Tales from Earthsea (2006): A Ghibli look into the King Kill Ritual Dragons Drugs

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Summary

➡ This podcast discusses Studio Ghibli’s film, Tales from Earthsea, which was released in the United States by Disney. The hosts discuss their personal preferences for fantasy and non-fiction, and how these preferences might affect their view of the film. They also discuss the film’s animation style, comparing it to other Ghibli films, and noting that while the animation is good, it lacks the kinetic energy of other Ghibli films. Finally, they discuss the film’s direct approach to conveying its moral messages, which they found a bit repetitive and heavy-handed.
➡ The text discusses a film, comparing it to other works and critiquing its characters and plot. The speaker mentions the repetitiveness of the artwork and the use of similar character designs. They also discuss the film’s lack of iconic elements compared to other films, and the mundane nature of its story. The speaker also critiques the characters’ actions and motivations, suggesting some moral ambiguity.
➡ The text discusses a movie where characters have “true names” that, when spoken, give the speaker power over them. The movie also explores themes of magic, power, and identity. The author compares this concept to other cultural references like Beetlejuice and Bloody Mary. The text also mentions a critique from the director’s father, who felt the movie was too emotionally driven.
➡ This text discusses the making of a movie, where the director’s son takes over the project while they are not on speaking terms. The movie’s plot mirrors their relationship, featuring a prince who kills his father and runs away. The text also compares the movie to other anime films, suggesting it might be more appealing to a Western audience due to its clear rules and morals. The author suggests that the director’s son should release his next film through a French company to avoid the cultural baggage associated with his father’s brand.
➡ The speaker discusses their limited knowledge of anime despite living in Japan, and their daughter’s greater familiarity with the genre. They also mention the popularity of Western themes in anime, such as a 70s anime based on the story of Heidi. The conversation then shifts to the influence of Western culture in Japan, particularly baseball and Disney. They also discuss the distribution of Studio Ghibli films by Disney in the late 90s, and the lack of a consistent distributor for Ghibli films in the US.
➡ The speaker discusses their recent visits to a theme park, reminiscing about how it used to be and noting the changes that are being made. They talk about the thrill of the rides, suggesting that the excitement comes from a sense of danger. They also mention a movie they watched, discussing its characters and plot. The speaker concludes by comparing the seriousness of the movie to that of other films they’ve seen.
➡ The text discusses a movie made by Goro Miyazaki, comparing it unfavorably to another film, Mononoke. The author suggests that the movie’s themes include the struggle of living up to a powerful figure, symbolized by a king-killing ritual and the inability to use a stolen magic sword (or pen). The text also discusses a substance in the movie that seems to represent drugs, and the protagonist’s journey, likened to Pinocchio’s. The author also interprets a character’s shadow self as a representation of potential homosexuality or abstinence.
➡ The text discusses a movie where Sparrowhawk, a character, seeks to preserve his legacy through his daughter’s union with a masculine male. The movie also explores themes of masculinity, societal expectations, and grooming. The text also mentions a subplot about a spreading plague that doesn’t seem to be resolved. The author compares the movie’s animation style and themes to other works, and criticizes its soundtrack.
➡ This text discusses the making of a movie, its success and profitability, and the potential for a studio Ghibli version. It also mentions the movie’s budget and box office earnings, and the impact of the pandemic on the release of another movie, Earwig and the Witch. The text further talks about the use of computer animation in the movie and the reaction of some to this approach. Lastly, it mentions various projects and podcasts related to media and film, and promotes paranoid American sticker sheets.

Transcript

Ghibli trad daddy save patricidal orphan boy from drugs and gay sex to impregnate his secret daughter to gain immortality. All right, welcome to the Occult Disney Podcast, where we explore all the seas of Earth and other fantastical worlds. Like Japan. I don’t know. Japan’s not a fantastical world for me. I live here. But we are back in Japan for films. Today it is Studio Ghibli’s Tales from Earthsea, distributed several years after its production by Disney in the States. This is Matt here. It’s a paranoid American over there. How’s it going? I want to give a shot at something new.

Maybe just this one episode. I don’t know, but like a one sentence summary of the movie and maybe just for Ghibli movies, I’m gonna do my absolute best for this one. Just right up front, just to get all the different key points out of the way. Ghibli trad daddy save patricidal orphan boy from drugs and gay sex to impregnate his secret daughter to gain immortality. All right, that’s. That’s confusing, isn’t it? Is that one of the issues with the movie? This one has like a weird reputation. It’s. It’s kind of like it’s directed by Goro Miyazaki, which is Hayao’s son.

Right. So the whole idea is a legacy thing. Like, son, you shall take over my empire and I shall retire. And he just keeps screwing up. It’s happened like twice now. Is this movie known as a screw up? This one, it made some money, like it was a financial success, but it was seen artistically as kind of a misfire. And Hayao Miyazaki went out and took a smoke break during his screening of the movie. So really, I mean, I feel just so far detached from even knowing what you would look at and be like, oh, that wasn’t very good.

Because all of this is painstakingly great animation in a technical sense. Right. People didn’t complain about the animation. I think it just. They didn’t feel it had, like, the charm. And I’m coming in a little biased. I. I don’t. I guess we don’t get into pure fantasy much here. And I’m not a pure fantasy guy. I need to be grounded in a little bit of something, you know, Like, I’ve never gotten into Lord of the Rings. It just seems too detached from everything. And this is one of those things where it’s this pure fantasy. It’s completely detached from any reality.

So I just. That’s That’s a bias for me coming into this. Like, I generally don’t like this kind of thing. Now hear me out. This might be like the Japanese in you in a way to like, reject what I would consider classic European folklore. Like in. In like a broad sense. If you just took an amalgamation of all the different little specifics and just put one together, this kind of represent. In my. And it stood out because Ghibli. I was going in expecting, you know, something that took place in a classical Japan that would seem foreign to me.

And this one really does feel like a Lord of the Rings. It feels like a movie in a setting and some of the character styles that I might expect, even if it’s drawn in an anime style. I felt like I was familiar with these characters. These guys were in the background of Robin Hood. They were in the background of a few other movies that I grew up watching. And now we’re just seeing some side adventure. That was. That was the vibe that I got from this movie. And I. The first thing I thought was, would the traditional Ghibli audience that would show up and be like, I love everything Ghibli puts out.

And they. They show up and they go into this thing blind. Are they happy to see this like, European, medieval sort of sorcery tale and maybe not. How kind of did that house Moving Castle was kind of. But it had like the weird. Yeah, yeah, it had. It had like an extra weird Japanese touch to it. This. This one felt way more straightforward. The same way that if I forgive my horrible palette here, but like, if I go into Ninja scroll and I’m not going to complain that the whole thing was all about ninjas, you know, fighting and.

Or something. It’s like this movie. I would go into it not expecting Howl’s Castle and be totally fine with it. Whereas someone that is in love with Hell Castle comes and watches this and expects more of the same. Maybe the. The bar is sort of limiting your own enjoyment of this movie being good. That’s what I’m saying. Just I. Even beyond that, just my aversion to fantasy, like when I was a kid, you know, I. When I was trying to start reading like, more adult books, you know, I tried to read a few fantasies. Who knows, maybe I read one of the Ursula K D books at the time, the writer of one of the stories that inspired this.

But yeah, it’s that. That I couldn’t get into this. I got into a few science fiction and then, you know, I started like, yeah, just fantasy has Never done it for me. I’ve not seen all three Lord of the Rings movies. I’ve only seen the first one and half of the two. I’ve only seen one of the two towers. I haven’t seen the second tower yet. Probably get the idea though, right? Yeah, yeah, you get the idea. I feel like I don’t have a strong dog in this fight at all because I. As soon as I didn’t have to read fiction out of school, I went directly to just reference and nonfiction.

There was. There was almost no desire. For the longest time, I felt like conspiracy theories got to serve as my helping of fiction, like part of my like reading diet. So that kind of counted as the fiction. And then I. Everything else was just straight up reference books. That’s pretty much how my reading is too. Occasionally I will get into a glut of reading some sci fi, which usually ends up being like, you know, trashy Star Trek books. And I feel like I miss out sometimes and I try my best to go back and read some highly recommend fiction books and stuff, but it’s like I’ll get halfway into or even a quarter into a sci fi book and just dose out.

