Device Notes

  Mamoru Hosoda's own favorite films include A Brighter Summer Day and The Spirit of the Beehive , elegiac coming-of-age stories that use light and long shadows to quietly devastating effects.  One of Hosoda's episodes of the series Ojamajo Doremi lifts shots almost exactly from A Brighter Summer Day to achieve the same thing.  And as I said the last time I discussed this film, Hosoda also admires Nobuhiko Obayashi, whose films are similar in tone and subject matter to Hosoda's other favorites. To this day, Hosoda has mostly stuck to stories about children or adolescents, though with an increasing emphasis on their family relationships.  While the main character's memory of her late mother is central in Belle , it's his first film in a long time to focus on adolescents left to their own devices, with negligible interference from their families.  That's exactly what many people loved about his 2006 film The Girl Who Leapt Through Time , that it sho...

  The image is from Princess Mononoke , and if you didn't recognize it, I recommend you watch it at your earliest convenience.  This year is its 25th Anniversary, and I wrote this right after going to see a screening of it at a local theater.  I was pleasantly surprised by how many people showed up.  There are a couple scenes theater audiences always react to when they see Princess Mononoke : they snicker at the scene where San pre-chews food for an unconscious Ashitaka, and they get excited when Ashitaka grabs an arrow that was fired at him and fires it right back at his assailant.   It's been a very long three months for me.  I spent half of January and all of February writing a 56-page draft of a paper about groundwater and environmental justice.  A psychiatrist prescribed me a bunch of medications without actually telling me what diagnosis they were for, but I later found that they were all for bipolar disorder so I assume that was it.  ( Upda...