Siberia and Techno

We watched an hour of Spirited Away yesterday. My wife was slightly cautious after my daughter stopped watching it on Saturday because Chihiro lost her parents. Having only seen an hour I can review the style without worrying about revealing any ending. It opens like some laid-back French film and then becomes something else entirely. Occasionally it has the trademarks of typical Japanese animation, the peculiar style of walking and running or the exaggerated expressions of surprise which seem to take a single frame to affect a face completely. We also watched the dubbed version which gives the other common trademark when long, fast speeches in Japanese have to be translated and the English comes out as stream of words with no gaps between phrases or sentences.

I was reminded of Marine Boy all the time. Having said that, Spirited Away is far above any other animation I have seen. The detail is exquisite with some frames appearing almost as treated photographs rather than drawings. The ideas seem to have comes from some oblique strategy system that provides strings of ideas, all of which are interlinked. I have not seen much Japanese animation (Akira a long time ago and of course Marine Boy) and so this overall concentration on making a complete story seem so off-the-wall may be a common trait but to me it is new. I seem to remember that Alice in Wonderland is one of the famous Japanese literary obsessions (along with Shakespeare and the Brontes) and it seems clear that Miyazaki has read it. One of the minor dissenters the IMDB reviews of the film says that the film could have benefited from a little rigour in the storytelling rather than the rambling introduction of sub-plots and other distractions. My thought about Oblique Strategies seems to confirm that and maybe I should wait until I have seen the rest to comment further. Whatever the result of that, I would still say see it.

I am about half way through Her Husband now. Despite the fact that the lives of Plath and Hughes are described in a Novelistic way, jumping back and forth in time, I would say that I am getting a far clearer view of things than I have from any other book on either of them. The book makes no judgements either consciously or otherwise. It tells the story, gives personal interpretations of various literary outputs but never comes down on anyone's side. I am not sure any book has ever said she was right and he was wrong but I often get the feeling that a biographer is either for or against one or the other.

I love this rainy weather. It was a wild night with high wind and heavy rain and personally I love the clear air that results. I used to keep a paper journal years ago and I dedicated a lot of it to categorising the different types of rainy day. It was lost years ago so I cannot lift anything to put here but I can recall the category of 'grit-splasher'; rain heavy enough to lift small stones into the air. What were you expecting from an adolescent's diary?