Watching the current barrage of sci-fi movie trailers, it’s hard not to let out a hideously outdated analogue sigh before breaking into a strobe-lit panic attack.
The new year offers both Jurassic World and Terminator: Genital Synthesis (or however you spell it), essentially making a trip to the cinema in 2015 an expensive resuscitation of your VHS collection. Soon you’ll be telling me the next big thing I should be getting excited about is a new generation of genetically modified Pogs.
However, there is one trip down cinematic memory lane that requires neither an expensive reboot nor a truly absurd storyline (sure, after three dino-disasters, let’s reopen that theme park anyway, only with worse dinosaurs we’ve invented without even the pretence of grounding them in scientific fact).
SBS is running a season of movies by Hayao Miyazaki, of Studio Ghibli fame, which is another way of saying it has opened the door to a dimension of pure naive wonder that will render all other aspects of your life drab and miserable in comparison. You should totally watch them.
Kicking off on Saturday night was My Neighbour Totoro. As is often the case with Miyazaki, his protagonists are young but the themes decidedly adult: mortality, fear, loss, growing up, and the bond between humans and the natural world.
Satsuke and Mai move to a country home with their father while their sick mother is in hospital. Once in the countryside, the two girls befriend a series of mystical forest creatures at once cute and utterly terrifying. I can never decide if O Totoro is a giant fluffy bunny I want to snuggle into, or a hairy steroidal psychopath who will lure me in with the promise of snuggles, only to commence my disembowelment with his adorably powerful paws.
That confusing feeling – of something enormous being a fragile ally – is a hallmark of Miyazaki’s imagination. Enemies aren’t always dark and threatening and allies can often be unnerving on first meeting. When the kids need to get somewhere fast, for example, they climb into the friendly innards of a giant, nightmarish cat. I’d rather wear away the flesh from my feet, you freaky grinning bus from Hades.
What lends My Neighbour Totoro a sense of giddy adventure, beyond these bestial characters, is Miyazaki’s animation. Shots are often framed to make you feel miniscule in a burgeoning landscape or drawn in such a way as to elicit a bizarre sense of nostalgia for a time and place you’ve never actually experienced (there must be a German word for that).
These adventures are for adults who want to recapture a childlike mindset as much as for children. To remember a time when things appeared huge and daunting and we were close enough to the natural world to see its threats – and its mystery. Give me that over a T rex expensively screaming into my face any day.
Today is the greatest
Another friendly face who has assumed a threatening demeanour over the past week is Karl Stefanovic, surely now Australia’s most viral political commentator. It was all rather baffling, with Stefanovic first laying into the prime minister, Tony Abbott, and then the education minister, Christopher Pyne, in an emboldened style that felt like Network Ten’s The Living Room tackling the global financial crisis.
It was certainly an interesting watch, though I’m not entirely sure why the internet decided to go into celebratory meltdown. Getting excited about a man on television telling another man to “man up” isn’t the mark of a society that’s quite made it yet.
How’s a woman supposed to get legislation through the Senate anyway? You might be better of sticking with Leigh Sales. I doubt she’d ever tell a female minister to, well, what? Womb-it through? Go lady the crap out of them?
- My Neighbour Totoro is on SBS’s on demand service – Kiki’s Delivery Service is on 13 December.
