 NO! Welcome everybody to the first episode of The Ghibli Cast. I'm your host Digi Bro and today joining me is The Davoo. Hello. Uh, Hippocrite. Hey, it's me Hippocrite, a resident Chibi Baka, signing in from your mother's bedroom. And Munchie J. Trump. Another fucking podcast? No, I shouldn't even be here. I already have one anime podcast. This is too much and I don't even want to be here. I don't want to be here. Well, this is primarily going to be a podcast that I and probably Davoo will be on every episode because he expressed interest. Um, but we're going to have just whoever wants to be on can be on. We're watching all of the Ghibli movies in order of release and right away I have to address the fact before anybody fucking comments. Yeah, but um, actually, no Skye is not actually a Ghibli movie. People think it was, but it came out before the founding of Ghibli Studio. Oh, eat an egg, you fucking retard. I mean, it's the most convenient way to think of it. If you go to, even on the Wikipedia page, it's like listed right above the list of Ghibli films. It's like, by the way, you might as well think of this as one, but like it's technically not, but you know, Ghibli owns all the rights to it. So it's a Ghibli movie. People who say Ghibli mean Hayao Mizaki movies. That's what they mean because it's the guy. Well, we're going to be watching all of Ghibli's movies because they are all great. And in Japan, Isawa Takahato would be as much of a household name as Miyazaki probably, but and he recently passed away. So this will also sort of be in his honor. Yeah. Um, but yeah. Anyways, this was the first one. It's a classic, very beloved based on a manga also written by Miyazaki, but he was writing them both at the same time and the movie just kind of ends at the place where the manga was at that moment. And then the manga keeps going. But, uh, you know, it's a, it's a fun, freewheeling action adventure movie, I guess. What'd you say? Yeah, Kira is very similar. So like there's two anime movies from the 80s that adapt a manga directed by the same guy who did the manga that ends at the point that the manga was at that involves a giant blobby monster trying to do something and then just kind of falls apart. I think Akira was a little farther along in the manga before the anime movie came out. But yeah, both of them kind of had the same story and they both just kind of, yeah, like take the some elements of the actual conclusion and just worked them into whatever the story was at the time. It is funny the way that they parallel each other that way, but like for starters, I just want to know what you guys each even thought of this movie because while there's tons of history and context and deep lore shit that I can get into, I'm sure people are going to expect that because I'm the anime guru here. I don't really want Ghibli cast to just be like a guy reading you everything about a Miyazaki film because frankly, Miyazaki movies are, I think, some of those things where people who love them won't shut up about how they're perfect and anyone who doesn't really get why is just like, okay, I just think they're boring because I used to think they were boring and Munchy, your reaction to this movie, you seem to not really care for it all that much. I wouldn't say that I have a negative opinion on the movie. I wouldn't say that I dislike it at all. It's just I don't give a shit about like basically anything about it. And it's a 10 out of 10. It's flawless. Like it's a masterpiece. It's made by how Miyazaki. I know that person. I don't know goddamn shit about anime. I don't know the first thing about a Shinji or a fucking American flag. I don't know any of that shit, but I do know that guy and so obviously it's great. Ghibli Cast will just be, okay, obviously this movie is good because it's made by a guy who everyone knows to be good. So sure, I have complaints, but like who cares? Who cares? This is a beloved movie. This is like all fucking, you know, Aladdin's bad or like Beauty and the Beast is bad. Like who gives a fuck? No one believes you. But why? I don't get it. Why don't you like it? It's just boring. I don't feel a connection to any of the characters. I don't, this movie like excels so well and like, oh wow, there's like a world outside of this movie that it doesn't feel the need to like make me care about any of them because like, oh there's a world outside of it. You've probably read the manga. You probably know what's going on. You probably care about these people. Just watch them go, but I don't care. I'm not just cause just Fluttershy and then there's just mustache people and I don't care. Oh that's fucking hilarious. She is totally though. I don't want to come out as like the guy who doesn't like the movie and everyone's like, why don't you like fucking Beauty and the Beast? It's a American staple. I just want to come out and say that I fucking hate Beauty and the Beast. I think that movie's boring as shit and I don't get it. So like I'm on your level with this, but even though I love this movie. I'm confused mostly because I thought you would like the fucking sick bugs. Okay, no I like the bugs. One of my notes here is that if the alms didn't have a great design, which I cherish and just think is genius and every time I see them I'm like, ah, a shock zone. But if they didn't have that I would have just fallen asleep and died. Well, hold on, hold on, Munchy. When I saw the alms I thought, oh wow, Super Metroid. The whole first scene and basically every other scene in the movie made me think, was Super Metroid like only 75% James Cameron's aliens and like maybe 25% this? Yeah, it's definitely like... I've never played a single Metroid game. Like specifically the alms, they feel like that like... The alms were an extremely influential design. Like Miyazaki, you know, he's always been sort of heralded as like a god because he really descends from what was essentially like the Japanese equivalent of Disney, the Toei studio, you know, like the people who are making the real big