Yeah. And so I think our reading habits pretty similar in that. But you know, obviously watching things is different. So most people love watching fantasy. Watching is my reading. Yeah. Watching is my version of reading fiction. I watch the books. Yeah, exactly. So but for me, I was looking at things. Why? Are there any other reasons why maybe this isn’t as appealing as some of the other Ghibli’s one. I was thinking the devil in the details. The animation here is all really good, but you know, something like Spirits of the Way Totoro. There’s so many weird little details, just things moving around.

It feels more kinetic where this one, while it looks good, doesn’t feel as kinetic. That that’s one thing. And then like all of the morals or whatever they’re trying to impart with this movie are said annoyingly directly. You know, like they go on a minute speech about these are the morals of this movie. And they do it like three times. And by the last time I’m like eye rolling a little bit. You know, I have to. I’m glad that you actually mentioned it in that way because as I was watching this for completely weird unrelated reasons, I’ve been re watching these old Bible tale animations from, I want to say the 80s.

And I’m not saying that they have Ghibli artwork or that the Ghibli artwork in this movie is anyway comparable, but they’re both anime and they’re both wearing the same damn outfits, and they have got the same damn, like, black beards. So as I’m watching this movie, it was like, man, this is just a higher rendered version of these 80s Bible animations that I’ve seen plenty of times. So the direct morals almost felt like an elevated version of that in comparison. So I kind of gave it, like, points for that. I don’t know. Like, maybe on, you know, they didn’t earn those points, but I gave them to them anyways.

Maybe you got to make a super cut where you enter polite scenes from this and that, if anyone notices. Yeah. And. And actually, I had, like, a note that I didn’t even write down because I was like, oh, no. I think that that’s a stylistic choice. So maybe here’s a good time to bring that up is that whenever they show, spoiler alert, these slave kids in the background of, like, this wagon, that they’re taking all these kidnapped children and throwing it into, like, old school Franklin scandal. But, like, I noticed in one of the screens that, man, they all look the same in a way that in Ghibli, usually everything is.

Got so much variety in it. But then I was thinking, well, maybe that’s because they’re stylistically trying to show that once you get kidnapped, you. You are just, like, turned into some kind of a commodity that’s interchangeable with anything else in your environment. And therefore, the artwork was, like, repetitious and used. Everyone had the same haircut, the same hair color, the same skin tone, the exact same. It looked like someone just took one character and pasted them, like, 20 or 30 different times in a few spots. But I was thinking that was intentional. I could also see that’s where Daddy takes a smoke break.

But, no, I get what you’re saying, and I imagine, you know, it’s like, obviously he’s got to be like, I got to make a little bit of my own style. Right. So I have to break out of just the basic. Well, if. If that you’re trying to establish your style and, you know, showing the same color tones and stuff. I know that it felt like when I was watching it, ooh, this is something I could be critical of. But, oh, wait, maybe there’s a reason that they did it this specific way. Like, the images are conveying the same feel.

But if this was the way to stand out from Daddy, I don’t think that this is the way to do it. His more recent film, which was actually more poorly received is Ghibli’s first cgi, which is Earwig and the Witch. And it looks kind of terrible. I’m looking at screenshots. I have not watched it. Maybe it’s. Maybe I’d love it. But I’m not afraid of bad movies, man. Sometimes I find out, and I’m shocked that some of the movies that I thought were, like, the best I’ve ever seen are so horribly rated. So I. I’ll give.

I’ll give you one example. There’s one called Land of the Blind that has Donald Sutherland playing this kind of Trump, like, character way, but way before the Trump was on his political sort of arc here. But it. I. It was like one of those movies, like, man, this movie is so good. I need to recommend it to everyone. And you go and look at the reviews, and it’s got like a three or force. Yeah, mine for that. I’m going to check what the rating is. I’ve always felt that way about Mast and Anonymous. Have you seen that? Masked.

Anonymous. Masked and Anonymous. Oh, my God. Sounds like the worst documentary ever. What is it? Oh, it’s not. It’s. It’s a weird. The poorly named something else. Yeah, hold on. I have to check. It’s directed by not. Not the guy that does Curve, but Larry Charles, the director of a lot of Seinfeld’s. Not Larry David. This is a different guy. And it’s starring Bob Dylan, who doesn’t try to act at all, but he’s the star of the movie 5.3. So maybe not as bad, but not well rated, but, like, it just has everybody in it. The highlight of the movie is you have Jeff Bridges and John Goodman kind of like a year after the Big Lebowski.

But Jeff Bridges is now like the opposite. The Dude. He’s not chill about anything, man, but he’s still kind of talking the same. And he still kind of looks like the dude coming off the tail end of it. Yeah. And then he murders John Goodman. Spoiler alert. There’s like 30 characters. And so it’s one of those movies everybody’s in. Jessica Lang’s in there. Who else in there? Off the top of my head, Anyway, I highly. I recommend it there. That’s my bad movie recommend, everyone. The point being that I don’t care what the critics thought of this movie.

I gave it just as much, I guess, merit. At the end of it, I felt just as satisfied as some of the other ones. Although House Castle has so many iconic, weird, little quirky Things that just etch into your brain the second you see it. You’re like these weird little dust demons. Or like Toto Row. The cat thing. Right. That thing just sit in cat bus. This movie doesn’t really have a lot of those. This one has motifs and story plots, but it’s like kid fixes fence, gets in fight with wolves and bad guys. And it’s.

It’s very mundane compared to anything else. I’ve seen Ghibli. But I also like seeing that. If this were a Final Fantasy game, I would probably quite enjoy playing it. That’s kind of how I felt watching it. And I guess you would be Sparrow Hawk in the JRPG version. I don’t know. I don’t think you’d be the kid. I don’t think you’d be Aaron, but. But then Sparrowhawk just disappears for long periods of time too, so maybe not. I don’t know. No, he’s got to go on the side quests. I think he would be Sparrow Hawk. Yeah, you’d be side quested.

Yeah. And the. And Aaron, the kid is just the kid that runs up to you when you get to town and like, gives you some kind of bad information. Right? Yeah. So I. Or kill you. And by the way, I want to be playing like this in 90s Final Fantasy form, you know, like on my Nintendo DS. That’s the version I would be playing. Just to throw out there. I’m a purist. Final fantasy 7 and above. Okay. I’ve even played more Dragon Quest, but I think this is probably a little too dark for a dragon Quest.

Well, yeah, just blobs. We’re just gonna attack blobs in that case. Yeah. Right. Now this is another Black Goo movie. So this does go into the Black goo genre because first Aaron has the dream about the black goo, and then later it becomes a real thing with Cobb. Right. So speaking of Cobb, I feel like we just need to jump right into the feminine qualities of Cobb and how that’s typically discussed or perceived. I didn’t realize Cobb was. Was male until 75% through the movie, I think. Oh, okay. I mean, didn’t you put it together the second you heard Cobb’s name or like Cobb talking? I just thought that was a weird one.

No, I’ve been. You know what I thought of, and it’s in my notes in the car. Recently I’ve been list Mitch Hedberg where he’s like talking about corn on the cob. What if it’s off the cob? And the. The punchline Somehow I’m saying people called me Mitch all together. So my note is just Cobb altogether. I was too busy thinking about that to. To catch the. The signs, I guess. I. I thought. I thought that that was probably the biggest underlying motif of the entire movie was the. Was the conflict between sparhawkawk and Cobb. That seems obvious.

And then directing the future of potentially the world that, like the energy that’s left in this entire kingdom is either going to go the Sparrowhawk way, it’s going to go the Cob way. And Cobb makes some convincing arguments. And I wasn’t even sure if he was lying the entire time, or he’s just a slimy dude that happens to. To convey the truth in very harsh ways. My way or the Cob way. That’s. That’s the new bumper sticker. That is one thing with this film, though we’ve noticed in a lot of the other Ghibli’s how everybody’s in a gray area, which is not the case in this.

You know, I don’t think. Well, you did mention Cobb has a few good points. So you could call that some great points. Good points. And I’d argue Sparrowhawk has a few maybe like chinks in his armor in a way. Because a. He’s got what I assume is like a bastardized dog. What’s the bastard version of a daughter. But he’s basically. He’s got a daughter he abandoned and doesn’t necessarily claim, and she’s clearly got daddy issues to make up for it, even though he’s somewhat in her life, but doesn’t want to recognize any of this. Also, when Aaron gets kidnapped by these traffickers, he goes and saves Aaron and he takes Aaron under his wing and he brings him to the forest.

