It is so strange to see Kiki in more colorful clothes at the start of the movie. I completely forgot this was in the film.
Kiki meets another witch who seems like a snob but nevertheless takes time to answer her questions; she might be showing off and acting fancy, but she isn’t mean or rude. Jiji says the cat is stuck-up, but later he says the same thing about a different cat and learns otherwise.
I notice this other witch’s dress isn’t actually black.
With all the other times characters act like snobs, is Kiki guilty of this too, in her early treatment of Tombo?
Osono: the warmth and comfort of being welcomed by a stranger into her kitchen to share a hot drink—not as a daughter but also not quite as a friend, seen as still a child but able to make your own decisions, given extra kindness and understanding but not indulgence. Later Ursula the painter does much the same, though as less of a stranger by then.
A silent baker shamelessly showing off—for the cat.
An artist in the woods, independent and following her own path; and, we learn, she has previously had to break from her old practice of copying other painters.
This aged dog is an artistic ancestor of Heen in Howl’s Moving Castle.
Kiki, you need to say thank you to that dog.
Kiki tells Osono she can’t make deliveries now, and seems genuinely afraid she’ll be asked to leave the bakery attic. She ought to know Osono wouldn’t throw her out, but she is still thirteen years old, not as grown-up internally as she often seems.
Someone you care for is in mortal danger, and there is no hope for him but you, and yet the one special thing that makes you able to help is the thing that isn’t working at that moment.
A dirigible captain who knows his priorities: speak to the boy to give him instructions and reassurance, not to the crew, who know their jobs and signed on for this task knowing the risks.
“There are still times I feel sad . . .”
By the end of the movie, Kiki still doesn’t have a special skill or focus. She flies . . . which is the basic thing that all witches do. This always leaves me dissatisfied; but perhaps the point is her acceptance that right now, being able to fly on a broom (and talk to a cat) is enough.
Miyazaki elements: of course the flying machines, and flight in general; the need to find a balance between the old ways and the new ways; expressive faces as always; and a girl with grim determination as invisible power courses around her, making her hair rise up.
•
There is no single trigger for Kiki’s crisis of confidence. We see her repeatedly regret the way she must dress while other girls get to look nice. She encounters the other witch who has a speciality, while she does not. She’s learned that the town has rules and habits that don’t make allowances for witches. Staring in boredom out a window, she looks up with interest at the sight of a young man, only to watch him leave with a cheerful young woman in a light-colored dress. We can imagine, though it’s never hinted at in anything she says, that Kiki second-guesses her decision to leave home before preparing herself better and maybe learning some of those potions her mother wanted to teach her. Possibly she asks herself if she gets along better with adults than people her own age because she’s old-fashioned and behind the times. She admits that she doesn’t find flying fun. She ends up wet and bedraggled face-to-face with a well-to-do birthday girl in her party dress, who treats Kiki like an unimportant laborer—treatment in keeping with being a deliveryperson. Then she gets upset that Tombo is friends with this girl.
It isn’t as simple as Kiki wanting to be like the birthday girl, though, because it seems clear Kiki considers her rude and ungrateful, someone who speaks dismissively of a good and thoughtful grandmother. Kiki may want what the richer girl has, but she wouldn’t want to be her. Is it possible to have it both ways, being fashionable and glamorous but at the same time pure in heart and respectful and kind? Does being the second mean she’ll never be the first?
•
I imagine this conversation as Kiki returns the broom at the end of the movie:
Kiki (bowing): Thank you so much for letting me borrow this!
Street sweeper: Oh, not at all! I’m glad it was useful!
Kiki: It’s a good broom. Please continue to take good care of it.
Street sweeper: Oh! Well, if you like it so much—you could have it!
Kiki: Oh, no! I couldn’t! It belongs with you. It wouldn’t like to be given away.
Street sweeper (looking with puzzlement at broom-head): Is that so . . . ?
In Miyazaki’s original version of the story, there was only one girl, not a pair of sisters.
