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It’s very funny and just a little memorable to argue that individualism and personal growth are what allow you to kill god in a show that starts bad and ends in the most mind-shatteringly fun climax I’ve ever seen in a mecha anime. It’s all about doubling roles and signifiers morphing vs. staying the same but it feels the need to build them up from ground zero which makes the first 2/3 seem trivial even when contextualized by the final arc as just a single stepping stone in history, a perfect case study but ultimately something that has played out a million times and will ... play out a million more. Kamina is the capitalist ubermensch but the point is that he as a character is irrelevant (everyone is one-dimensional intentionally, the show is about archetypes not real people) and ultimately he is a metaphor in the sense that the entire cast is a metaphor for people that are refined and molded by their personal “ceilings”. It doesn’t actually acknowledge Society in any way outside of bland mob commentary so I wouldn’t call it Randian but it is absolutely reactionary, something made kind of annoying by its obvious and unflattering reading of post-timeskip Beastmen as racial minorities and the shockingly tone-deaf treatment of women + gay men throughout, from the inexcusable fanservice to general backhandedness in the various romantic subplots.

I remember when I was only a little bit through the show I was convinced that it was a response to Evangelion's Shinji-Asuka relationship but now I think that’s a pretty small part of what the show is getting at. Interpersonal rejection and mental illness to Imaishi are fundamentally only “bad” things as far as they don’t drive you to become a stronger person, and ultimately maturation is learning the process of overcoming whatever you’re dealing with through sheer force of will. If you can’t make it then it’s on you, if you’re even asking if you can give more you’re wasting time not giving more. What really lessens it in comparison to something like Evangelion, though, is that it reuses its images without giving anyone but Simon meaningful character growth, and casting Yoko as Asuka specifically treats her mental issues as just the way women are. That's why it lumps Leeron in with the women, the showrunners can only conceive of femininity as something that is attracted to the masculine characters of the show and never bothers giving any of the women interiority. Which would have been perfectly fine (it could have just been a show about men and their penis insecurity) but because of its appropriation suddenly Asuka's BPD and trauma just get wrapped into the Feminine Condition. Archetypes that were twisted from the outset are here presented as natural.

What makes it interesting, though, is how post-timeskip every character morphs in their own way, embodying or rejecting the ideals of their mentor in a sincere and compelling examination of what it means to have and leave a legacy for others to mature while looking up to. It’s no surprise that Nia and Yoko are barely relevant for most of it and the most compelling characters are easily Rossiu and Viral, who both play roles that we have seen already but feel fresh because of how they are recontextualized by scale and motion. Rossiu is his father but for the entire world, and Viral is Rossiu, just tagging along in Gurren, but he’s been taken into the fold as Rossiu has exited it. It’s this really heady jumbling of meanings that keeps the show compelling as you basically see the first arc play out again but on a galactic scale instead of a global one. The repetition is necessary, though, to show how even though people can be swapped out arbitrarily we as a species (not as a society, as a species) are defined by broad historical strokes of headbutting whatever wall is in our path until either our skull or the concrete gives out. Capitalism makes heroes or martyrs of us all.

This movie is perfect, in its own deeply weird way. It is indestructibly built and sprawlingly self-contained. It spends its brief runtime on just half a dozen characters and fewer locations, but i really don’t know if there is a more exhaustive way to explore its heartbreaking, intimate views on hope and dread.

Miyazaki’s best works always embrace the undercurrent of darkness in his concepts, touching on the unsettling to bring the levity more weight. It’s the same here—the threat of death is always present, either Mei's or her mom’s, and the entire film is constructed around the rambling search for a miracle to save their ... mother’s life. The mom’s sickness remains in the background the whole time, generalizing her disease to an unshakable feeling of bad things on the horizon. And there is nothing Satsuki or Mei can ever do to stop it but live their lives like they believe in the fantastical and have never had a worry in their life. Which they do! Darkness and levity, side by side. 

In this movie the impossible and the real both exist, superimposed. If Totoro is real, then their mom can get better, then their family can end up okay. And he both is real and isn’t, in the same contradictory way that you have hope for the best to get by while knowing that it will never come true in order to act on the chance of succeeding anyway. The dream of Totoro's tree was true but it wasn’t; the miraculous is not singular but all around us, shrouding even the most commonplace things in an indelible sense of magic.

