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  2. Brave has some of the best Pixar film music since Ratatouille, and an excellent depiction of a lute — placing it alongside Ghibli’s Whisper Of The Heart for interesting (non-tropic) music.

  3. Just finished Laputa, Castle in the Sky again. It may not have the strongest plot out of all the Myazaki films, but it does have, in approximate order of appearance:

    • Crazy awesome airships
    • Mysterious crystals
    • Flying pirates
    • Bad guys who wear dark glasses at night, inside and underground
    • Pseudo-Welsh miners
    • A hermit who talks to rocks and has a beard
    • Robots. Lots and lots of robots. One of them looks after birds nests and picks flowers. Others destroy things with their crazy laser vision.
    • Stylised lightning which looks like dragons
    • And at the end: a flying island which looks like a giant jellyfish, floating gracefully into orbit

    The robots look like this:

    My point being that anyone who demands any more than this from a film probably doesn’t deserve it.

  4. Miyazaki says, "Our job as animators is not only to draw scenes. We must find the minimum necessary and important lines for the specific movement in a given action. The techniques of animation drawing are not the same as those of painting a still picture. Animation is a consequence of the audience's perception of movement created by sequential drawings. For this reason, each drawing in the sequence -- especially the lines -- should not be drawn too detailed; rather, they should be drawn less [detailed] and create an instant pause in the sequential movement.” (source)

    Sounds a lot like UI design to me.

  6. Is it a hallmark of Ghibli films that I don't remember the actual storyline, just small, nonsensical plot details — I.E. exactly the opposite of how remembering is supposed to work?