And Aaron’s like, what about the rest of the slaves that, you know, I was with? And he’s like, oh, I unlocked their handcuffs. Like, they got it from here, but Aaron didn’t have it from there. Aaron needed someone to escort him through the forest and hunt and bring him to shelter. And a little family that had like a fire burning and a whole setup, right? Fence everything. Like, what. What are we really expecting to happen to this, you know, collection of slave kids that they just unlocked their handcuffs in the middle of the forest and it’s like, all right, have at it, guys.

That almost reflected this. Weird. Either he’s like really naive or he also was kind of cruel in some way. Imagine you’re the guy that was handcuffed to Aaron and you see Sparrowhawk come in and Take Aaron away. And he’s like, you guys got it from here. I would almost feel like Sparrowhawk is my cob. Right. Like you can convince me to go and kill a cop now. Well, I. I’ll give you two parallels. One, you’re mentioning how she’s. She’s the disowned daughter or whatever. And I was like, well, it’s kind of the opposite of Ponyo, isn’t it? Where Daddy also is like in that weird gray area, but is really.

And pono. Right. So kind of a different vibe there. Right. And this one, like, they. They live in the same house and they just don’t acknowledge, even though they. Everybody knows this. Like, I knew the mom knew, the dad knew the daughter knew. Everybody knows that it’s his daughter, I assume. Am I reading too much into that? But no one says it right. The. The other one I wanted to respond to is from one of my other podcasts I rewatched, Django Unchained, where Django does the same thing. He just, you know, unlocks the guys and rides off on the murders, the.

The slavers, and rides off on a horse. So. Right. But Django is sort of like a Robin Hood where he uses an acceptable amount of violence to fight other types of violence. In this case, if it’s Sparrowhawk versus Cobb, maybe. I mean, they’re both gray. I guess that’s the ultimate point, is that they definitely both have these wide gray areas. Even though they represent a light and dark archetype, there’s lots of dark little shadows trailing around Sparrowhawk constantly. Like, even. Even his name refers to, like, a pretty brutal sort of predatory act. Right? Yeah. And I mean, let’s.

Let’s be real. Part of the thing with this movie was dad kneecapping it. Let’s. Let’s look at some of his response here. Other responses. Okay, I’m now reading from Wiki these. During a screening of the film, Goro’s father, Hayao Miyazaki, walked out for a smoke break, commenting, you shouldn’t make a picture based on your emotions. When asked his thoughts, he said, I was looking at my kid. He’s not an adult yet. That is all. He later wrote a message for his son. It was made honestly, so it was good. Le Guin, the author of the Earthsea book, she liked the movie, but was like, yeah, that’s not my story.

Well, I mean, you wouldn’t expect your story to come directly out of the End of Ghibli, would you? If it’s named after the book, it has the characters from the book or not. I. I can’t. Maybe I haven’t read Tales of Mercy. Anyway, the author did like the movie is the point. While also noting that it. She didn’t feel responsible for the story at all. You know, I. I would assume then that his son probably related more to the. The girl in this movie. Less like not Aaron, but. What was her name? Taryn. I can have that for you in a second.

Tara. Taru. Tartaru. Taru. But then she has the second name, right? Everyone has a second name in this. Don’t say it. Don’t say it. I won’t say it. I’m not saying it. The world ends if I say it. Okay. I wrote Lebanon in my notes. Like the country. Because I kept hearing that. Lebanon. Okay. I didn’t. I didn’t. I. Actually this was one that I watched entirely in English along with English subtitles which did not match. So. So I got two different interpretations of every line that was delivered. So I kind of took notes on the best of those two.

Okay. I don’t think the names change. That’s a question mark. I think they have the same names in both. Yeah. I mean it’s Cobb in Japanese. It’s Prince Aaron and English, so I think it works out. Yeah, but where was I going with that? I don’t remember. Well, you were just confirming that her name is Tartaria, I believe. That would have been fun. Yeah. Yeah. All these harsh sounds that nobody wants to do. Make smooth names. What happened to the nice sounding names? And she all. There’s also this weird thing that immediately reminded me of Ready Player one.

If you’ve seen the. The movie. I don’t know if you read the bar. She’s horrible. Now this is one Sci Fi Mov. Or a book that I. I did read, but Ready Player one. But in the movie. Yeah, exactly what you’re talking about. Liv. Olivia Cook plays Artemis and everyone’s like, oh my God, like, don’t even make direct eye contact. She’s a monster movie. It’s the same thing. And then, yeah, the. The hot girl just has like a little bit of makeup and then bam. Have you seen a Zoolander 2? I’m sure I have. They’re. I mean, they’re both about MK Ultra, so it’s natural that I don’t remember either of them.

Right. They even have the scene, the first one. Ye. Owen Wilson’s hand. So the first half of the movie he’s wearing like this gold mask on one half of his face because he’s been disfigured. And at some point in the movie, the mask comes off and he’s got, like, this real tiny scar on his cheek. I’m glad to see that was. I mean, this is. In Zoolander 2. This is Ghibli, and they kind of do the exact same thing. Right. I mean, they. And they clearly have the capability to have made her look grotesque if they wanted to.

I’ve seen them do it a million times, you know. Yeah. Zoolander 2 does not fit into my unpopular theory that comedy sequels are better than the originals. By the way, Zoolander1 definitely the better one. I wouldn’t. I mean, I feel like you should watch them both together and not try and separate them. Oh, yeah, that. That. That works. I don’t know. There is, like, a gap between the two. So what about the Happy Gilmore sequel coming out? That’s not out yet. Who knows what the deal is with that, you know? Right. But that would fall into your formula.

Right. Well, I should hope it’s good then. Yes. Okay. Not just good, but better. Better in my mind. But I also think Wayne’s World 2 is better than Wayne’s World 1. Like I said, it’s an unpopular theory. That’s the concert one, Right? Yeah. I’m the only person that thinks this. I believe I could be persuaded. I don’t know, is it a Monday or a Tuesday kind of thing? Yeah. Beverly. Beverly Hill Billy movie suck. No, Brady Bunch sequel was better, I think. I think most people say Adam Stallion sequel is better. I think most people say that I kind of like Anchorman 2 better, and I think I might be the only person that thinks that.

So. Yeah, well, we. We got into this whole tangent because we were talking about don’t say something’s true name. And you just mentioned Brady Bunch, I think. And that was one of the things that ironically was coming to mind, as they say, like, don’t say, you know, someone’s true name. So one of the major premises of this entire movie is that everything on the planet has a true name. From the waves to the wind to Matt to me, we all have, like, a true name. And if someone else says your true name, then they’re sort of commanding your power.

They take over you somehow or they have control over you. And that back in the day, people used to know the true name of the water and the true name of the wind and therefore had power over it. Then that was essentially all magic is, is knowing something’s true name. So if you just say it out loud. So when I Think about Brady Bunch. I was like, when she’s just going, marcia, Marcia, Marcia. Is that her literally, like, vampiring out? You know, the energy from Marsha? Because that’s her name. Yeah, yeah. Or. Or you. You know, you’re walking down the street, you hear seals and cross summer breeze, and then you shoot a politician.

You know, okay, that’s another MK Ultra reference. I was also thinking Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice seems to follow this exact same premise. The same thing as. What’s the one where you look in the mirror? And Bloody Mary, as well bring it up. Like, all of. Like, those all imply the exact same dynamic here. That, for example, Bloody Mary somehow got elevated to her real name, and that’s her real name. And if you say it even hundreds of years after she’s dead in a mirror, that somehow you’re tapping into that energy. And that is exactly where they start this entire movie out with, is that, oh, my God, they’re lost at sea.

There’s choppy waves, and this guy’s like, oh, my God, I just forgot the name of the waves and the name of the winds, and we’re screwed now. And these dragons fight each other, and a bloody dragon falls down to the earth, and everyone’s like, oh, my God, dragons exist. And then the credits kind of start to open up. I just thought that was awesome, but I could see maybe a Ghibli snob not thinking it was as awesome. I mean, one of the problems here is if. If Walt Disney’s son had started making movies in the 60s, and then Walt Disney publicly was like, this movie is kind of crap.

That. That would kind of color the whole thing, right? Like, you know, daddy did give his son a bit of a kneecap here, but I do see where, like, all the Ghibli pieces here, but they do feel a little more like in crayon. Like in Spirited Away, the weird rules of the bathhouse you kind of have to work out. These are just kind of laid down. If you know the true name you can control. Right? It’s. It’s very, like, broad stroke. I. And they deliver that rule in literally the first 10 seconds of the movie. Like, you don’t.