Totoro in a few words and phrases: joyful, playful, beaming with wonder, rich in emotion.
Miyazaki trademarks offered here: nature coexisting with humans and vice versa, touches of a not-hostile supernatural, flying in strong wind, active girls looking out for their family or community, facial expressions that communicate so much.
Both girls, but especially Mei, show absolute delight and eagerness when they encounter creatures and situations that would be scary if allowed to be. The girls boldly leap at things that are strange and new.
You can be good, kind, and respectful but still behave like a kid.
Satsuki is working so hard to fill the place her mother would: preparing bento boxes, tending the kitchen fire, fixing her little sister’s hair, reminding her father of things.
At the start you see the truck packed with belongings, and Miyazaki doesn’t forget to include, without drawing any special attention to them, a pair of umbrellas sticking out the top.
I wonder if Totoro’s breath smells like leaves and fresh grass. It must not smell bad, and is likely even pleasant, because Mei and Satsuki aren’t the least bit fazed when he exhales a gale on either of them.
I will always and forever love the catbus.
When your dog seems to be barking at nothing at all, it might not be a ghost—it might be a catbus.
photo of the cover of the Warner Archive Collection blu-ray edition of the original King Kong film
I’ve seen the original, the 1976 version, and Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake. The best special effects are in Jackson’s version, not surprisingly, but in most other ways the original King Kong is superior to its later imitators.
And in fact the original’s special effects are far better than what you should expect from 1933. Willis O’Brien not only made supposedly impossible shots possible, he turned a monster into a character.
The Premise
In all the versions I’ve seen, the King Kong story has at its center a preposterous notion: that a gigantic gorilla has any interest in a human woman except perhaps as something to chew and swallow.
One of the many remarkable things about the film is that it doesn’t simply ask you to believe that an ape is interested in a woman, it shows you that Kong cares about her, and you believe it.
And yet you can’t justify Kong’s interest in any natural way. Yes, for a moment or two maybe Kong would be curious about this odd creature, bleached white unlike all the other humans he’s seen, puzzled enough to pause and poke at her before deciding what to do—but the answer, reasonably, would have to be either “eat” or “throw away as too risky to eat.” But you don’t have much of a movie that way, so you simply have to go with the idea or give up.
Unless we invent a story nowhere hinted at in the film that as a baby, Kong was cared for by a human woman—it would not be a white woman, but an islander—after his own gorilla mother was killed (presumably by a dinosaur). If infant Kong was nurtured by a human woman, up to the point where he could fend for himself in the wild, or maybe when that woman was herself killed somehow, then he could indeed have some obsessive (completely non-sexual) desire to possess and be around a human woman. The fact that Ann is white would be little more than a temporary distraction—him thinking, Okay, she looks a little weird, but, all right, no, this is basically the same as the mother-creature. Carrying Ann back to his lair and setting her up on a ledge would then be the same thing he’s done with all the “sacrificed” women over the years. He brings them home and dimly expects that they will fill the niche his foster mother once did, satisfying a garbled psychological need.
(Just think—that kid at the orphanage in Cider House Rules might’ve been on to something.)
Each woman would last a while but eventually expire—maybe he fails to feed her properly or she accidentally falls off the ledge or he picks her up too roughly or she fails to meet his expectation somehow so he gets mad and smashes her. The only thing unique about Ann’s case is that this time people come after her, armed with guns, gas bombs, and little concern for consequences.
Racism
Viewers today ought to be prepared to face head-on the issue of racism in King Kong.
Most immediately evident are the islanders, presented in stereotypical ways with appearance, customs, and actions probably chosen to signal “primitive.”
But it’s fair to note that many of the condescending and bigoted things the movie tells us about the islanders (like the idea that they’ve been degraded and lost the civilization that the wall-builders possessed) come out of the mouths of white men thoroughly ignorant of their history and culture, and we can easily suppose that what we’re hearing is the result of these men’s own biases, arrogance, and sense of cultural superiority, not anything remotely like an accurate assessment of the islanders.
