Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

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In children’s movies the antagonist/monster is often meant as a metaphor for the child’s lack of autonomy in an ambivalent world that they do not fully understand.

And then you have My Neighbor Totoro, where all the monsters are friends, and the bad guy is just chronic illness, children who have let their imaginations run wild and fear the worst, a sibling getting lost, and at the end basically nothing happens which is the best news considering. There is no metaphor for human struggle, it’s just human struggle.

While some of his movies like Castle In the Sky, Mononoke and Nausicaä follow a modified Hollywood bad guy arc (in Castle half the bad guys practically become chosen family, in Spirited Away they become allies), a lot don’t. Up on Poppy Hill is essentially two teenagers in love discovering to their horror that they are first cousins, despair, and then discover that one of them was adopted.

But in all of them is the self-rescuing princess. The child either has to save themselves or at least demand the help that they are rightfully entitled to.

I got to introduce some kids to Ghibli right as Disney started distributing them. If you’ve seen Lasseter’s introduction to Spirited Away that’s where we were at that time - I’m telling you a secret that should not be a secret. And they in turn “forced” their friends to watch them in the same way my generation forced people to watch The Princess Bride; like it was a moral imperative to postpone other plans and rectify this egregious oversight in their education.

It’s a standard trope in a mahou shoujo anime such as Sailor Moon or Futari wa Precure that the enemy tries to infiltrate the hero group and ultimately gets domesticated by Japanese society. I think of how the antagonist joins the party in Tales of Symphonia as a playable character.

And the tsundere: person initially thought to be an asshole is either just having the worst day possible, or softens and grows as the story progresses.

There’s a lot of western film where a minion is sent to infiltrate and ultimately either becomes a double agent or is convinced to do the right thing at a point of no return, by choosing to fail their task, or sacrificing themselves in a brief and tragic redemption arc, either directly or an implication of potentially fatal consequences from their boss.

In the high postmodern of anime about visual novels (Saekano or Date-a-Live) the Tsundere is confronted with being a Tsundere and violently denies it. (Whacks you with their twintails or something)

I watched The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya recently. The main character can bend reality to her wishes. She is unaware of this. But it makes her basically a monster, because the other characters are locked in a constant struggle to prevent her from getting bored or angry, in case she remakes the world without them in it. By the end of the series this is not resolved at all, she is still a monster with the other characters in her thrall, it's just that the last episode is somewhat calmer as if they've arrived at a kind of stability. Also there's eight episodes in the middle that are all nearly identical, because they get stuck in a time loop due to her unwillingness to permit the end of summer.

The book on postmodernism in anime is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otaku:_Japan%27s_Database_Anim...

but yeah, Haruhi Suzumiya stands out but I'd also reference the anime which contain the fantastic element of anime in an otaku frame such as Gundam Build Divers, 2.5-dimensional Seduction or Shangri-La Frontier.

My kids (8 and 6) snuck out of bed and ended up watching Grave of the Fireflies with me. I originally didn't watch it with them because of the subtitles, but they were hooked.

How did they react? I would hesitate to show it to my children of the same age. It is a very grim and sad movie.

I told mine I’ll watch it with them when they’re old enough to drink. Which is next year.

I’m not ready to watch it a second time though. I’m told it’s worse the second time.

They were hooked until the end. It was quite late for them, but school vacation so I didn't push them to bed.

I didn't know the story going in.

At least if I was their age, I wouldn't have reacted to the end. I didn't become sensitive to tragedy until I was in my 20s, except that I cried when I read Bridge to Terabithia when I was 10 or 11.

To me Ghibli often seems closer to the medieval / early modern narrative of the knight's adventure, which is a variant of the classical Western arc (initial stable situation, incident, helping figure, self-doscovery, resolution), even without considering the "Princess in the Castle" aspect (which can also be considered the female narrative counterpart).

I'll be the guy to mention Grave of the Fireflies, which is also Ghibli, and which is the Totoro flipside as another, "There is no metaphor for human struggle, it’s just human struggle," situation. In fact, IIRC, they were released as a double feature (imagine being in THAT theater). As with Totoro's joy, GotF's devastation lies in its lack of concern for fitting events to any overarching metaphor. People make choices and there are consequences. That's all. The story ends when the viewpoint characters have nothing else to say.

Perhaps worth pointing out, that GotF was written and directed by Isao Takahata without involvement (afaik) of Miazaki who has written and/or directed most of the stories with more of a well-known 'Ghibli' feel to them.

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