You don’t even have to sort of work at that. It’s just given to you direct. And I think what makes this movie extra interesting is the familial conflict going on in the actual production of it, because it’s not like it’s a movie after he had already had some kind of a conflict with dad. It. Like, you can See it throughout this movie. For example, if he’s represented by Tartaria or whoever the girls named Taryn. Tara, if that’s the son. Right? The actual Miyazaki son working through this and Sparrowhawk is Miyazaki, then Sparrowhawk’s just like refusing to acknowledge any association or like any kind of support in this.

In the way that everyone else knows that you’re connected. That’s absolutely how this movie was. Came about. It was in the cooker for some time. I think Disney showed interest in doing Earthsea. Eventually. Miyazaki had. Had shown some interest in it like in the. In the late 90s or whatever. Right? Daddy didn’t. Hayao Miyazaki said he didn’t have the fire in the belly for animating Earth. C. So he basically promised, I’ll be in charge of the script. I’ll make sure the script is fine, and then my son’s gonna do it. Which I guess he did do the script.

But he also like, was not on speaking terms with his son while mate. While he was making this film. So they were not actually conferring with each other apparently while making this film. I don’t even know what the spat was at that time, but it seems like he really was not, you know. Yeah. Remained on non speaking terms from the duration of the project. So he kind of like washed his hands of it. The other weird thing though is it’s also based sort of on a story by Daddy Miyazaki called Ashunta’s Journey, which is from the 80s, I believe.

1983. So I think the details of the actual story kind of come from this Miyazaki manga from the early 80s, which is maybe one of the reasons that Le Guin was like, yeah, that’s not my story. Because it literally is not. What. And speaking of. Even though Mia’s. I. I’m sorry, I don’t know the first name. So I’m just gonna refer to dad. Daddy. Daddy and Sonny’s fine. So. And I’ll just shorten it to Daddy and Son. I won’t even say Miyazaki anymore. So. So sun is working on this movie. Dad refused. Dad and son decide not to talk to each other as they’re working on this movie.

And. And that represents literally what’s happening between Sparrowhawk and Tartaria or Taryn in this. In this movie. But outside of that, the main protagonist of the movie is actually the prince of a king that kills his own dad and then runs away and never speaks of it again. So there’s like some Very deep themes here. Like, I can see both sides of this family sort of coming out in. What you’re describing is what’s going on behind the scenes. And let me just say, let’s not put it beyond Ghibli though, that maybe we weren’t seeing a conflict that they were going through in this movie.

Maybe they went through the conflict in order to bring us this movie. Yeah, it’s just one of the things from. Like, is the behind the scenes actually more interesting here? And it could be part approach, which. This is appealing to you more. So let’s. Let’s say Ponyo is like growing a garden, right? You know, this movie, you know, the. The Ghibli’s watch that’s a guard, whereas Goro is going for like a race car driver. You know, he’s getting into F1 and doing a few laps. You know, you can be successful at two, but it’s a different thing.

I. I’ve given this a lot of thought, right, Because I’m. My mind is still kind of blown from movies like Ponyo. I’m admitted. Like, I’ve just barely started dipping my toe into Ghibli in general, but anime even more so, right? And I feel that there is a certain saturation point. Like, if I made it my life’s mission to just watch nothing but anime for the next 20 years, maybe you can correct me here, but I feel like I could be so saturated with surreal, quirky, weird, unexpected things that I see Ponyo and get a little bit lost in the sauce.

Like, okay, yeah, cool. It’s another weird movie about like a fish baby girl that grows into a human and no one talks about it. And that’s just. That’s Norton kids are inside of waves and they turn in the fish and all that. And that’s normal because every other movie that I’ve seen over this course of 10 or 20 years also have, like, weird, nonsensical kind of rules to it. So when I. When I watch this movie, right, Tales from Earthsea, it’s the opposite for me. Like, I’ve seen plenty of movies like it, and I feel like it holds up in that.

But whereas I don’t have a frame of reference, if I see Ponyo right now, it’s fascinating because it’s so novel, but I would imagine someone that’s been watching, you know, nothing but anime for, like, their entire life does. Like, is Ponyo still as magical and surreal? And if so, what is it that makes Ponyo so different, which represents what this movie is Missing in some kind of like qualitative way. It, it might be that Sunny is, is basically, you know, adapting more western things. Akira Kurosawa, I mean, very well respected in Japan, of course, probably more respected in America.

He made Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, all that sort of stuff, all the throwing of blood, you know, all the primetime samurai movies. His style is heavily influenced by John Ford. You know, the guy made all the westerns in Hollywood. Right. So for Japanese that’s a little bit off putting. Everyone knows those movies are good, but they sometimes prefer the like, quieter directing styles of some of the Japanese directors, the more impressionistic ones. Right. So when you’re in the Ghibli thing, you expect extremely impressionistic. And this, you know, this is imaginative, but it’s a little more on the nose.

Like the rules are clear, the morals are clear, they’re stated on screen multiple times. So that could be more appealing to a western audience where, you know, a Pixar movie usually lays out all the rules as quick as it can so then they can play with its toys, literally and figuratively. You know, you know, we’re butting up against my MK Ultra programming because I, I feel that even though you’re not supposed to like to have everything spoon fed, sometimes it is nice. There’s a warm feeling about having the like literally the movie opens up and it’s like, oh my God, I’m lost at sea now because I used to be magic and I just forgot the name of the water.

And if I knew the true name of water, then I wouldn’t be in this pickle. And then the movie starts like I kind of, I kind of like it being spelled out in a way that like, that’s all I’ve consumed for so much of my media consumption that it, it does it well, it fits that formula well. Whereas I have, I can’t really figure out like how Ponyo does it. Well, I know it does it well because it’s a fascinating thing to watch. Just the same way that Hell’s Castle is a fascinating thing to watch. I mean, if you secretly just said this movie’s from France, I think everyone would love it.

Right this way. It’s from France. It’s this French thing. You know, you trick people with a French dub or something and then they’d be like, oh, this is a masterpiece. Because they, like you’re saying there is a lot of cultural baggage. The branding of this movie carries a lot of baggage. Same with the Pixar. You know, when you a Pixar movie, it doesn’t seem to fit. The Pixar branding can be off putting, even if it’s good. I think you just offered a perfect solution. We should, we should float this up the chain and just let son Miyazaki know that the next movie puts out, put it out through France, make a new shell company in France and make it seem like it was all made by some sort of refugee team, right? Of.

Of different countries that all fled to France and the government paid for them to make this masterpiece. And bam. It wins every award made for animation. And then he can come out and take the gold mask off or shift it to the side or whatever and be like, it was me all along. And then daddy appreciates them, right? That. That would be a thing. But yeah, he’s supposed again, he’s supposed to, you know, tend to daddy’s garden and he wants to drive an F1 car, so. And again in this movie, they ruin this garden, right? The kid ruins the garden and he has to go back and kind of fix it and sort of like help mend the fence.

Like, I do like the meta of this movie a lot, you know, it’s just like I’m not gonna rewatch this one. Like I do rewatch other Ghibli sometimes know, and I’m. I’m not a heavy anime viewer, by the way. I live in Japan, but I. I don’t know, like a ton of anime. My. Sometimes I have to ask my daughter, do you know what this is? Because she’s much more, you know, she’s 15, she’s up on the anime. She knows what’s up with all that. I would hope so. I almost, I almost feel like there would be something wrong if not.

Yeah, she’s got a big box of, you know, anime DVDs that we got from the Blu Ray apocalypse, that sort of thing. So. But I, I don’t watch that much. Let me ask you, are there any widely known animes that have this kind of a theme, like a European western style theme that do phenomenally well this. In the late 70s, there was a Heidi anime. You know, Heidi of the mountains of the hills or whatever that is that was. Was the example that you have that’s still popular today in Japan. So that would be. Okay, I get.

I guess that is technically western. Yeah, yeah. I mean it’s not a fantasy, but I mean this. Hey, hey. Earth Sea is an Earth sea. It’s not in the West. Is it Heidi’s. Heidi a Nazi or something? I don’t, I don’t remember. Neutral I. I do that. It doesn’t look appealing for me to watch that, so I haven’t. But they’ll still have the character, like, Heidi and the grandpa or whatever. Like, they’ll show up in, like, commercials and stuff, like, even now. So that’s surreal. For what. What. What exactly is Heidi selling to people? I don’t know, like, energy drinks or something.