budget anime films and like Ghibli kind of is like the... They were like the next step to try to make it like more cinematic and like actually well directed. Yeah, like actual paced. About the pacing though and also relation to what Munchy said about not caring, I was very struck by the whole like first 15 minutes that's just character walks into a world building level and then just the exposition dumps shit. Before anyone hugs. They copied that. They wholesale copied the start of this movie in fucking the Star Wars Episode 7. Well, that one starts with like emotional moments first. It starts with like a village getting burned but yeah. Oh, yeah, I don't mean to say that it starts the same way. Yeah, but then they have like a scene of her going down through the ship and everything. Yeah, but what's unique about this one is it doesn't start with like... The way the shots are framed. You're normally accustomed to like first you're gonna see like the little kids of the town going, you know, go get them. Don't like die for my sake. You're supposed to like get an emotional attachment first. This movie just like kind of starts off with the biggest uninterrupted moment of just like nerdy world building shit, which actually then kind of undercut me when the rest of it was kind of a, you know, not a terribly dynamically different eco-terrorism affair of like, you know, I speak for the trees kind of shit. You know, it became a much more normal story after 10 minutes. Does the original like 1976 or whatever came out, Lord Axe Animation have any Japanese staff behind it? Because I would unironically be on for the Lord Axe cast, because that is one of my favorite pieces of media of all time. Just side note, you continue what you were saying. Hello, the Doctor Seuss cast. Yes. I can do that. A Seuss cast would be interesting. Like I would, I have no interest, but like I'd watch it if someone did it. So there's an encouragement somewhere if you're a Seuss fan out there, get on it. Yeah. So what are we going to talk about? Like the visuals, the sounds, the themes, the background? Well, I haven't said what I like. Oh, true. Whether I like it. And I fucking love, I fucking love this movie. And the last time I saw it, it inspired me in like, it gave me a lot of like creative inspiration for like various things and a love of bugs and mushrooms and stuff. And watching it again, I'm like, this is great. This is the perfect thing. This is one of my favorite movies. I'm so glad. I've got like the perfect palette of impressions here, because like, like Hippo, the way you react is like how the people who I think, who really speak for this movie, like feel about it, you know, like lots of artists, lots of people who draw a fan art of this, who, it's like a long standing artist alley kind of movie, because it has such a specific aesthetic. And obviously there's the strong female protagonist, which even, you know, in Japan, they've always celebrated like female protagonists. But the more that it's celebrated in the West, the more we look back to Ghibli movies and like those trend into Tumblr and become, you know, big deals here. The way I would like, like describe the, like, Norsica's appeal is like that of Journey, the video game on PS3 and PS4. Interesting. It's just a really cool looking place and there's not much happening and it's very slow and you just walk from one place to the next and then you get to the end. And there's no dialogue, there's no nothing. The feeling is very much of like an aesthetic journey. You're just sort of taking in all these vistas and water-colored backgrounds and dynamic shots of flying things. Isn't that nice? Yeah. And I mean, Munchie mentioned in his notes that he didn't really care for the aesthetic. So I mean, that's like losing half the battle right out the gate. Yeah. It's very much one of those. I feel like such an asshole, like being the guy, that's the person that's like, you know, I didn't think this movie was perfect, even though it is perfect. That's my official statement. That's my official political statement. Quote this in all of your magazines. It was a tampon. But I feel like bad, because it's just like, again, to go back to what I was saying before, like, ah, fucking Aladdin, the pacing's all off. Yeah, yeah. I feel like that guy. I feel like a dick. I don't want to beat the bad guy. I'm going to help you with your feelings right now because I'm actually going to come out and say that this movie, I've scored this movie a nine out of 10. And the funny thing about it is that I think it's, I think as a movie it's kind of terrible because it has no ending. Like, it just stops. It doesn't answer most of the questions. It's like, okay, Kusharna has like a very minor arc and then it's just kind of abandoned as a character. It's like, she shows up, she's a bitch, she's like, you know, and then Nazca saves her and then she just kind of is in captivity up until the moment she gets out the God Warrior at the end and she just kind of feels like a stark villain archetype. In the manga, she's one of the main characters. She has a huge arc. There's like a whole major battle she loses. By the way, the manga is like a Game of Thrones-esque like epic or Lord of the Rings-esque epic like fantasy. So, you know, this is like reading the first, this is like if you watched the Lord of the Rings and you stopped like 30 minutes before the end of the first movie. It's basically how much of like the manga is covered here. Yeah, I definitely, as soon as the first scene begins and she starts like vertical slicing a bunch of the bio lore, I'm like, okay, clearly this is not going to, I didn't expect to get like some massive conclusion. I was expecting to get sort of like, here's a sample for the manga, you know? And I mean, it's not as though the manga was already complete at the time. You know, it was ongoing too. So like the rest of the story just wasn't told yet in any real form. So it's just kind of like, here's where the movie ends and you'll have to go read the manga to