. Those sequences were very entertaining and 10-year old Taeko was a funny and charming child. Maybe I enjoyed those sequences most because I could actually relate to them, having once been a pubescent child myself, whereas I can’t (yet) relate to the peculiar anxieties and emotional concerns experienced by 27-year olds.

What I’ve Been Watching

Well it’s been a long time (5 months) since I’ve done one of these, so for this post I think I’m going to share my thoughts on a selection of the movies and TV series I’ve been watching recently.

Studio Ghibli films: Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Whisper of the Heart, When Marnie Was There

• Studio Ghibli’s anime films really are something special. They’re all made in a particular style: at one level they’re films for children, but the narratives are so well-constructed and the themes are so intelligent that they very much appeal to adults as well, and unsurprisingly Studio Ghibli has a substantial following of grown-up fans as well as kids. They’re magical, emotional, heartwarming films that bring out the inner child even in adults.
• These four — Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Whisper of the Heart and When Marnie Was There — are the only Studio Ghibli films I’ve seen so far, but I want to watch more of them. I liked Spirited Away (the studio’s most popular film) the most, but they’re all wonderful.
• One thing Studio Ghibli does really well is creating wonderful, complex, relatable, well-written characters with whom it is easy to empathise and become invested in. Chihiro from Spirited Away seems like an obnoxious brat at first, but you come to love her as you go on a journey with her over the course of the movie. Shizuku from Whisper of the Heart is a romantic, exuberant, free-spirited young schoolgirl and an aspiring writer with a brilliant imagination. Anna from When Marnie Was There is a troubled, introverted, anxiety-ridden young girl whose friendship with a mysterious girl called Marnie one summer turn her into a happier, healthier version of herself. All fantastic characters, with fantastic stories to go with them.

Arrow

• As of writing this, I’ve finished the first season and am two episodes into the second season. Season 1 was very good—I found the season arc involving the “Undertaking” really absorbing, with a well-executed climax in the season finale. There were also a couple of interesting side-plots, including that involving Helena Bartinelli, a character I’d love to see return at some point.
• Although I’m only two episodes into season 2, I’m not sure how the show is going to follow on from season 1, though. The Undertaking is finished and there’s no obvious Big Bad left to fight for season 2. So far it’s just been Oliver cleaning up his mother’s mess and being a bit more angsty. And this kind of show really does need an intriguing season- or multi-season arc to keep it interesting, because “masked vigilante cleans up the streets” gets boring very quickly unless there’s something bigger going on. But don’t let’s pass judgment too soon…
• Something the show needs to work on (again, keeping in mind I’m only 1.2 seasons in) is its character writing. The characters are good, but the writing is a bit lacklustre. These characters for the most part don’t feel like real people—their motivations and reactions and even the dialogue feels artificial, Felicity Smoak perhaps being a notable exception.

Rogue One

• Excellent film. I was much more impressed by Rogue One than I was by The Force Awakens. The Force Awakens itself was a good movie in its own right and a tour de force in demonstrating what modern filmmaking can do for an established franchise like Star Wars, but I felt that as the latest instalment of an established franchise it failed to take up the opportunity to continue the story in a meaningful way, opting instead to rehash old tropes and indulge in nostalgia.
• Rogue One on the other hand, although a prequel of sorts to A New Hope, really was a fantastic and worthwhile addition to the franchise. Although indulging in the obligatory fanservice, it didn’t feel like fanfiction as The Force Awakens did, it expanded the narrative universe of Star Wars meaningfully and, above all, was a wonderfully well-written and well-directed sci-fi movie. I think it’s easily one of the better Star Wars films of them all.
• To say something in The Force Awakens‘ favour, though, it did introduce some really brilliant new characters in Rey, Finn and Poe (I’m not as much a fan of Kylo Ren). Rogue One continued this trend with an equally wonderful cast of new characters. Jyn is fantastic, and I think that sassy robot is my spirit animal.