Probably, their mom will die. The dad knows, and the kids know too, somewhere deep inside. But in that moment when Miyazaki cuts to credits, you believe wholly and overwhelmingly that she *will* get better and that things will turn out alright, regardless of the odds. It posits not that hope is effective or powerful—not that it produces results—but that it is indispensable to not break down in the face of it all. That it is an integral part of the human condition. Totoro’s power as a symbol, the microscopic miracles that make up the world around us, is that he lets you believe in the macroscopic miracles as well.

The climate crisis of a civilization is happening in our lifetime. The biggest police brutality protests in a half-century have just accomplished absolutely nothing. We are in the middle of a pandemic that will probably kill tens of thousands more before it’s done. As i am writing this, the future looks terrible—and honestly, nihilism would probably be a perfectly reasonable response. Probably, the earth will collapse in on itself. Probably, Joe Biden will continue in the esteemed tradition of austerity politics and leave vast swathes of the country out to rot in the pandemic and decay in the recession. Probably, we will see police shoot another Black man sometime next year. But in the face of such all-consuming dread and uncertainty, you have to hope. And you have to recognize that hope will do nothing. And you have to do what you can.

This movie means a lot to me. Joe Hisaishi is a legend. Miyazaki is a genius.

Grave of the Fireflies is at its core a story about two siblings unable to communicate. They are subjects of a Japan divided in two—half rigid, militarized, urban, and the other anarchic and seemingly utopian—and that setting is in perfect harmony with Seita and Setsuko’s conflicts of wants and worldviews. Though Isao Takahata does make them suffer, he does so by continually putting them at odds with each other, torn between the mental gymnastics of fascism and the harsh, plainspoken truth of nature. Seita—supposedly the more “mature” sibling—is in complete denial about his future and the true effects of the war, while Setsuko understands what ... has happened to her family and country on an emotional level but is unable to fully express herself. That dynamic is what drives the film, and it is continually mirrored in a shattered landscape full of people too busy consuming and destroying it to rebuild.

Their unspoken refusal to communicate stretches through every scene. When their mom dies and they stand at the playground, it is Setsuko that sobs: she realizes that their mom is dead already; Seita, in stark contrast, does his best to distract himself by pretending to distract his sister. When they find the dead man on the beach, it is Setsuko that feels sadness for his passing and Seita that refuses to properly acknowledge it for fear that it would overwhelm him. Their differing capacities for empathy, ultimately divergent understandings of the suffering that surrounds them, come from fundamentally different worldviews. Respectively, they are inherited from a military father and gentle, humane mother, both of whom end up victims of an international refusal to communicate.

Imperial Japan is in a position where they have to tell themselves they’re winning until they finish losing, and Seita, engulfed by the rhetoric and blind to many realities throughout the film, is the human embodiment of this self-consuming mentality. He is the heir apparent to the country’s crude military-industrial complex left stranded and directionless, incapable of viewing the world in the more nuanced terms his younger sister does. While Seita obsesses over Japanese military superiority, his sister is utterly unconcerned with who is winning or losing as long as the people she cares about are safe. Seita tries to learn from her simple moral logic as he pursues a life on his own terms, but his already twisted ideals break down along with Japan’s until he ends up a thief and outcast. He is beaten by a farmer and cast out by the police, simply because of his refusal to communicate both his and Setsuko’s pressing needs. He cannot admit that he has lost.

Nature in Grave of the Fireflies is health and sickness, beauty and decay, life and death, and all of these things are part of Setsuko, just as her ability to see things clearly is part of what makes her her. Nature offers a truth that the city cannot, the moral purity to live unencumbered by the hostile and claustrophobic demands of society. It is free of the fascist artifice that has become part of the Japanese regime, as the fireflies that fade into the navy make clear. Both are dead, but the fireflies will let you know of their death promptly and truthfully.

The metaphor of the firefly that dies too early is not literally Setsuko’s death but the death of her honest and pure outlook, which becomes corrupted even before she dies as she begins to hallucinates things that aren’t there. Her wants are simple and compelling—not some over-dramatic disease but basic malnutrition and a willful, petty appetite for nicer things—but as they remain unfulfilled, she, like Seita, begins to refuse to face the truth. She communicates with him, finally, by deliriously moving past reality in her final moments.