continue. I do actually think, you know, when you hear things like how an anime adaptation is basically pitched as a little spoon sample for the manga as like a really spruced up, colored up, voiced up rendition of some of it. I think that's not like something disposable or something to see as negative. I'm reminded of a, okay, so like there's this game design book, The Book of Lenses, The Art of Game Design, by Jesse Shield, that says, back in the day when graphics were bad, you'd have to have a really densely detailed illustrated cover or even in an arcade, a very illustrated cabinet to give people an idea of the aesthetic of what the graphics are supposed to be. Then you sort of use your imagination. And he compared it to going to an old theater show. People way up in the back would get out little goggles to see what all the costumes look like up close. But they'd only do it for like a minute. Now that they know what the costumes look like, they can just put the goggles down and their imagination fills in the details. So you can sort of think of watching the movie as like, here's what the manga is kind of supposed to be like, right? So here's a fully packed in sample because you're just not going to get the full story in animated form nine times out of ten. So I feel like it still enhances the manga. You know what's weird about that is that I constantly forget that there's a manga and this movie doesn't make me care about looking into anything. Like I just like it as it is. I think that's the funny thing about it, though, is that the movie removes elements from the manga that would have made it like feel open-ended. Like they wanted this movie to feel like a complete experience so that, you know, it would stand the test of time and be a classic film. But as a result, yeah, it doesn't make you curious because there's a lot of like, it's fascinating to read the manga because I had volume one with me while I was watching the movie this time. And basically like the first good 15-20 minutes are like a one-to-one exactly the same. But then when the invasion happens, that's when it starts diverging because like in that scene the bad guys show up and they just kill her father. In the manga, her dad doesn't die for like three volumes. So like it was just a way to expedite this element of the conflict and like write this character out of the story because he doesn't really have a payoff until a point that the manga hasn't even gotten to yet. So like we'll just have him die so that that's not an open thread. But as a result, he's not an interesting character because nothing's happened with him. So you're just like, okay, well, her dad died, I guess. I kind of feel like that way about literally every character. I don't feel like I have a sense for anything about them. And it's not even like I demand, you know, high narrative stakes or like, you know, character arcs that just blow my mind or anything. It's not like I'm an American audience who just needs high action because there's a lot of explosions instead here. I just feel like there's no whimsy and there's nothing interesting that's going on that's making me care even about these people. I'm fine with having shallow caricatures if they're just interesting to me and if they're potent and vivid. But I just feel like these guys are just like vaguely good and there are people who are vaguely bad. That describes most movies though, IMA show. If you were to read the manga it would feel more like almost a political epic. It's much more of a message piece because like immediately after where the movie ends they introduce the other country that the people are at war with. Because this whole movie there's this backdrop of like this kingdom is at war with this other kingdom and they are oppressing the Valley of the Wind because of this like war effort but we never see anything about the actual war or who they're fighting with. Right after this point in the manga is where we'd be introduced to those guys which is a fully religious society which D'Vu, you even had notes about how the lack of religion was like interesting in this society but like the manga then immediately introduces a fully religious society that's like clearly supposed to be Muslim. I'm not talking about the religion of the movie society I'm talking about our society's religion is what I took out of this because I totally agree with what Munchie was saying. I guess, okay here's how it is here's the thing about movies and when like nerds of our particular persuasion like talk about movies a lot of nerddom, a lot of the analysis fan people we emerge from like comics and manga and TV shows and books and giant long dense shit and I feel like a lot of our types when we dip our toes in the movies were like hold on I can't like from heart write up like two pages of character bios about their emotions and arcs what's going on here this isn't what I'm used to but then when you actually like hear from movie buffs people who are all about movies they don't talk in the same terms of like how can I describe every character for a fucking hour usually like about talking about the random themes miscellaneous, not random things excuse me they're usually talking about themes or just pacing or more like the kayfabe of the movie rather than how long can you spend fan-fictioning the lore you know what I mean? I don't give a shit about lore or again having like detailed arcs like I said I don't care about that I just want like just the base like you know flat personalities of these people to be interesting for them to feel like a dynamic and like feel like they have like a place in the world that they are interesting to just have them spew generic shit if the generic shit just interests me then I'm fine with it I think I do agree with the the thought that the movie itself is kind of bad even though I really like it because the last time like when I was booting this up to watch it I got the imagery immediately I saw the spores and the mushrooms and the ome and the glider and I was like yes I remember