The Serious Wonder of Hayao Miyazaki

Last weekend, I finally got around to watching The Cat Returns, which is an animated movie from the now-famous Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. It's the story of a teenage girl who rescues a cat from the road, only to realize that the cat is the royal prince of the Kingdom of Cats. As a reward, the King of Cats captures the girl and takes her to the Kingdom, where she must escape becoming the prince's bride. As far as animated movies go, it's a little weird, and very, very awesome.

"A little weird and very awesome" is applicable to pretty much all of Miyazaki's productions. His movies are whimsical, strange, and beautifully animated. They're also deadly serious. While most contemporary American animated movies (Pixar, Disney, Dreamworks, etc.) play tongue-in-cheek games with the conventions of fairy tales, creating films that they claim appeal to children and adults alike, Miyazaki takes fairy tales very seriously. His films are almost always about war and environmental destruction and the very real danger that comes from forgetting who you are. His movies inhabit worlds whose borders can blur at any second with eerie and dangerous magics. Aerial wars can break out between zeppelins and dragons. Birds can become staircases. Shadows can coalesce into henchmen. Even balls of dust and soot can come alive.

Dust sprites from Spirited Away.

I think that by taking fantasy seriously, by favoring whimsy and wild imagination over generic humor and contemporary references, Miyazaki is able to create movies that are truly fascinating to children and adults alike. My favorite is My Neighbor Totoro, which features a cat bus and trolls unlike anything you've ever seen.

OMG catbus!!

I'm also a big fan of Howl's Moving Castle (which is very unlike the original--and also excellent--children's fantasy novel by Diana Wynne Jones) and Ponyo, the Studio's most recent production.

 
Ponyo is, in theory, based on the fairy tale of the little mermaid, but Miyazaki's film is as different from Disney's The Little Mermaid as the Brothers Grimm stories are from Shrek. As a mermaid, little Ponyo is cute but creepy (she looks like a goldfish, occasionally sprouts bird-like feet, and really enjoys ham), and the film features massive flooding and prehistorical sea creatures.

Ponyo in her bucket.

I'm always surprised by the genuine delight that I still feel whenever I see a Miyazaki film. I'm fascinated with the little threads that flow through his movies--the stone ghosts, the dust sprites, the menacing shadow men, the omnipresent and insect-like war zeppelins--and how with every film he makes for children, he doesn't just play in the worlds of myth and fairy tales, he actively contributes to them. It's his startling originality--his ability to create creatures that are delightful and terrifying, beautiful and bizarre--that makes me rent his movies again and again.

The Art of the Nap

This morning, I woke up and promptly decided to do nothing with my day.

I had plans to go to the farmers' market downtown and errands aplenty to run, but after a cup of coffee and two toasted pitas with peanut butter, I hit the couch and haven't moved since--except, of course, to transition back to bed where I could better enjoy the warm breeze coming through my bedroom window, the buttery Saturday morning sunlight, and my comforter (which is just thin enough to be perfect for warm spring-time napping).

I've never been much of a napper (though I have recently developed a fondness for falling asleep on my couch for a half hour each night as an overture to my real bedtime). But I do love a good half-awake, hour-long loll in bed when just I'm conscious enough to hear cars driving by but asleep enough to lose track of which of my thoughts are real and which are the bizarre result of half-dreams ("Why shouldn't the ghosts ride motorcycles to make it to their graduation day history tests?").

Between this morning's naps, I've had the good fortune to spend my time with Joseph Epstein's Narcissus Leaves the Pool: Familiar Essays. I'd never heard of Epstein before, but I saw this book's title on another blogger's list of favorite essay collections, and I had to get it from the library.

Epstein's essays are emphatically "familiar." He writes in the spirit of Michel de Montaigne--his voice is indulgent, leisurely, charming, and desultory, and his topic of choice is always himself. Whereas "personal" essays are usually about some event in the author's life, their form still tends to be somewhat formal and narrative-based. Epstein's "familiar" essays, on the other hand, feel like letters Epstein has written to a dear friend. I imagine that Epstein worries far less about keeping his meanderings on topic than he does about maintaining a relationship with his reader that is warm, relaxed, and consistently engaging.