The tragedy of the movie is that her worldview ends up mirroring his. Seita spends his time avoiding this result at all costs—he makes sure that it is always him in the wrong, always his fault for stealing or offending or lying—but Setsuko feels the effects anyway as she continues to formally learn the hard, depressing truths about cruelty and indifference and human nature she already deeply understood. It's hard to avoid a feeling that Setsuko loses something essential when she learns about her mother's death or when she sees her brother being beaten, but the real loss is in how Seita, the closest thing the audience has to a self-insert, passively allows those revelations to destroy her. Throughout the movie, Seita’s self-sacrifice isn’t really driven by altruism, or else he would have swallowed his pride and simply gone back to his aunt's: he just needs to convince himself he is winning until he loses. And he does lose, but long before he dies.

The firefly dies when Setsuko convinces herself that she is going to be perfectly alright, just like he has; Seita—realizing this—begins crying when she offers him her hallucinated food. He expresses his most visceral anguish not at her death nor her funeral but in the moment she loses her priceless and unique clarity of perspective, unable to come to terms with the fact that she is about to die herself. Two people that can’t communicate until they both begin to lie. The grave of the firefly is the grave to truth.

The truth of the morning after underlies both light shows, the firefly and the military alike. The truth is the corpses strewn around buzzing with flies, buried unceremoniously if they are buried at all. The truth is the disfigured lips and the bottom of the nose that reveal their mom’s true state when she is smothered in bandages. The truth is that war is hell, barely even a cliche in a story about mass civilian destruction caused by a country with a culture of military worship and a history of covering up war crimes.

The truth is that Seita and Setsuko were dead from the start, both figuratively and structurally, and it is the viewer at fault for failing to understand the ramifications of that fact. We the audience are not responsible for what happens to the children, but we are responsible for not taking the text at its word when it communicates with us without facade or melodrama. When Takahata begins the story with Seita's death he is grieving, and yet it takes nearly an hour and a half for us to grieve with him.

The cough drops are how we cope with war, and ashes are how we mourn it. Eventually, the movie tears both from us, leaving only the truth. It tells us to look at the effects of war straight on, without shirking from it or flinching at anything we see. That’s why it is such a painful watch, but I think it’s also why it remains so powerful.

Makoto Shinkai's movies have all been a kind of anti-icebergs—always maximalist but never, ever thoughtful under the surface—and The Garden Of Words abuses its short runtime to say as little as possible about basically every subject it tries to tackle. At this point I have to conclude that Shinkai is afraid to have his artistic choices ever convey any kind of meaningful subtext, past like rain = sad and sunshine = happy. His ideal moviegoing experience seems to be a vacant smile held throughout as you watch the pretty powerpoint. I think I finally understand what Scorsese was talking about when he made the distinction ... between movies and cinema; if any movie feels like a theme park ride it‘s this one. Nothing but baby brain symbolism and manufactured, superficial story beats.

This is a movie about our doom, about the ways in which we try to live on until we can’t anymore. We all have a goal, a calling—airplanes, work, family, movies—but the most we can do is pretend that they will bring us fulfillment or lasting joy. We will never be able to change the world through our art. We can never really grasp the desolation of the world we live in, that status quo we are all complicit in maintaining. We are all just beautiful planes sent off to war.

By following our obsessions, we sacrifice everything that used to matter to us, bit by ... bit. And in the end, Miyazaki would give it all up again for his art. He lives on for his art.

“But still, I choose a world with pyramids in it.”

It’s a false choice, of course. Either way, we will all be equal in the end. Jiro is dead and so is every soldier he was responsible for murdering. All that's left are the planes.

Discovery is a masterpiece, but I feel like this kind of misunderstands the appeal of Daft Punk and their music which was that the world was futuristic and cool but you were still just a normal guy doing boring things, so it would have been cool if space fanboy got more focus.


I also feel like the movie comes more from a love for the individual songs and an overriding commitment to perfectly emulating whatever aesthetic the album was going for, which makes for a really unfocused and weird film. It’s not bad, though! HBFS and Something About Us were highlights, though they tried to ... make Veridis Quo into Castlevania for some reason. I think the gothic stuff was where they lost me.