these things oh I love it oh I want to see it again but the story it like it was never really the draw for me it feels like this is as an experience it's like watching a really long Sakugukif the whole movie it's just like I really like seeing these omes move I really like seeing all of these backgrounds and the clouds and everything yeah the animated backgrounds you probably had recognized some of them from the what the fuck is it called the decompression chamber every fucking thing in this movie yeah I think that the problem is basically that with a lot of elements of this movie they were there but they never got to the point and just because the movie just ends and the only characters who I feel like they really justified in the context of this movie were Nasca and Yupa Lord Yupa is sort of like just meant to be like he's basically Gandalf like he basically just is Gandalf except that he fucking has a sword instead of a staff you know but Super knows everybody in the world has been everywhere knows everything that's going on has the most level headed perspective and like you understand that about him immediately and if you watch the dub he's voiced by Patrick Stewart because they basically wanted you to know that his place is to be Picard in this story like but this is a story where Picard is not the main character he's just kind of on the sidelines but you know did everyone watch the dub here I watched the sub I've seen both in recently they're equivalent in Miyazaki movies the voice acting is never really a draw in either the English or Japanese version for me it's like I don't want to have things obfuscating than nice things to look at and if it doesn't really matter that much because the Japanese audio is never anything to write home about and the English audio is always like major actors if it's a Disney dub of a Miyazaki movie so like either way you're getting pretty much the same experience again I feel like an asshole but going back to what everyone's saying about how it's just one big sakuga gift and how did you how you used gifts from the movie in your podcast I just thought everything looked really ugly like I really did not appreciate how and why though you didn't like the color palette I think this movie has an amazing color palette I hated the color palette I absolutely hated the color palette I thought it was just super boring and I you don't like those yellows like your own tentacles or like the gold on kusharna's fucking thing no I thought everything looked like watched out this might have been because I watched it on kids anime but everything felt super watched out and none of it was like vivid it is very watched out but it's a biopunk world I see it as I see this movie as the world is meant to be first of all it is post apocalyptic the movie doesn't exactly clarify it's kind of like a footnote but like the implication is that the god warriors were the ultimate final weapon I think they do just flat out say they incinerated everything well then they destroyed the whole world and we're like way the fuck later and now the forest of corruption is trying to reset the world again so we're basically on apocalypse number two for humanity at least as the world attempts to cleanse itself but like you know there's again that's another one of the things where it's an element that's in the movie but you don't have time to have the apocalypse fully encroach the way that it would across seven volumes of like an epic fantasy story like there's just a lot of things that are cool ideas but then the emotional catharsis of it never gets felt because again it's just kind of over before it's really begun before like a lot of the points have been made but I do think that at the very least nasca like the idea of how she's sort of a martyr and like if other people were able to adopt her mentality then this would mean that people could be peaceful is like pretty easy to understand I think you know so like there are elements of it that are delivered on and the movie does have its own conclusion I don't want every movie to be the complete package with all the characters that I go away from the movie loving and wanting to be with forever and the great narrative payoff that makes me hyped you know sometimes something like hey here's a little tiny bit of a story about a biopunk future with some fucking Jesus themes in it and shit you know I my favorite character is the baby ohm who's bleeding to death I like him too and I think the baby metroid is literally based on that yeah and nosica nosica when she the acid gets into a fucking wound and she screams and the baby's like oh wait hang on someone's going on here and pulls back the fact that he actually like reacted makes me love all the bugs a lot yeah like he actually he's a big bug man they're smart boys I would say I got more invested as the movie went on there were two scenes that I had a pulse during and both of them were when shit was getting fucked up I really liked the scene when I don't remember any of the names of literally anything nosica and the boy get on the glider and they go to the place that's in the desert that's fucked up by bugs and it's like the boys hometown I believe then he meets his friends and they and they tell nosica that her people are fucked and she's I have this written down as one of my favorite scenes because I really love the way that we see her with everyone surrounding her like framing her and like at first it's supposed to be like jubilant like they found people and then you gradually realize that no one's on her side now you feel trapped in claustrophobic and then everyone like runs into the frame and grabs her yeah it's great you know she's never alone in the frame again I didn't feel like I cared about any of the characters besides scenes like that and one where she gets her fur gets put in acid those scenes I care because nosica's in pain but I don't really like for the rest of the movie I don't really feel like anyone's in pain even though there's like death and destruction and stuff I don't