Long read, but some real gems in there. The ideas that seem to animate Miyazaki’s movies, if you’ll pardon the pun, feel a lot like the ideas that animate most of Jordan Peterson’s lectures. Life is a relentless and unmitigated tragedy, and yet we manage to find (or create!) beauty and wonder all over the place. The author seems to think this acute awareness of the paradox that is life comes from growing up in postwar Japan; I can see how that experience might have been a major influence.