Okay. Yeah. I guess that’s insurance. It’s like, really mundane stuff. Japan is weird. Like, Mao Chan, she was an Olympic. A figure skater, like, 15 years ago. She doesn’t act. She doesn’t make music. She just. But she still shows up in commercials, like, all the time. She’s just, like, still in every commercial I get. Because that. It represents. Even if you’ve never done anything, that you represent the apex of something. And. And that’s rare for someone to actually connect with whatever it is that they can do better than almost anyone else in the entire world. Most people realize what that is far too late or like, they just don’t have the technical stills to pull it off.

So I don’t know. It’s. I think that. That kind of a weird fluke. That’s why, you know, I’ll still eat sweeties if they got Larry Bird on the COVID even though everyone tells me they’ve expired. And they’re probably not healthy for you to continue eating. But I feel like that type of. Yeah, but that kind of legacy doesn’t. Same reason I still eat Wade Boggs chewing gum, even though the doctors tell me to stop. This is funny. Shohei Ohtani, the baseball player, he. There were some exhibition games in early March in Japan. So he came back to Japan for, like, a week to play these games, and suddenly he’s in every advertisement on every machine and every billboard in Japan.

It just seems while he was here, when he wasn’t playing baseball, they were, like, making him do every advertisement possible. Do you think maybe baseball is the biggest Western sort of infiltration of Japanese culture of any kind? Of any kind? It’s a contender. I’m sitting here thinking, if anything else, because we’ve even seen one or two animes at this point that feature baseball in them. Like, it’s. It is part of the culture that if you grew up in Japan and no one ever told you what came from the west or even mentioned what the west was, you’d probably assume that baseball was part of Japanese culture.

Because of how popular it is, though. Yeah, it is. It is. I’m. No, I’m sitting here trying to think of if there’s anything from Western culture that would be bigger than that. So let’s just not talk about any wars. We’re talking just fun cultural stuff here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, I know what you’re. You’re saying. I’m just thinking if there’s anything else. I mean, McDonald’s is infiltrated pretty well. 7 11. But 711 has become a Japanese company. The Canadians tried to buy it. The 711 that you get, right? We wish that was it. Dude, our.

The difference between the 711 in the States versus the 711 in Japan is literally like whether or not you’re going to the police station with handcuffs behind your back. Yeah, well, Disney itself, Right. Tokyo Disney was built in part to basically be like, well, if people can’t afford to fly to the States, it’s kind of like they’re visiting America when they go to Tokyo Disneyland. Right. Speaking of Disney is the occult Disney podcast, by the way, that’s felt very on the nose. So I’m just wondering, and just in a most bumpkin way, even knowing that I was the one that worked at Disney, I’m just curious.

We say Studio Ghibli is distributed by Disney. Is. Was there other contenders? Was there a bidding? And Disney just happened to say, we can get you in more stores at a better price point and yada yada. Or. Or was there, like, an intention, an intentional blending of these two? And we’ve already talked about some conflicts with, like, Weinstein, where he wants to make edits, and they’re like, blah, blah, blah. But I just. I just wonder, was there synergy in this or was just 100% a. A business move by Studio Ghibli? Business move because other studios had already dropped the ball.

Disney didn’t start distributing these films till the late 90s. Things like Totoro had already been released in America. I think it was Fox. Warner Brothers or Fox or maybe both. And they’d put them on home video. They made really bad dubs. Disney did a much better dub of Totoro, which is probably the one you saw because there’s a. The early one’s pretty rough. So there had been, like, home video releases by Warner or whatever that didn’t really get much traction. So it was another case where Disney might have, you know, dropped the ball again and just happened to catch a little more fire because they had a better marketing plan, I guess.

Okay, fair point. I mean, because I’m. I’m still trying to understand too, like, right now, what. How. What kind of ownership does Disney feel over These ghibli movies in 2025. Right. Is there some exec at Disney that’s like. Like yeah, we kind of did that. I think it’s probably. We kind of did that because even here’s the. It’s not even all the Ghiblis. The only Ghiblis that Disney was actually involved with Totoro they did on home video. But not theatrical. Right. It’s just the ones we’ve done. Spirited Away, House, Moon Castle, Ponyo. This one. There’s going to be two more that they distributed.

One is an actual Miyazaki and one is, is, is another Ghibli. So. So another Ghibli comes out this year. Does Disney end up distributing it into the web? No, they don’t have. They don’t currently have the deal. The Boy and the Heron was. I don’t remember who distributed that in the States, but was not Disney. So the ball kind of gets punted around with. With Ghibli in the States. Interesting. I wonder why there’s just not a Ghibli in the States. Are they not? They. I mean if there’s a Disney in the States and there’s a Disney in damn near every other country.

Right. So how come there’s not a Ghibli at least in the States? Well, we. I think I mentioned here before, the Tokyo Disney is not owned or operated by Disney. It’s owned or operated by the Oriental Land Company. In the 60s they started building man made islands in Tokyo and they were finding things to have people go to them. So it took a while for them to make the deal like it. Make them. It took them like 10 years to convince American Disney to let them build the park. They made a deal which made it seem like the Japanese were going to get screwed on it.

But then the park became so successful that they’re just making, you know, gangbusters. Even now the expansions that they keep doing to these parks are like nuts. Oh, by the way, they just announced that they are going to build an upride. We were joking. How up didn’t get a ride a few weeks ago. They’re going to take out the Jungle Cruise and put in an upright Tokyo Disney is. Yeah. Okay. Now, now I feel like a trip is going to be in order at Some point because 2030, if you want that. There’s too many things going on.

I have to wait until 2030. I can do that. I can. We can plan for five years. I assume they’re going to shut. They’re opening new space Mountain in 2027. So I assume that’s when they’re going to shut down Adventureland and redo it, you know, because right now, Tomorrowland’s kind of a nothing at the moment. So I’ll be almost 50. Whatever. Let’s do it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, now, see, I. I’ve been several times recently. I’m like. And I’m wondering maybe this is the last time. It really resembles like 80s Magic Kingdom because they’re about to make so many changes.

Maybe that’s why I’ve been there a lot recently. I’m like, oh, this is the last time to snatch away a bit of my childhood before they. They change it here in Florida. They’re ripping out the rivers of America and stuff. They’re, you know, really starting to change these parks for whatever reason. Yeah, Honestly, it’s. It’s been such a slow burn, though, that if you went to the park in the 90s or even in the early 2000s, it’s like, it’s a completely different place now. Even if all the rides are the same or most of them similar, the whole.

The whole magic is just not the same. Tokyo still mostly feels like 1985. You’re selling it. This. These are all selling points. Yeah, but they’re about to change Adventureland. It’s gonna be. And Tomorrowland is changing now. So. But yeah, ye. That’s that for me, it’s part of the charm of going there is just like, oh, wow, this is super nostalgic. You know, Snow White Scary Adventures is still scary. That’s the Queen. It’s all. There’s no music. It’s all screaming. Queen just jumps out at you like five times, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I heard. I think I mentioned here that I wrote and then I heard a kid.

It was lame. Why did you even take me on that? Which was great because it’s janky old dark ride. It’s just the old lady screaming at you for 80% of it. I think for older people, it just triggers a different trauma response from younger kids. Response would be like, you get on a ride and like, we’re going to take your phone away. Like, oh, my God. Like that. That. That’s sort of the equivalent. Like, they would have a similar trauma response for different reasons. There’s Pinocchio’s Daring Adventure. I don’t remember that one. It starts off with a really happy scene of Pinocchio singing and dancing on stage.

Car turns left. I think it turns right in California. And then the rest of the Ride is just nightmare fuel. I’m in. I love holy screaming at you and trying to trap you. Then it’s Pleasure island, and then it’s, you know, off to the salt mines and all that. And it ends in a room of clocks. And you have to sit in the room of clocks because the car in front of you is unloading. Ultimately, if you go to any theme park, most of the, like, the quote unquote rides, right? There’s the baby rides and there’s the adult rides.

And the adult rides tend to fall on a scale that at the top of it are like roller coasters that make some people, like, nervous to even go on, right? But on that whole entire scale, everything that gives you a thrill, in my opinion, are all things that are designed to make your body think it’s going to die. Even if you go on a Harry Potter ride and like a burst of fire blasts out and it’s close enough that you can feel it. It like you’re resp. The reason that that’s fun is because you. You’re telling your body and like some mammalian, like, primate version of it, like, you’re about to die.