really feel it on any of the characters because I don't know anything about them and I don't really care I don't even like really care about nosica but she is the main character and this movie is great so it is great is what I'm trying to say you don't have to say it's great if you don't like anything I'm not saying that purely out of like pure pressure I'm not saying that because I want to fit in with the guys and kick back in a cold one I just I there's no value in me saying these things because I'm not an anime guy I'm not a film critic I don't know what I'm doing here I didn't want to be on digi said to come on and now I'm here so it's hey everyone it's fucking munchie J Trump huh Japanese so am I right fellas yeah so I just feel like the first time I saw this movie I only saw the first half of it in a Japanese class and I just remember being like I never forgot the imagery but did not remember anything about the plot and like I really don't think I would even now had I not read the manga like I really think this movie stands more on like the scene that best represents why this movie deserves to exist and I'm happy for it is the part where they're on the glider and they're being chased by a gigantic fucking serpent worm thing with like a pincer mouth and it's playing like this awesome fucking retro ass 80s synth music the synth was sick as hell I will not laugh yeah and like that scene is just an animation showcase of like this super long worm and when we were watching it last night to prep for this podcast I was high as fuck and the length of the worm just felt insurmountable felt like it was tugging my brain like a like a piece of gum being straight like rubber but also has the properties of gum basically like that's that's yeah that's how it felt watching that and like moments like that make me go oh thank god they made a movie so like I know what the colors are of the because long as in black and white you know and yeah we know that the we get to see the ohms like eyes glowing red and we get to see Nazca in the blue outfit in the golden field and it's like now when you read the manga you know what that's supposed to look like you know I it's really interesting just here you say that you saw this so long ago and like the imagery just stuck with you and that you don't remember the plot at all I can kind of recount the plot but like I don't remember any individual element like visually I mean I don't really remember in depth any of the okay I won't even say that I remember the whole thing I'm sorry okay I was sorry but she it was mostly just the fact that and tell me if you thought this was cool because this is the one thing that had stuck with me forever and like is still my favorite thing about Nazca is when they go into the forest of corruption in that scene I was just talking about and like the worm like knocks them down and they fall through the forest into a second forest underneath the forest and they're like oh this is the purification forest where like the world is being reborn and like the idea of the world underneath the world is like the coolest thing in the world to me I totally okay first of all Kirby 64 totally did it the same aesthetic you know what I'm talking about the part where you go down through the sand and you're in that little underground world isn't that totally just like the same Nazca it really is that's funny just because it doesn't feel the same but it is the same stuff it was so hard for me to remember what level you're talking about because it just does not give you the same emotion whatsoever it just like is you go down I remember as a kid thinking like when I saw the movie I thought like oh that's like that scene from Kirby 64 I mean for me it's Ash Lake from Dark Souls yeah well that's what I was going to bring up next is that Ash Lake is obviously based on it oh shit why why didn't I yeah Ash Lake is definitely based on it I feel like there's too much detail sometimes in the sets like everything's really meticulously designed but like I just don't enjoy looking at it I'm really glad you brought that up it's that 80's high detail fantasy world high detailed watercolour backgrounds that are kind of washed out it's it's it's it reminds me of good shit it reminds me of good shit and I like it when I when the movie was starting and there's like all these pans over just like ludicrously lusciously painted backgrounds I thought of the Dark Crystal and which is like I don't know if any of you have seen it but it's a pilot movie that is basically just a very generic fantasy movie that I absolutely hate but like the it's mostly known for the like super detailed puppetry and world and like that's kind of what the 80's fantasy aesthetic was even the Lord of the Rings movie from back then I don't know if that was in the 70's or 80's 70's yeah it's kind of like that that's just what I think 80's worlds were more like because like fantasy was such a saturated genre at the time but it was so popular that like everyone was just trying to make their own like unique aesthetic of a fantasy world it's like oh this one's gonna be all fucking plants this one's gonna be all this or that but like even like Nazca did even the fucking covers of the of those 80's movies it was like I can out air brush you motherfucker yeah I think much in the same way that like alien totally defined like what's you know sci-fi thrillers were gonna look like for from then on and then like you know Blade Runner defined with cyberpunk work was gonna look like Nazca I think did such a good job of this like biopunk bugs aesthetic that it defined that forever but unfortunately whereas those other movies like inspired anime and video games to make like a billion iterations of them with Nazca because it's already an anime like no one wanted to compete with it I think that's the problem with everything that's like the problem with Miyazaki everything he did was so perfect no one can follow him because when you try you end up with something like children who chase lost voices which is