In other words, we can often pin the racism not on the movie itself but on the characters, and observe that they are being people of their time, idiotically spouting things they don’t know because it suits their hyper-inflated ideas about white culture. Instead of pointing at the islanders and saying, “Wow, they’re savage!” we can point to Denham and the sailors and say, “Wow, they’re clueless and prejudiced!” if we choose to.
Logically the people of the island ought to be Pacific Islanders, or conceivably Indigenous South Americans, and not Africans, but the movie seems to have relied largely on African American actors to play these parts (and maybe a few white men painted to look black). In some shots the filmmakers have apparently made a special effort to emphasize people’s hair and facial expressions in ways that are brief but cringeworthy.
On the other hand, note that the islanders are entirely ready to throw spears at Kong and fight him, hopeless or not. They are not trapped in any superstition about the sanctity of an “ape god” as we might expect to find in a movie of this era. They know very well Kong is a threat and that he is not so sacred they must be passive before him.
Also some of the shots of islanders facing Kong have clear parallels in the shots of New Yorkers facing him. Kong reaches into a two-story hut to pull out a nameless victim; Kong reaches into a hotel window to pull out a nameless victim. Kong throws a hut wall that lands on islanders in the foreground; Kong throws an awning that lands on New Yorkers in the foreground. Kong puts an islander in his mouth; Kong puts a businessman in his mouth. The island defenders hurl spears; the city defenders fire pistols. There’s no difference in bravery or panic or commotion, only a difference in technology.
•
Charlie the Chinese cook speaks in stereotypical language, and his role on ship is subservient, but in his actions and behavior he’s never a caricature or a joke. In fact when he finds a pivotal clue he immediately knows what to do and correctly takes the initiative without hesitation or doubt, setting in motion the next portion of the plot. He’s a capable, intelligent individual, not just a servant to white people.
•
In addition to all that is Kong himself. Yes, he’s a gorilla, not a human being, but the racist comparison of Africans and African Americans to apes has a long history, and this is an ape with an obsession for a white woman, and such obsession is another old racist trope. You can watch and enjoy the movie on its surface terms without getting the idea that Kong symbolizes black men or a black man, but when you’re aware of racist slurs and imagery it’s hard to believe the filmmakers weren’t playing with this notion on some level, though it would be more as a way to heighten white viewers’ anxiety than as any kind of direct allegory or analogy. (There’s no reactionary social message here like you can find in Pierre Boule’s Planet of the Apes novel or the movie[s] made from it.)
King Kong doesn’t try to tell us what the islanders are thinking when they go out of their way to sacrifice Ann. Viewers may assume—and may have been expected to assume—that it’s because her whiteness makes her a “superior” sacrifice, but this is hardly a necessary conclusion. It may simply be that since the outsiders ruined the first ceremony, one of the outsiders should become the replacement sacrifice. Maybe the islanders also thought that although this woman looked bizarre to them, Kong might like a little variety, and it meant no one from their own community needed to die.
On the other hand, we do not actually know that this is a human sacrifice meant to appease the giant ape; for all we know, the local woman who was nearly delivered to Kong was being punished for some terrible deed, and that gong they rang to summon him was sounded only when they happened to have a capital punishment to mete out.
•
In any case we ought to marvel at and respect the resilience, ingenuity, and intelligence of the islanders and their ancestors for creating a viable human community in such an intensely inhospitable place.
Natural History
It is hard to imagine any natural history that would allow giant gorillas to develop on an island populated by dinosaurs, even if we accept giant gorillas as biologically possible. (There was, at least, gigantopithecus, apparently a massive prehistoric orangutan.) I would propose that the dinosaurs, reptiles, and insects are native to the island but gorillas are not. Giant gorillas, let us imagine, are native to some other island (or mainland) and were brought to Skull Island by the humans who journeyed there—possibly as a necessary condition for settlement. It may be that without giant gorillas protecting them they would not have been able to establish a community in this hostile place. Suppose that these humans had tamed giant gorillas in their previous home, and brought several along as breeding stock, but at some point in intervening history the gorillas became feral and mostly died out, leaving Kong as probably the last survivor.