You know, like this fire is coming at you. You’re gonna die. You’re on a roller coaster. This isn’t normal. You’re flying up into the air every other one of your relatives going back hundreds of thousands depending on what your beliefs are of years, right? Are all saying, like, you are gonna die from this experience. So you start to kind of like touch God a little bit, right? And then we come back down because the technology that we’re using, like the fire doesn’t actually burn you. And the roller coaster is made to be super safe. And all this even to the point of the old witch jumps out of the foot.

Like if an old witch jumped out of the forest at you, and this is the year 1600, you actually are gonna die probably. So I think that all of these and that. And the point being, that’s the entire point. Every one of the rides that’s fun. Any ride that’s fun. I think deep down, it’s because you just told yourself you were gonna die and then you survived it. And there’s like a. A crazy dopamine serotonin release just because of it. Okay? Except for some boat rides, I. I rode the Rapunzel ride. We’ll talk about that more next week.

And that one is just like a gentle float through a few rooms of animatronics and stuff, right? There’s nothing. Right? Well, I said there’s baby rides and there’s adult ride. Yeah, baby ride. That’s like, the kids are restless. We just gave them some lunch. Now let’s like, get them sleepy so we can just cart them through the park. Where? How do we get there? Oh, because I went to the park, that’s why. But yeah, yeah. So Disney itself, that Disney and baseball are probably the most infiltrating things. Even McDonald’s. Like, you gotta look a little bit for a McDonald’s.

They’re not on every corner. Seven elevens are, but not the McDonald’s. One of the fun ones to play with, I think is like, dragons. Like, like dragons seem really interesting. And mind you, this is going back into this movie because it starts out with these two dragons that are usually not seen in this part of the world, right? They’re like, there. We never see dragons in the east or the west or whatever side of the world they were talking about. And that this is like this big. But dragons themselves are one of these archetypes that seem to have spontaneously came up in a lot of different cultures and region.

Which is why some people I talk to are like, I believe in dragons, but I think dinosaurs are fake. Even even though if. If they’re like, well, there’s never been any really good fossil record. Like, okay, let’s talk about dragons now. But some people just seem to give credibility in dragons because the east and the west both had their own versions that were apparently not influenced by each other. Well, you look at the poster of this one big ass dragon, and I would say the poster for this has always, like, you know, intrigued me about the movie.

It’s got a great theatrical poster if you haven’t seen it. You don’t really see a lot of dragon though, beyond that opening scene. Yeah, maybe that’s disappointing. You expect drag. Maybe, you know, people expected dragons when I saw this. They come back a bit at the end, right? How much dragon can you really put in a movie, though? You know, I mean, really, unless they make a figment movie or something. I mean, you saw Game of Thrones, right? Actually, I didn’t. I told you, I’m not a fantasy guy. The one actually one that I did really like, the Dungeons and Dragons Honor Among Thieves movie.

Is that the one with Marlon Wayans? No, that. I did watch that one recently too, for that’s got to be one of the worst, right? But, well, you could watch this on YouTube. The scenes of what’s his name? Villain. Die Hard 3. Oh, God. Oh, I can’t remember his Name? Samuel L. Jackson. No, no, the villain. The bad guy. The Euro trash guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that guy. It’s really annoying. I can’t remember his name. It’s gonna come to me. But anyway, he’s just screaming gibberish as a wizard and it’s fantastic. Like when he’s screaming diverse, the wizard, the movie becomes.

Becomes great. Anyway, the newer one, that’s. That’s Hugh Grant, Chris Pine. I mean, it’s snarky, it’s funny. Right? So that. That ties me in a little bit. Maybe the sensibilities of the people feel kind of like modern. It’s the. I. Here we go. The secret sauce of that movie is like all of the characters feel like they’re people out of Dungeons and Dragon. People playing, like acting the character out. Right. There’s. There’s a weird disconnect with all the characters in that movie. So now I can think it’s just people around a table playing this. This weird game, you know? Whereas usually in fantasies and like in this one, everyone is very self.

Serious. Serious. Yeah. I would definitely say that this movie is one of the most serious Ghibli movies I’ve seen so far. And great. Graver. We didn’t do great with the Fireflies, right? Not. Not for this one. I mean, we can do at some point. But yeah, that. That one is pretty hardcore. So that one again, was not distributed by. They decided not to package that. No, Disney, never. But. But I think we mentioned in Totoro, the original screening, they were packaged together in the. So you would watch them back to. Back in the theater when they were first released.

So this. So this does seem like the most serious Ghibli Disney movie to date. Why was. I was definitely thinking of Mononoke. And that’s another one where this one kind of doesn’t. Kind of pales because it’s got the same, like, balance of nature ideas. Right. But Mononoke just has so much more going on. Oh, my God. Yeah. To compare those two, I can see why dad would go out for a smoke break now. Now I get it. Yeah. I feel like that’s what I needed. That’s. With this movie, I think if you do take it on, if it’s divorced from background, it’s a pretty good movie.

But if you compare this to Monoke, it’s not. You got nothing. You know, again, if it was out of France, you would never think to compare it to Mononoke. But since it’s made by Goro Miyazaki, you have to, you know, well, and. Okay. And that’s why I can see that this is why you want to kill your dad in the first movie that you put out. Like, you’re like, even if it’s not going to be your masterpiece, you know, you’re going up against Mononoke. If you can’t beat it, then maybe, like, energetically, you know, kill him.

Like, like, remove it. Like, there’s a literal killing of the king ritual at the beginning of this movie, which I think he was maybe trying to harness in the real world. Right. Like, he can’t actually kill Papa Miyazaki, but he can definitely enact that. And like, we’ve. We mentioned that people talk about how spells and spelling and words are magic and all that. I mean, that’s literally the premise of this movie is that words are magic. But I would make the argument that if a picture is worth a thousand words, then an animator drawing the same picture over and over again, thousands of thousands of times, is an even more powerful spell than anything that you could say or write.

So him actually having it. An illustration of the King kill ritual as his sort of, like, breakout. I think that there’s. There’s something deep and dark about that. Yeah, Maybe like, that’s. He was like, this is the only way I can do it. Because, I mean, come on. You can. Can’t. He cannot match his dad at what dad does he. But he’s probably like, I have my own skills. How do I finesse that? You know? And he steals Dad’s pencil, but he can’t use the pencil. He can’t even take the freaking cap off the pencil. Right.

Or I guess a pen would make a better. In the. In the movie, literally, it’s a sword. He steals his dad’s like, magic sword, but he realizes that he can’t even unsheath the damn sword because he’s not powerful enough. Like, this is him taking Papa Miyazaki’s pen. And, like, he can’t figure out how to take the. The. The cap off the pen, so he can’t draw or write with it, but he still uses it to, like, bash people over the head with. Yeah, see, that’s where I’m like, if you made, like, a TV show about the making of this, you’d have something like secession, right, people? This would be secession level.

You know, maneuvering and stuff. Making. Just making a TV shows about the making of this film. That’s why when we get to the men, the men rises. The wind rises. We gotta watch. Sorry, just had the name here. The Kingdom of Dreams of Madness, which is a documentary about the making of that film, which basically is. Goes outside the purview of just that film. So this movie also has drugs in. Has this weird substance called. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wrote some notes about that, which apparently just kills you. It’s like cyanide or something. Like crocodile again.

I always like to bring up the crocodile. Of course. I don’t know. I mean, it showed some of the people I. The most obvious reference seemed like heroin. It seemed like it was some sort of a heroin kind of more black goo. It’s black tar. Okay, well, black. If you were to try and sell me black tar, I might be scared. But if you told me that like, if you smoke this, it’ll put nanobots into your body then. And that’s what makes black goo fun is that. That at any point you could just be like, those are nanobots.

And now this organic thing feels technical. And it feels like this weird thing that can bridge sort of old history with new sci fi stuff. Only. Only black goo kind of has that power. What if I was like, hey man, I got Soma. The. The brave new world version. You’re taking the Soma makes you happy. Not if you say it like that. No, I don’t. I would not recommend that you personally become the drug dealer that. That. That like entices the first timers. Hey man, you want some drugs? Yeah, no, no, I don’t think. Well, I’ve never been a salesman.