just a shit or his own son vaguely like a Miyazaki movie or yet Goro who can't who can't top it but like it's a shame because the specific aesthetic of this movie should be plumbed to death like I do think Super Metroid took a lot of influence from it um the Mushihime Sama games are known for you know I don't think this is an aesthetic that Ghibli could do now or at least it's not anything like what they do now now it's much more clean no one could do this aesthetic now it's a shame because man my friend Ghost Lightning used to have on his like wish list of like his anime wish list a seven part OVA adaptation of the Nazca manga would be like the ultimate anime because the manga really is an epic like it has a lot of big messages to say it's like a religious epic you had written in your notes that this movie doesn't quite go all the way with the Christ allegory with Nazca the manga goes way past all the way like she literally lives the entire story I may have written it wrong but you're reading the note backwards actually actually what does it say well hold on so well hold on it says she doesn't just go capital J Jesus at the end a biblical paradigm of good and evil are you saying she goes even higher okay hold on hold on so I've been kind of like sitting on a whole themes grenade on this whole time and I don't want to like go into until we're like ready okay so here's the thing I guess the thing that was the emotional investment keeping me through the whole thing very excitedly was thinking about the environmentalist message and the mindset of people who do that shit you know like Miyazaki who feels like every movie he makes is environmentalist in some way or another it's about the environment it's a classic fucking anime manga thing you know uh Tizuka did it a lot too and I think that the way that uh Nasaka presents her is presented in this story as basically the eco ubermench the environmentalist Jesus right she's the one who can speak for the trees or in this case the metroid bugs and she's able to sort of bridge the gap between the misunderstandings between the humans and nature and with her wisdom we shall live in peace and harmony and it made me think I think the reason why this sort of I feel like it's like the most direct and blatant wish fulfillment fantasy of normal people here in the real world regarding the environment and a lot of environmentalist shit sort of presents it this way you know actual the actual concerns regarding the environment is a whole lot of like math and resource management and business and politics but the way it plays out in a lot of people's hearts is much more biblical I think we think of it as you know oil and coal and our resources our society doesn't pollute the earth because of carbon atoms or whatever the fuck atoms and like chemistry and shit no human society pollutes the earth as the ultimate ironic punishment for the sins of being like it's the self-hatred of ourselves and what we represent that we can then extend to actual chemistry actual science that backs up that worldview and I think that environmentalism might be the world's fastest growing religion and that's what I'm gonna call it but a very atheistic one and it's as religions go probably a huge improvement because it insists on being based in science and on being based on empirical evidence but it leaves it with many challenges so I do think environmentalism has a lot going for it right regarding sort of filling in that gap that people used to put more people used to put God or a lot into right but now a lot of people are like switching to the ego alternative because it sort of has this big apocalypse narrative going on with climate change or just in general even if without climate change just the amount of pollution could eventually hit a tipping point while lifestyle especially for someone like Miyazaki who's always been involved in like local river cleanup and stuff like that like yeah he's very involved in like local cleaning efforts so he has literally watched like neighborhoods he grew up in like go to shit like the whole river God in spirited away like the idea that Miyazaki lived that scene where they were pulling the shitty gun god in the face that literally is based off of a real thing he did where he pulled a bicycle out of a lake I didn't know Miyazaki did like real shit I think he's the hands of the ground guy so yeah like watch Kingdom of Dreams in Madness he's like a he's the kind of guy who does like Ghibli does radio calisthenics every morning like that's the kind of studio they are so um that that's exactly what it is it's one of those things just like how the Christian Bible presents this ultimate fate for the world but you can have a sense of purpose by by edging it along like you can actually make the world just a little bit better by spreading the word of God and spreading good will towards men and you can also make it worse by spreading hate and evil and demonic shit so or like I guess playing Pokemon so similarly even though the environment is ultimately going to come down to politics and the industry you can give yourself a sense of satisfaction by just sorting through your fucking trash and throwing some of it into the recycling bin you know or like getting a slow a lower gas mileage car right people sort of do this as little little trinkets little tributes to the environmental God in a sense right to sort of absolve them of the sins that they see their broader society as being being guilty of so that the issue of course is that not everything about religiosity can be trans transferred into this environmental setup because ultimately you're still gonna be bumping up against even no matter how eco friendly you can make shit you're still gonna bump up against uh entropy right like that's the whole reason why I don't get like full on the environmentalist bandwagon in a ways because I don't really see it as being in the long long term ultimately the solution when entropy is gonna like cancel it all out anyway and also environmentalism lacks a God