Joseph Epstein

One of my favorite essays so far has been "The Art of the Nap." In this piece, Epstein starts with his personal napping habits (a topic with an almost unimaginable potential for dullness) before waltzing playfully from the historical connections between writers and insomnia to sleep's purported similarity to death and back around to why it's important not to take Harvard too seriously. He manages, somehow, to transform the potentially banal into the delightful--a brilliant and surprisingly difficult trick.

Here's one of my favorite paragraphs from "The Art of the Nap":

I nap well on airplanes, trains, buses, and in cars and with a special proficiency at concerts and lectures. I am, when pressed, able to nap standing up. In certain select company, I wish I could nap while being spoken to. I have not yet learned to nap while I myself am speaking, though I have felt the urge to do so. I had a friend named Walter B. Scott who, in his late sixties, used to nap at parties of ten or twelve people that he and his wife gave. One would look over and there Walter would be, chin on his chest, lights out, nicely zonked; he might as well have hung a Gone Fishing sign on his chest. Then, half an hour or so later, without remarking upon his recent departure, he would smoothly pick up the current of the talk, not missing a stroke, and get finely back into the flow. I saw him do this perhaps four or five times, always with immense admiration.

Epstein possesses all my favorite traits in an essayist--he's light-hearted, well-read, subtle, intelligent, self-aware, and unfailingly kind--and he's made a lovely addition to my lazy Saturday morning.

Now the question becomes, where do I go from here? A trip to the gym is definitely in order, as well as a trip to Home Depot to look at paint swatches and perhaps a jog over to Old Navy to seek out sundresses. Maybe I'll make my way to the theater to see Bridesmaids tonight. Perhaps I'll find time to deal with the Jenga-like stack of dishes piled in my tiny apartment sink. It's possible that I'll even repair the complete lack of clean white socks in my uppermost sock drawer.

But, then again, there are essays waiting for me, not to mention more sunshine and that already well-rumpled comforter waiting on my bed . . .

Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends

I have a strange (though not necessarily bad) habit of finding wildly famous writers of fiction, ignoring their novels, and reading their essay collections instead. I did the same thing with Jonathan Franzen last fall, and I just did it again with Michael Chabon's collection of essays Maps and Legends. 

Maps and Legends with its gorgeous set of mythical layered dust jackets.

It's an absolutely stunning book to hold (way to go, McSweeney's!) and an engaging text to spend time with. For some reason, I kept comparing Chabon's book to Franzen's How to Be Alone--in part because they're both works by critically acclaimed and much lauded contemporary writers of fiction, and in part because they take on such similar topics (for example, The State of Modern Fiction and Reading) in such wildly different ways. Where Franzen is serious and brilliant and critical, Chabon is enthusiastic and blithe and mercurial. Franzen's writing is more precise and persuasive, but Chabon's is more engaging; I wish I could take a literature class with Franzen as my teacher, but I wish I could take Chabon out for a beer to talk about our promiscuous reading habits.

Chabon's collection contains essays on the state of the modern short story, the dangers of labeling novels by genre (he considers the library's system of categorization--science fiction, mystery, young adult, etc.--to be a sort of ghettoization), Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy, the history of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, the myth of the golem, the importance of comics for children and adult readers, and his childhood love of Norse mythology. (If you know my reading habits at all, you can see why the table of contents practically forced me to get my hands on this collection!)

Chabon with superheroes.

While much of the essays are what could be called light or popular literary criticism (usually a serious, if accessible, genre), at its heart, the book is a gleeful celebration of reading for pleasure and entertainment. I think that the world of literature might be a better place if all authors--Pulitzer Prize winners or not--were able to occasionally admit to Chabon's thesis: "I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain. Period."

Chabon, Franzen, Tom Wolfe, and Gore Vidal as seen on The Simpsons.