Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 04/22/24

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Monday, April 22, 2024

Children Who Chase Lost Voices (Makoto Shinkai, 2011)

Cast: Voices of Hisako Kanemoto, Miyu Irino, Kazuhiko Inoue, Junko Takeuchi, Fumiko Orikasa, Sumi Shimamoto. Screenplay: Makoto Shinkai. Cinematography: Makoto Shinkai. Art direction: Takumi Tanji. Film editing: Aya Hida, Makoto Shinkai. Music: Tenmon.

Myth-making anime fantasy, crafted with Makoto Shinkai's usual opulence, Children Who Chase Lost Voices draws on a variety of legends about the underworld, including Orpheus's journey to Hades to reclaim Eurydice. The protagonist is a young girl, Asuna, who finds herself in a subterranean land called Agartha, accompanied by her teacher, Mr. Morisaki, who knows a good deal, though not enough, about Agartha. He wants to go there to see if he can bring his dead wife back to life. Asuna is driven by curiosity about a strange boy named Shun, whom she met on her wanderings in the hills near her village. They discover that they have to deal with the animosity of the residents of Agartha toward people from the upper world. (The subtitles call them "Topsiders," which for me has a distracting footwear overtone.) It's too creepy and violent for younger kids, and some of its plot points, such as the suggestion that Agartha has been exploited by malign upper-world forces like the Nazis, need better context. But it's never boring and always a treat for the eye.