there is no one who can just come in and solve it willy nilly right and that's what nosica presents herself as and and I do think it's like the way that at least the way the movie presents the lore I think is a little bit it was I thought it was a little bit silly at least the way the movie presents the lore and a little bit contrived to present this scenario where a great redeemer can come in and make everything right because it's like if the owns are so fucking smart why and if they want to if what they want to do is to cleanse the world why the fuck do they have such a crazy foreign policy like oh shit you fucked with us slightly or moderately we will destroy you completely now they never like come up and be self-sacrificing like nosica would be they never come out and be like fine keep hitting me here here's my little communication tentacles here I'm just gonna sit here wait for someone curious enough to listen to my communication tentacles and I'll tell you all about what we're fucking doing with the soil and the toxins and the purification no the owns never fucking do that even though they're supposed to represent what's good in this world they for some reason have the craziest plan ever I don't think humans can understand their communication only nosica can like she's just a fucking biopunk she's like she knows she's fluttershy she gets animals well here's here's the way I think nosica is meant to sort of be interpreted and in the manga they really push the idea of her as like a Christ allegory that she's like literally like like she's different from like she's a what's the word what do they call Messiah well dude okay hold on hold on spoiler for the movie the last scene is her being risen from the dead and then walking sort of like on tentacles sort of like walking on water and there's literally a prophecy like the old woman the old like religious woman is like hey this is the prophecy fulfilled like she is the fucking the second coming of like whatever they show like some god that is like the god of the grain I guess of these people and she is sort of the human embodiment of it just like the Jesus and that really becomes like central to the story going forward in the manga to the point that like she like basically lives the entire bible you know um but like yes uh no I was just I was just gonna say I wish I could I wish I could like enjoy fantasy stuff without knowing that themes exist and that people use them because when I like when I first watched this it was just like you know the prophecy and all the environment stuff is just it just it was just yes that is the story that is being told this is real and uh these are characters and this is the thing that happens I mean and then now I know your ability to watch the movie that way though like I think the reason that the movie doesn't like beat you over the head with the themes there's a few scenes where like very old characters will just kind of preach at the camera for a second like you know oh this is why you should have love in your heart because Nazca did this and that's why uh if you guys just thought about it for a second like this is what the world is like but there's only a couple moments like that for the most part I think he wanted them to be you know this is like what's informing the story but the story is itself it is a story that you can you know you can just get involved in this world the things are not happening just for the sake of telling this message well for me I think what plunged me out of like plot thought and into theme thought was when I thought okay is Nazca the only one who figured out the toxins are in the soil are she and that guy the only one who fell through the fucking other world sand pit like no one else has gotten the word out like we still have enough industry and science to keep building planes but no one is still that's kind of the one of the biggest things that it's like the biggest liberty taken with human nature in like 95% of fiction is curiosity I think well I think this disconnect happens also because of the fact of how this movie opens and it opens in a really interesting way because it's trying to guide the viewers perspective on this from the perspective of Nazca who is like not a normal person in this world um so at the beginning of the movie like Nazca's in the forest and she's like openly exploring it she's curious about it she thinks it's beautiful but she's also telling us like it's dangerous and nobody goes here and I think because of the fact that like she understands the insects she knows how to like not cause a fuss she understands how to like make teto calm down how to make the own calm down like immediately we're sympathetic to all these elements like the movie in tells us right off the bat like the bugs have minds like you can reason with them the forest has like is beautiful we don't need to burn it down you know but like this is a super outsider perspective in the context of the story to the point that Lord Yupa who's like the most open-minded guy the most like well lived and well learned when he sees the cultivation that Nazca's doing down in the basement he's like shook he's like what the fuck you've been growing plants down here like no one's ever tried this before you know and it's cause like she just literally has been in a position where she can explore these forests more than anybody else can because she's just like she's she's always been for some reason sympathetic towards these animals and you know we eventually see flashbacks of her like being othered by the entire society around her were like everyone wants to take this little baby insect and kill it from her and like she really feels like a powerless like outsider to the group here because she's like do this thing that would hurt me very deeply if you killed this insect I'm like role-playing now the idea of a studio exec pretending that I was just sent the script for this and maybe some storyboards and Munchy is the test audience I played it to and if my first note if I wanted to mainstream it