I. I can definitely tell you that. And, oh, and the. The drug pusher in this one wasn’t that great either. Even though I could totally identify that Aaron was ready. Like, Aaron absolutely could have been sold drugs that day. It’s just that the drug dealer did not have. Have the right pitch for him. But here’s this kid that had just been trafficked or and perhaps is about to be re. Trafficked. He’s kind of like the ultimate perfect customer for a drug dealer in the middle of the city. But somehow Sparrowhawk shows up in the. The middle of the second, and again it’s like, is this guy following this drug dealer around or is he just helping Aaron for some reason because he’s got this magic sword? Yeah, I guess Aaron’s kind of having his own Pinocchio adventure here.

You know, getting trafficked, running to the. The drug dealers. Yeah, but Pinocchio didn’t kill Geppetto. Not yet. Pinocchio 2. Pinocchio’s revenge. The COVID He’s just sharpening his nose. Yeah. Yeah. 15 no actually, you can make that now, couldn’t you? Everyone gets to make a Pinocchio movie. You don’t have to wait for that. Could be so dark too. Like, he tells us, he tells Geppetto he loves him and his nose grows and stabs him through the heart. So it’s got like all this extra, like, beat you over the top of the head meaning to it. There’s a.

There’s a rabbit hole to go down. Figure out what the most existentially terrifying Pinocchio movie is because there’s so many. There’s that one with Roberto Benini. There’s the. The weird one from the early 80s where I think Christopher Lloyd voices the villain or something. I. I imagine there could be a Saw version where, like, someone is slowly asking Pinocchio some horrific questions and he has to keep lying because admitting them would make him like, the worst thing ever. Worse than Hitler. And you’re. You’re kind of like sitting across the room and they just keep asking these questions over and over.

And the nose keeps getting closer and closer, almost like a, A, A Swinging Pendulum kind of story, but he’s just going to poke your eye out at the end. There’s a 90s TV live action Pinocchio with Drew Carey and Brent Spiner. TV’s Lieutenant Commander Data is a bank clerk that turns Geppetto down. There’s also a movie called Pinocchio’s Revenge that I definitely recommend. Yeah, okay. Sorry, that’s what I said. I guess it’s not the, the most creative idea to end up at. That’s bad. Actually. I’m pretty sure there’s like a few different versions of it. But yeah, Pinocchio’s Revenge is like a 90s movie where it doesn’t, it doesn’t look great, but the premise is so good that you can forgive so much of it.

Yeah, I guess. What’s Tales of Earthy Being a Ghibli. It’s just like too many things make sense in this movie. I mean, they’re magical, they’re fantastical, but they make sense. Right? All the rules are clear. And. And it has some good old classic, like, Western contradiction, too. Like, the morality stuff has a lot of contradiction. For example, as soon as Sparrowhawk saves Aaron from being trafficked, and he’s like, congratulations, you know, hooray, you’re free from slavery. Now go plow this field until you get blisters on your hands. Like, it was the. It was the. It was literally like the very next thing that happens is like, you’re I released you from your chains.

No longer. You are a slave. I’m paraphrasing. And then they’re plowing the field when you’re paraphrasing. This is basically the same speech that Liam Neeson gives Batman and Batman Begins. It’s basically the same movie. Yeah. So although something we haven’t talked about yet is. Is Aaron’s shadow self, which is like, it follows him. So, okay, so this is where maybe I reveal too much about my own weird sort of like, self reflection. Maybe this is coming from the Miyazaki debate. I don’t know. I don’t know where this is coming from, but I swear, at a certain point, it felt like this movie was beating me over the head.

Maybe it was just how feminine Cobb was, but that Aaron is at risk of becoming gay, essentially, or. Or becoming abstinent, maybe, and he’s never going to unsheath his sword. And the whole fight is that. That Cobb is the passive energy, the feminine passive, that’s like, come this way, Come this way. And then Sparrowhawks like, no, come. Come this way. And in fact, I need proof of it. I need proof that you are gonna be like an upstanding masculine male because you need to bang my daughter. Because my daughter mating with this, I guess, like, magic sword wielding guy is the only way that my own immortality can live on.

Like my legacy. And the only version of immortality in this western magic world is still just your legacy. So in order for Sparrowhawk to truly gain immortality, he needs someone to bang his daughter, who is in this case, Artemis or whatever her name was. Tartaria. His horribly disfigured daughter. Right, but. And that’s the whole entire premise of the movie is that if Aaron goes the gay way with Cobb, right, and or becomes abstinent or non binary or whatever, then all of a sudden, Sparrowhawk’s legacy dies. It. It falls with Taryn. And instead he needs to make sure that this kid understands how to unsheathe his sword.

And he needs to understand what it is to do a hard day’s work and get blisters on your hands and get calluses on your hands and be like that masculine energy Sparrowhawk thing instead of whatever the hell it is that Cobs want to do. And I was like, okay, okay, maybe I’m reading too much into this. Maybe I need to, like, take a break and. And start watching it tomorrow if I’m just, like, putting all this onto this movie. And then as I was having that thought, Cobb lays Aaron down in his bedroom on his bed.

And he’s like, here, drink from my cup. Trust me. And he kind of. It just. It felt like the ultimate grooming session. Like, Cobb was clearly in. In not just like a sexual way. In almost any interpretation. Cobb is literally grooming Aaron at this point, and he’s clearly quite feminine. So that was. I mean, that was the running theme that I felt just came out of freaking nowhere. And then everything else that Sparrowhawk had done up to that point, it all kind of clicked. It all made sense. It’s like, oh, Sparrowhawk isn’t like the good guy versus the bad guy.

It’s the masculine trad daddy that needs to lay down the law and teach your man how to be a boy or your boy how to be a man versus what society might do if. If I don’t take this into my own hands. Like, Cobb is society, and Cobb is just gonna, like, lie and turn you passive. And I don’t know. So that was. It felt like that was almost beating me over the head, though, that I didn’t even have to read into that. No. That this movie is not subtle in most ways. And that’s. It’s. It’s.

Yeah, it’s just weird. The context of it is so, so funky. But. But in a way, it’s just not what you expect. You don’t expect everything to be that. Just like, here is everything served to you. But sometimes that’s nice. I guess. I guess the other movie for Disney, I was thinking that I guess it’s a very different story, but just the vibes are a little black cauldrony. If we want to do a direct Disney comparison, which I never thought to do with other Ghiblis, but this one does make you be like, oh, this makes sense as a comparison with Western.

You mentioned. You mentioned Lord of the Rings, and I could compare this with the. The animated one for sure. Not. Not familiar. Unless we’re talking about the OG Hobbit. I think that’s also Baski or something. But yeah, I think they did the Hobbit and they did a one movie for all three Lord of the Rings. So it’s kind of a jump. You are talking about, like, the vintage version. Not like. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, remake. Yeah, that’s what I was saying. I would compare this with the vintage version, but probably not with the newer ones because.

Because it’s animation. But that the Black Cauldron, this does have vibes from that. So in a way, it kind of goes back to some early 80s vibes, which Goro was born in 67, I think. So I guess those might have gotten in this crawl when he was a teenager or whatever, you know? Okay. I mean, now I’m. I’m comparing this against, like Don Bluth artwork. And I’m also thinking, man, Don Bluth also wins in that battle between Sun Miyazaki and Don Bluth. He does. But it seems to make a little more sense than comparison. Like, when I think of the way the characters look, I can definitely think of Don Bluth more than Sandra Ghibli.

You know, I see that. Again, I’m thinking the Bible tales, right? Like. Or the Bible tales. Yeah, like you said. So the characters don’t necessarily look that Ghibli. Like, the designs are good, the animation is good, but they do have a different look. Not so many wrinkle lines in these characters, you know, this one also, it had a few different characters that were like, very utilitarian. It seemed like they just kind of like the entire opening sequence, we’ve got these guys on a boat and they’re talking about there’s this plague spreading through the land. And it almost felt like it was going to be a pandemic style movie.

Like it was going to be Utopia or something where everyone’s coming down with this horrific sickness. And I guess maybe I wasn’t paying close enough attention, but I didn’t see where that ever amounted to anything. All of a sudden we’re in a completely different story where all we really care about is Aaron and maybe Tarot or whatever her name was at the end of it. And I didn’t for once think anything about it. In fact, there was one part where Taryn is like feeding a lamb. And I remembered, oh, didn’t they say in the very beginning of this movie that.

That it was like the thing had spread from lambs to people or people to lambs or something. It was affecting the livestock. And I was like, oh, that’s weird. Like that whole pandemic thing hasn’t come up. And the movie is well over a half into it now because they forgot about it. I mean, maybe there’s a much more apocalyptic movie going outside the confines of this movie. You know, if you go 50 miles that way, it’s a big mess. Okay, But I didn’t miss anything. Right? Like, they really do hammer in that there’s this weird pandemic and.

