Akira in 4.5 seconds

Investigating Hayao Miyazaki's "Rin the Chimney Painter"

Introduction Spirited Away is my personal favorite film of all time, it is one of Hayao Miyazaki's great masterpieces that once sat on the top of the box office revenue for about 20 years ($395 million) and had gone on to win many awards including the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film at the 75th Academy Awards in 2003. Little do people know that this fantasy film, which is now considered a classic of anime cinema, had gone through many phases of development during production. In May 2001, a few months before Spirited Away's release in Japan, Miyazaki was interviewed in which he mentions the earlier incarnations of the film. Here's the quote translated from the original Japanese to English by Ryoko Toyama, edited by Team Ghiblink, sourced from Nausicaa.Net : "There is a book for children, "Kirino Mukouno Fushigina Machi (A Mysterious Town Over the Mist)" (by Sachiko KASHIWABA, published by Kodansha). It was published in 1980, and I wondered if I c...

My review of Peter Wessel Zapffe's "The Last Messiah"

After reading Emil Cioran’s ideas, particularly The Trouble With Being Born , I decided to step a few decades back to see what his Norwegian predecessor, Peter Wessel Zapffe, thought of humanity’s chaotic existence. Zapffe’s essay proved itself to be quite a thoughtful read. One night in long bygone times, man awoke and saw himself. He saw that he was naked under cosmos, homeless in his own body. All things dissolved before his testing thought, wonder above wonder, horror above horror unfolded in his mind. Zapffe’s decision to employ the essay format to convey his nihilistic perspective on humanity is undoubtedly effective. In short, he considers the human consciousness, in its developed, post-ape state that we’ve had for many thousands of years now, as a tragic accident. It is what Zapffe calls “a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature.” Zapffe observes that, in order to combat the existential dread of being so conscious of life, as...

My review of "The Catcher in the Rye" (J.D. Salinger novel)

Poor Holden. There are (and will be) many readers who misunderstand Holden; they’ll say he sounds too annoying or too passive. And you know what? At times, yes, he certainly sounds like that. That’s what depressed people sound like when you read their thoughts. This is not a coming-of-age story, nor a postwar grief story, though there are elements of both genres. Honestly, it’s a story about a teenager having a psychological breakdown. And it’s one of the best things I’ve ever read, because its rawness makes up for all of its flaws. Rawness, that’s the main thing about Holden’s narration that gets me. Sure, sometimes Holden himself sounds kind of phony, phony in terms of inauthenticity. He’s a walking contradiction. But a conscious contradiction, which is where the rawness remains, despite it all. This is the rawness of Holden’s words. Rawness is when you see someone telling you about how smart they are and how they’ve figured out a lot about their life, but you see underneath their ce...

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