Miscellaneous
You’d think the path to the captive sacrifice would already be clear of trees, unless it has been a LONG time since the last one.
Most of the time when you use a dummy for a human body it looks silly, as when the brontosaur-type lake creature grabs people in its mouth. But when Kong shakes the men off the log and the “bodies” land on the rocks below, the limp, flailing limbs kind of work, uncomfortably.
Kong has brute strength, but he doesn’t defeat a tyrannosaur with that. He wins by using intelligence and skill, able to outfight his deadly opponent with dodges and wrestling moves.
Ann screams too much (with provocation, yes), and you can see that some of this has been added to the soundtrack when Fay Wray is not mouthing any screams.
Kong’s scale is inconsistent. How big IS he compared to a human being? His size shifts around even on the island.
I’m pretty sure that instead of skirting around Kong and climbing down a cliffside on a vine, I would go back the way I came, on foot.
It’s not really clear how Kong locates Ann in the city. How does he know what building to look in? Was he able to track Driscoll-taking-Ann just as Driscoll tracked Kong-taking-Ann?
In 1933 I’m not sure I would expect a police chief to think of airplanes without prompting from a civilian.
Kong is tough. It takes repeated passes of those planes shooting him before he starts wobbling even a little.
Notice there is not the slightest hint in this film that Ann feels any sympathy for Kong or is sorry for him being killed. There are, though, displays of Kong’s tenderness towards her and maybe even a recognition—at the end when he picks her up the last time—that he should set her down so she won’t be harmed, regardless of what happens to him. And even if Ann is terrified or traumatized, we the audience sympathize with Kong. We have seen him as a feeling, living being with yearning and regrets and anger and posturing and curiosity, and we can be sorry that things turn out the way they do.
In honor of Thanksgiving tryptophan, I’m pulling this Big Sleep reflection from my personal archives. I wrote this back in 2015 after seeing the movie for the second time.
Perhaps the most famous story about the making of the Humphrey Bogart movie The Big Sleep is the unsolved puzzle of who killed chauffeur Owen Taylor. Brody seems genuine in his surprise at the idea of a second murder being laid at his feet. Eddie Marrs didn’t do it (or order it done) because he really didn’t seem to know about Geiger’s death until confronting Marlowe in Geiger’s house, and therefore would have no reason to harm Taylor. Karol the punk kid might have done it, believing that Taylor had killed Geiger, but if that’s the case what made him change his mind later and (incorrectly) blame Brody and kill him?
Actually that’s a valid question regardless. The day after Geiger’s murder, Karol is helping Brody clear out Geiger’s shop—but later guns down Brody, apparently as revenge. So maybe Karol was merely playing along with Brody long enough to get his departed boss’s affairs in order . . . or maybe Karol didn’t blame Brody until Marrs just happened to point Karol in that direction. Or maybe Carmen, vexed at not getting her way in Brody’s apartment, broke away from her sister and immediately called up Karol (knowing how to contact him through their long association via Geiger) and pinned the blame on Brody. Perhaps Carmen had even brought along Karol to begin with, to act as backup in case her attempt to retrieve the photos went wrong.
So it’s possible Karol killed Taylor (sure Taylor had killed Geiger) and then was later misled into thinking Brody was really the one who killed Geiger.
I can work out a better answer, though.
Agnes did it. Or had a hand in it. For reasons of her own she was tailing Brody that night and saw Brody knock out Taylor and steal from him; but Brody left thinking Taylor was still alive. Checking up on Brody’s actions, she found Taylor dead or near death and decided to take care of the evidence and set up the car-crash-into-the-ocean scenario.
It might go something like this:
Joe Brody wasn’t much of a man, try as she might to change this fact, but Agnes needed him. Not needed him in the cheap and helpless way of a desperate magazine heroine, like a sap, but in the practical way, the way a carpenter needs a hammer, as a tool to build the thing she needed, and who cared what happened to him after that, she could always get another at any dime store. They were common as dirt.
