This diary is not quite on topic, but it's not off topic, either. It's about a great
NYT's article on Hayao Miyazaki, Japan's greatest maker of animated films, and the worlds he creates for children (and adults).
This is for liberal parents who want to introduce their children to films that aren't aimed at cross-promoting products and lay out the complexity of life, and the difficult choices we face, with intelligence, mystery, achingly beautiful images and a healthy understanding of what it means to be a moral person.
More below the fold.
Miyazaki is the anti-Disney, although he is distributed in the US and now worldwide by Disney. His films almost always feature young female heroines, trying to figure their way through difficult moral situations and confusing threats and characters. Sometimes the films are intense -- more violence than children normally see in a Disney film, lots of allegorical mysticism, scary threats that at times seem insurmountable -- but they are always multi-layered, speak to children's hopes and generosity and urge the point that individual responsibilities, for our loved ones, for nature and for the community, are to be taken and lived seriously.
A.O. Scott, who wrote the NYT's piece, says it beautifully, in his conclusion:
It is not that Mr. Miyazaki's films are pessimistic, exactly; being fairy tales, they do arrive at happy endings. ("I'm not going to make movies that tell children, 'You should despair and run away,' " he said.) But the route he chooses toward happiness can be troubling, perhaps especially to an American audience that expects sentimental affirmations based on clear demarcations between good and evil. The division of the world into heroes and villains is a habit Mr. Miyazaki regards with suspicion. "The concept of portraying evil and then destroying it - I know this is considered mainstream, but I think it's rotten," he said. "This idea that whenever something evil happens someone particular can be blamed and punished for it, in life and in politics, it's hopeless." Like the natural world, which follows its own laws and rhythms - "it does what the hell it pleases," in Mr. Miyazaki's words - human nature is not something that can easily be explained or judged. "One thing you can be sure of," says a character at the end of the film - a fellow who has spent most of the movie as a mute scarecrow with a head carved from a giant turnip - "hearts change." In the Miyazakian cosmos, so do minds, bodies, rivers, forests, nations and everything else. Wizards turn into birds of prey; young girls are transformed overnight into 90-year-old women; greedy parents are changed into pigs; shooting stars mutate into fire demons. You can call this magic - a word reviewers of Mr. Miyazaki's films seem helpless to avoid - or you can call it art. But it may just be that he reveals, in his quiet, moving, haunted pictures, the hidden senses of the word "animation," which after all means not only to set things in motion, but also, more profoundly, to bring them to life.