Doctor Strange

• The latest notch on Benedict Cumberbatch’s theatrical bedpost was a very enjoyable Marvel film, if not the most memorable of Marvel’s or Cumberbatch’s showings. As far as I was concerned it was typical of Hollywood’s superhero-themed output: enjoyable enough to watch, but I don’t think I’ll be bothering to buy the DVD (or download it).
• I did enjoy the distinctiveness of this superhero story, though. Doctor Strange is a distinctive character, a prodigous surgeon who happened upon a society of magic-users in Nepal in the course of trying to find a way to fix his hands, broken in a motor accident. It makes for engaging viewing, and Strange’s training with the magical monks in Nepal is also very fun.
• To be honest, while there’s a decent script there, for me it really was Cumberbatch who made the film. He’s a magnetic screen presence once again and really did turn what could have been a fairly ordinary movie into an enjoyable and engaging one. Benedict Wong and Chiwetel Ejiofor also put in some worthwhile performances, as did Rachel McAdams as Doctor Strange’s love interest, but I wasn’t all that convinced by Tilda Swinton as the “Ancient One”, and I question the casting of a white, middle-class English woman as the master of an ancient secretive Himalayan spiritual sect.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

• I really enjoyed this movie and I’m really looking forward to the next four films in the series. When I first heard that there were going to be three five Fantastic Beasts films, I was sceptical: “how and why are they going to milk this for five films?” But since seeing Fantastic Beasts and realising that the series is, in a way, a prequel to the Harry Potter stories, I came to see how this could work and how it could be a very valuable addition to the Harry Potter narrative. I won’t spoil the film for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but it’s becoming clearer how the Fantastic Beasts films are going to tie into the backstory of the Harry Potter stories, especially with respect to certain events and characters…
• Newt Scamander is a Hufflepuff and this is very very very good.
• As a huge and longstanding Harry Potter fan, I’m generally very happy about the Harry Potter renaissance that 2016 has been, with the release of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child stageplay and the release of the first instalment of the five-fold Fantastic Beasts film series. I’m just happy that the Harry Potter franchise is developing into something that isn’t just contained to the seven books and their movie adaptations, that J.K. Rowling and Warner Bros are willing to keep continuing the story and expanding the universe in meaningful ways and that both the fans and the creator(s) are coming to realise that Harry Potter doesn’t have to be something that ended with the film release of Deathly Hallows Part 2 in 2011—it can, if we all want it to, keep going, keep expanding in the way that Fantastic Beasts is showing it can. Why not a film or TV spinoff about the Marauders? Why not a spinoff about the next generation? If we all want it to, it can happen.

Victoria

• Ah, wasn’t it good? I usually don’t go in for historical dramas, because I usually don’t find them very good (Jenna Coleman was really the only reason I decided to watch this in the first place)—I feel it’s difficult to get historical drama right, and they usually either don’t do justice to actual history or are unfortunately constrained by historical events so that they can’t tell the stories the writers and directors really want to tell. But I think Victoria is one of the historical dramas I’ve genuinely enjoyed, and I think what it did right was using history as a foundation, a springboard for making what was really a period drama like Downton Abbey. In Victoria, the drama came first and history second, in that they weren’t trying to dramatise history, they were trying to historicise drama—if that makes sense… In any case, the formula worked and Victoria ended up being one of the few historical dramas that have won me over.
• Jenna Coleman was the reason I decided to watch Victoria, and she was lovely to see on screen again and playing the queen that she is. However, I hate to say it but I actually think she was one of the weaker aspects of the show. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed watching her, but her acting still leaves something to be desired when it comes to playing a figure like Queen Victoria: I felt that her performances lacked, to an extent, the precision that such a role demanded. Still, that doesn’t mean she wasn’t a joy to watch and that I’m not looking forward to seeing her again in series 2.
• There were plenty of standout performances in this show, most notably Rufus Sewell as Lord Melbourne and Tom Hughes as Prince Albert.