So it wasn’t out of sentiment or grief or anything so childish as jealousy that she was tailing her man that night, driving around in her own car, a car he’d seen her in a hundred times before but which he never once noticed following him around all evening, he was just that stupid; no, it was pure, unvarnished self-interest that kept her on the road, carefully hanging back just the right amount to keep him in view without drawing attention to herself. She had an idea the fool was getting sweet on that spoiled rich floozy Carmen Sternworth, the one he was so eager to blackmail, and she needed to know if that was true so she could make the proper plans to snip the bud off that flower before it bloomed.
It would not do at all if Joe Brody turned his head to another woman at this point. All her schemes depended on him being completely nuts about Agnes herself.
They ended up at the Geiger house—no surprise. Pretty soon the money-bleeding floozy showed up too—again, no surprise. Life was sure a kick in the teeth—Agnes had always had to scrap and scrape for every last nickel, every red cent, despite how tough and smart and careful she was, but here was this walking store-window dummy without a brain in her head or a rat’s worth of sense, floating around high and carefree just because her daddy happened to have a ton of money. It was unfair, that’s what it was, that the stupid and worthless ended up wealthy while the harder you worked and the more you deserved a good shot the faster life seemed to knock you down the ladder before you could get anywhere. This time it looked like that shove was going to come, as it so often did, in the form of a man who did you wrong just when things were about to go right.
<Agnes leaves her car to spy from a better position; soon there is a gunshot, a scream, a flash; the chauffeur flees; Brody chases him; Agnes needs time to get back to her car but eventually finds Taylor in the car; Brody has already left, but she goes to the car window to see what’s happened>
The heap of humanity slumped over the steering wheel made a moan—maybe its last. She’d seen plenty of men get whopped in the head in her day, and knew sometimes you made it and sometimes you didn’t. Even the blows that didn’t take you right away could still do you in before you ever woke up enough to know it. Was this going to be one of those times?
Agnes watched for a long moment, trying to decide what to do. Nobody was around to see, but at the first sign of anyone approaching she would scream. An easy story, especially for a woman, who would naturally be believed: she’d seen the car, parked in an odd place, and gotten out to see what was wrong, then stared at the man in shock until finally finding her voice. No trouble making that one stick, the way she’d lay it on if a witness appeared.
Then the man in the driver’s seat had a convulsion—almost too small for the word, more like a shudder and a tremble—and wheezed once, then never again.
Yes, he was dead, all right, and Brody had killed him, though the idiot didn’t know it. Knowing someone was alive when you left him won’t keep judge and jury from hanging you once they’re sure you’re the one who whacked him. But any business like that would get in Agnes’s way even more than a wandering eye and a useless heiress might. She wasn’t sure if anyone could tie Brody to the dead man or not, to point the investigation in his direction, but no need to take chances.
<Agnes gets the car to the right place, sets it up to roll to the pier, and leaves>
Just like a man not to clean up his own messes. And just like a woman, too, to clean it up for him and never even say a word to let him know what she’d done. You didn’t get any gratitude when you were a woman—either they didn’t know you’d done anything at all, because they were stupid, or they knew it but just took it for granted, smug and sure in their misbegotten belief that that’s what women were around for anyway, to clean up so men wouldn’t have to.
Well, just you wait, Joe Brody, Agnes thought to herself with a smile, I’m gonna clean up all right!
In honor of the movie’s U.S. blu-ray release on the 28th of June (2022) . . .
The anime series Urusei Yatsura (colloquially translated as something like “Buncha Alien Jerks” or “Those Obnoxious Aliens”), based on the manga by Rumiko Takahashi, has more than its share of weirdness, to put it mildly. Viewers of the show were treated to quite a lot of absurdity, oddness, nonsense, and unfamiliar imagery. Nowadays UY is likely best known through the second movie, Beautiful Dreamer, but probably nothing in the entire animated franchise is more surreal and unreal than the fourth movie, Lum the Forever.