And then Aaron kills his dad and now we’re just on Aaron’s travels. And there’s nothing like what happened to the old kingdom, what happened to the the kingdom that’s got the dead king that, you know, who takes over, because they’re like, where is the prince? Well, that. That was the prince. The prince was the one that killed his dad and ran away, right? Yeah. Once we run away, we don’t go back, do we? So. And the king was the one that was trying to get to the bottom of this pandemic. So by Aaron killing the king, I.

In theory, he allows this pandemic to spread, yet you don’t see it at any point. Mm. That’s. That’s for another movie. But I will say I’m looking through my notes here, and I don’t think I latched onto that as much as you did, because I didn’t make any notes about it. Could this have been a translation thing? Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know. I am getting to pretty much everything I said in my notes. I did think it was weird that when she sings her song, it’s very J Pop sounding, which was. That is a thing.

I think Daddy could have loaned Joe Hayashi to do the music for this. I think that would have helped a whole lot. The music is a cut below the other Ghiblis we’ve seen. I absolutely zoned out. As soon as that started happening, I, like, my brain turned off. And then when it was over, I, like, resumed watching the movie again. But, yeah, this. This movie just out of nowhere, kind of turns into a weird commercial that you’d see selling you, like, toothpaste in the middle of the night. It seems like, hey, middle of the afternoon in Japan.

But, yeah, that song and then just the soundtrack in general, like. Like, I mean, there’s that dreamy quality to the Joe Hayashi stuff that is kind of un. Replicatable. They would. It would have helped make this feel more like a G. Lee if it had the composer. You know, it’s just like how even with John Williams not, as, you know, too old to be involved with Star wars that much, they still have to keep using his themes. You know, this was another succession episode where it’s like, daddy, let me use the composer. And he’s like, no, you have to do this first.

Here’s this other guy. You haven’t earned Joe yet. That hurt. That would sting, right? That would sting a little bit. Or is it the son? Like, no, I’m gonna break away from Dad’s formula and do my own thing. That could be it as well. That’s where I. That’s where the. You know, like, maybe there’s not Enough detail to actually do that, like realistically. But it does seem like just a. A fascinating struggle that’s in the movie and out and in the making of the movie. So that’s kind of the amazing thing this movie wears. It is crazy too, to think that somewhere on a convergent timeline, there is a studio Ghibli version of this movie, right? Tale from Earthsea that has everything that Mononoke and Ponyo and Howl’s moving castle had in it as well, in terms of music, fidelity, surrealism, everything like that.

It exists, at least in concept somewhere, but it’s not the one that we say. And just to throw out, this was successful budget. 22 million box office, 75.5 million. You know, that’s pretty good. That’s a three triple multiplier. That’s. That’s not a failure. Do you think Ghibli can put out a movie that would be unprofitable? Do they? Is that something? Because there’s like Disney can, aside from Snow, the recent Snow White, for maybe bad example, be Disney. But like even a bad movie can still sort of break even after a while. And even, even the ones that we, we count as losses, right? The ones that like, fail.

There’s also some very creative accounting in the movie business. So even when we’re like, oh my God, it was a catastrophic failure, very often, like, there was plenty of people that got rich off that movie and continue to receive residuals and everything else. It’s just a matter of scale. His second movie not distributed by Disney. It made double its budget in Japan and triple its budget worldwide. Again, not an out of the box success, but not bad. His third movie, Earwig and the Witch, flopped miserably. But we should note the Release date was October 18, 2020.

So I think that one got a pandemic memory hold. This movie would have been way better if they had kept up with it. Oh yeah. But yeah, Earwig. Earwig and the Witch seems like a pretty much forgotten movie at this point. Oh yeah. 842, 744 in the US box office. So that. That’s 2020 for you. Well, and you also mentioned that was CGI. So this was like the very first CGI Ghibli or. Right, that’s correct. Very first one. Okay. Gora was running around saying, I’m the only person at Ghibli who even knows how to do computer animation.

Or at least 3D computer animation. I believe that there is a fairly popular video of. I believe it’s Papa Miyazaki dressing down some animators that had used some kind of software to do, like, I’m gonna assume, some kind of a tweening or some sort of digital process in order to, like, facilitate their animation. And he’s just like, this has no soul in it. You should be ashamed. Never show this kind of artwork to me ever again. This has no place in anything that we’re doing here. Like, it’s a very serious talk that I see often cited out of any kind of context to like, make this point that Miyazaki is some sort of, like, an absolute purist.

Yeah, that might be in the Kingdom of Dreams and Madness documentary. So we’ll. We’ll see when we get there. Do you have anything else you want to throw out on this movie or have. Have we drained the sea? I say get. Give it a good chance, man. This movie, I thought was interesting. It does beat you over the head a little bit. But it. It was cool to see the Ghibli treatment of something that was so un Ghibli in a way. And if you. And if you like Bible Tales, it’s just like an upgrade from Bible Upgraded Bible Tales.

There we go. There you go. There’s the full selling pitch. How about our pitches? What’s going on? I guess we’ll just say this summer, considering how early schedules work out. As always, I’ve just got a million different projects going on. The big ones, you can always go to illuminaticomic.com for the biggest release to date. And then hopefully the ones following after that are Titanic comic dot com, which is a comic book about the Titanic Surprise one called Does Bigfoot Exist Dot com, which is another chick trial pamphlet. It. It breaks down every region, regional and historical version of Bigfoot, from the most conventional to homeless Bigfoot to interdimensional psychic Bigfoot to biblical Bigfoot and Harry Mary.

If you’ve never heard of Harry Mary before, I envy you because it’s the weirdest thing to learn about for the first time. And then satanic panic, comic.com, which you can probably guess what that one is also about, something that. That me and you lived through in the 80s and 90s. And this pamphlet would argue that it has been going on for hundreds of years that as soon as there was a white person in America, Satanism was here and the Satanic Benic was here. So I’ve got an entire chick TR style comic book that lays all that out.

All right. Over on this end, I do a lot of podcasting on media@podcastio podcast.org it’s also that on Patreon and we’re just finishing up a bunch of stuff. Just before you and I got on, I finished for podcast 1999, the final live action Planet of the Apes episode. And let’s be real, I just watched 14 episodes of that. It was interesting. Tales from Earth. He’s probably better in the Planet of the Apes live action series just just to keep things in perspective. But it’s interesting. Worth a listen. Just finishing up a rundown of the complete original Twilight Zone.

I only have to record the last episode of the Twilight Zone Zone for Time Enough podcast and then we’re going to be going to other Twilight Zones, other anthologies, so that that one keeps on running. And I mentioned Films and Filth a little bit where we look at really good movies and really bad movies as rated by IMDb users. So come check that out. Okay, time to set off to sea get smashed by a dragon American stickers, Cryptids, cults and killers Killers we got all your face conspiracies all sticker sheets There are known American stickers they’ll make you smile and snicker false threads and secret society all of these and more on our sticker sheets Explore the unique with paranoid American sticker sheets Unearth tales of Cryptids, cults and mysteries through each sticker These won’t last long song get yours now@paranoidamerican.com American stickers, cryptids, cults and killers Killers we got all your favorite conspiracies all I sticky sheets down with North American stickers make you smile and snicker flags and secret society all of these what the heck are you waiting for? Discover the extraordinary with paranoid American sticker sheets From Cryptids in the night to cults out of sight each sticker is a unique find get yours now@paranoidamerican.com paranoid yeah, I scribbled my life away driven the right to page Will it enlight your brain give you the flight my plane paper the highs ablaze somewhat of an amazing feel when it’s real, the real you will engage it your favorite of course the lord of an arrangement I gave you the proper results to hit the pavement if they get emotional hey, maybe your language again.

How they playing it? Well without lakers evade them whatever the course they are the shapeshift snakes get decapitated met is the apex execution of flame you out nuclear bomb distributed at war rather gruesome for eyes to see max them out that I like my trees blow it off in the face you despising me for what though calculated and rather cutthroat paranoid American Must be all the blood spoke for real Lord, give me your day your way vacate, they wait around to hate Whatever they say, man, it’s not in the least bit we get heavy rotate when a beat hits a thing that you’re welcome for real, you’re welcome? They ain’t never had a deal, you’re welcome man they lacking a pill, you’re welcome yet they doing it still you’re welcome.
[tr:tra].


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