Testing, testing.
If all goes well, submitting this journal entry to the database will cause both Weblogs.com and Wander-Lust to recognize the fact that I’ve updated my page.
These are the things I do to pass the time between creative endeavors and emergencies, folks. Thank you for your patience.
On my daily rounds of the blogosphere, I found that leuschke.org is the featured site on Wander-Lust. I’ve seen the Wander-Lust buttons, but paid them no heed until today.
So of course, I’m now signed up as a member. I even managed to get the auto-spidering tags worked into the Monaural Jerk software rig so I don’t have to manually post updates at W-L. You can just bet I’ll be testing the feature sort of now-ish, in fact.
(UPDATE: I don’t yet have automatic notification on W-L working. There’s more tinkering to be done. What I have accomplished is automatic lifting of the most recent title and synopsis once I do let W-L know that a new entry has been posted.)
While I was tinkering around, I decided to rearrange some things along the ever-growing left-side column and add some colons to the navigation headers. Might as well go for a consistent style, eh?
Quack me up. Have I gone too far? Is this madness? Is it not enough madness? I need an outside perspective.
Submitted for your perusal…
Spirited Away review
At long last, Tenchi Muyo Thumbnail Theater is complete. Not only that, but the email links work. (Whoops.) The only thing left to do is to hunt down some missing thumbnails, like for the Jurai Royal Family. It’ll keep…
What’s keeping you, EK? *smirk*
Let me get right to the meat of the review: Spirited Away is an absolutely gorgeous piece of animation. It looks beautiful from start to finish. The action is fluid and dynamic. The design of scenery and characters is imaginative and detailed.
A coworker pointed out that she favored “Princess Mononoke” over this film. My reply was that “Mononoke” is to “Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind” as this film is to “My Neighbor Totoro.” This is a child’s film, albeit a wonderfully detailed and imaginative one.
The story is that of a young girl, Chihiro, trapped in a world of spirits and monsters. She starts out weak and afraid, but spurred by the desire to rescue her parents she finds an inner determination and generous nature that see her through an amazing series of challenges. Showing the value of determination, politeness and caring seems to be the driving principle of the movie.
Not everything is sweetness and light. Yu-Baaba, the matron of the bathhouse, is quite the intimidating and dangerous woman. Genuinely scary things happen to and around Chihiro. There’s even a rather disgusting sequence involving regurgitation. You’ve been warned.
I’ll briefly touch on the quality of the dub. Disney did right by this work, harnessing superb voices to a talented voice director and a quite decent script. Names were mostly unchanged, and the occasional instances of off-camera speaking used to explain certain cross-cultural elements weren’t jarring. I admit that I’m dub-agnostic when it comes to anime, so your mileage may vary. The zealots in the crowd will likely disagree with me, but the zealots probably aren’t reading this review.
So is the movie perfect? Perhaps not, but the downsides are subjective. Chihiro’s transformation from incapable to indomitable seems a bit sudden in some ways, though there are key events that spur this transformation. There are a couple of “huh?” moments in the movie, but those could be explained by an incomplete grasp of cultural cues. Maybe. Little things, subjective things, are all that keep this movie from being a perfect 10. Yes, it’s really that good.
“Spirited Away” is only in town through Thursday the 17th of October. As of this writing, that’s three more nights’ worth of chances to see this film in the theater. It is absolutely worth it. This is a splendid film.
Spirited Away at Nausicaa.net
I’ve posted wishlists before, but usually just for media items. This time I want some hardware:
I rely on music to balance my soul and maintain what semblance of sanity I possess. When my current set of cans finally give up the ghost, I want to replace them with a pair of these. Oh yeah.
I love taking pictures, but my 35mm camera doesn’t get much mileage. I admit it: I’m cheap and lazy, so buying rolls of film, getting them developed and scanning the results into the computer is just not my thing. I want a decent digital camera. Something like, say, the Olympus D150-Z or the Kodak LS420 or the Canon Powershot Digital Elph S230… a decent entry-level sub-$300 digital camera. (I’m open to suggestions, actually. All the websites in the world can’t really tell me exactly what to get.) Thank you, dpreview.com.
I’d ask for a portable music device, but so far none of them support Ogg Vorbis. Maybe next year…