It deals with supernatural themes and mysterious disappearances. It doesn’t explain things that happen. It shows things that don’t seem logical even within the story. Was it badly written? Was it sloppy film-making? Was the director being deliberately incomprehensible to thumb his nose at the world? Did we the viewers simply miss things by not paying attention?
I won’t claim to understand everything about Lum the Forever, but here are some thoughts I wrote down the last time I watched it, a few years back (with a tiny bit added here and there).
• This movie is aimed at people with a passionate knowledge of the regular TV series, made by hardcore fans for hardcore fans. The kind of people who can catch a subtle reference to a single episode that aired three years earlier and say to themselves, “Oh yeah! I remember that!” From Sakura’s yokai friends to the air-breathing capsule to Megane’s armor to the reason Kotatsu-Neko might disappear, there are a host of things new viewers or casual viewers would simply be baffled by. And the movie already has more than enough to be confused by without people asking why on earth Ataru would stuff a pickled plum in Lum’s mouth.
It’s practically a given that a movie based on a TV series will reward (or pander to) the fanbase by throwing in little treats—character cameos, inside jokes, a significant object sitting in the background. What’s different in Lum the Forever is that those insider treats are actually relevant within the plot, and the filmmakers still made no effort to explain them.
• Just before she enters the water in one scene, Lum puts something in her mouth—not a single thing is said about it, but it must be one of the air-breathing tablets shown in the episode where the group visits Mendou’s aquarium and tries to bring the “pool ghoul” back together with his true love. Which explains how Lum can breathe while she’s stuck underwater all that time.
• It’s useful to recall that Kotatsu-Neko is not just a giant cat who drinks tea at a kotatsu, he’s a giant ghost cat who drinks tea at a kotatsu.
• They never do tell us the original ending of the “Legend of the Oni Princess.” This is a significant shortcoming in the film. The movie shows Ataru, Mendou, and Megane going to visit Mendou’s grandfather, but we never actually see him. Surely there was meant to be a scene with the grandfather outlining the whole legend, but it must have been cut, resulting in the absence of a crucial piece of the story.
Perhaps in the legend the Oni princess gave birth (literally or figuratively) to the next demon-confining tree: one tree dies, but the Oni births the next tree, and thus the evil spirits are controlled once more. It could be that she died and was buried and became the next tree. Did the legend say something about the Oni princess becoming a companion to the area’s guardian spirit and thus placating that spirit? Could it be that the Oni became the wife of the guardian spirit and they were together parents to the new tree?
• The “Battle Champion Mendou” dream is much too long. For this we lost a segment explaining that legend?
• Mendou’s words at the town assembly might lead one to believe that Tomobiki town wants to get rid of Lum, to expel her from itself, because she is a “foreign particle” (like an infection). However, it seems instead that Tomobiki wants Lum as a friend. (Or lover?) Everyone else is essentially part of Tomobiki and only Lum, as something other than Tomobiki, is a suitable companion. (This is the sense behind the answer to Ran’s remark that she’s also an alien: yes, Ran is also foreign to the town, but she’s just not worth talking to.) The question then becomes why Tomobiki would make everyone else forget Lum, but apparently this is a way of making sure Tomobiki can keep Lum to itself (if people in the town missed Lum and felt a longing for her, that might awaken her and pull her away).
• Mendou starts the war with the Mizunikojis believing that if life becomes horrible enough, everyone in Tomobiki will be unified in the single desire to have things go back to the way they used to be. Mendou expects that this will somehow make the consciousness of Tomobiki release them from the dream world they’re trapped in, presumably by waking up that consciousness. Apparently this is what occurs, combined, however, with Ataru waking up Lum through his desire to see her again (Lum and Tomobiki are shaken from their dream communion at the same moment and therefore the “spell” around the town is broken).
• This movie does a poignant job suggesting that everyone would have been better off if Lum had never been around.
A good site for learning more about Urusei Yatsura is http://www.furinkan.com/uy/index.html. (I have no affiliation with them; it’s just an honest recommendation.)