up a bit to give it a little bit more a little bit more typical punch I would say okay make a new character maybe like a guy right who's like sort of the other main character and he's just like a more normal person and maybe it's like 20 to 25 minutes before Naska like really shows up maybe she has some scenes to herself but like she's off doing some other thing so then like 30 minutes the first 30 minutes has just been showing you the actual status quo of the society making all the plant shit as scary as possible and then Naska shows up and they have a whole new world moment where like they go into the thing and he's like well this is so dangerous just like oh just have a mask on don't worry have a mask on and I slowly what oh whimsy and then the audience would be like oh I'm supposed to be scared but I know I'm not scared that was an arc yeah I think Naska funnily enough is meant if you were to read the whole manga you would not get the sense it was made for kids you would not get the sense it was like meant to be family friendly it feels much more like a serious war story lots of characters die you know like that was something that was I mean you know it's common it's in lots of fucking action shows but no one like people very rarely like die on screen you know and like things we just hadn't gotten that far yeah I mean a lot of the characters in this movie would have died later in the manga if you're someone who won't watch an action thing if people like constantly survive like hails of bullets this is gonna be a problem there's it even goes a step beyond that we're like oh man this giant metal steel structure is breaking apart right above this giant crowd of people good thing the only small and slightly medium small pieces of steel are falling on us huh good now we can just brush them all off that was weird even though there is like scary looking scenes in the movie of like I really love the way that Miyazaki yeah the way he portrays war is always very realistic and very like detailed and I fucking love his skirmishes there in a lot of his movies you'll just get like a three four second long cut of like guys in a field just swinging swords at each other like flamethrowers and shit and there's one of those in this and just like lots of shots of dudes firing like very technical looking machinery and stuff and like all that feels very cool and real and I think this movie and generally all Ghibli movies this is something that's unique about them and maybe it's just a very Japanese way of filmmaking but they all have like more of a historical approach to scenes as opposed to dramatic more documentary style yeah they don't focus on just the most important parts they tell you every step of the battle like very clinical characters have to move from all the way from point A to point E and we have to see them at every step of the way and as a result like every scene is very long yeah scenes are long and also kind of stoic that's another thing like characters I mean Miyazaki's level is like everyone dead everyone's dead okay let's go whereas you know with the Tomino style is literally everyone in the universe is dead now all right moving on so you know it's not the most extreme but yeah but it's it's just that like there's certain battle scenes in this movie where even though all of the fighting looks amazing I felt like we don't need to see any of these guys like none of these characters who were watching fight are important the only reason that we're watching these scenes is so that we understand the exact scale of the battle the nature of the weapons being used like we have a full perspective on exactly what this battle was you can really feel the difference in military power us fucking 21st century Americans we don't really like think about like oh yeah that's a concern it for every other country whether or not your military is big enough which you wrote it you wrote a note saying like is this sort of like similar to the Ottomans versus the Persians and something like that yeah well okay so I believe this story is set in the Middle East it's so sort of because when you look at the like outfits and everything of the the Valley of the Wind characters like they're kind of not really Middle Eastern but that like somewhere in the area between like the Middle East and Asia you know it's kind of the feeling I get and in the manga there's like maps and shit of the world and it looks like it is set there but like and then the Muslim allegory characters are from like they live in like a desert place which on the map in the manga looks like it could be Saudi Arabia or something so I'm thinking it takes place in that kind of area and might be sort of a metaphor for some kind of historical conflict in that area since there is like the religious element it's kind of like a metaphor for the crusades in the manga but it doesn't I felt was a lot closer to home because once I started seeing those giant fucking fuck off planes I felt like the Valley of the Wind is World War 2 era Japan and the whatever their fucking names were I just watched the movie for the first time so I can't remember all the names yet is fucking Germany World War 2 era right which I think that was probably pretty intentional considering that Miyazaki then did actual World War 2 era Japan feeling like they got outdicked by German because like in the Wind Rises you know the character is spending the whole movie building these tiny little rinky dink wooden planes and it's like oh we will now show you the German plane and it's just like this giant behemoth of steel and I feel like maybe younger Miyazaki was presenting that more allegorically and more like just raw emotionally and then just drew the planes as these giant lumbering how the fuck is that not falling apart that's the might of these crazy industrial civilizations that your poor little 1950s Japanese ass couldn't even conceive of in your poor ass little country as I feel like the kind of feeling that Miyazaki is exuding with the role that the Valley of the Wind portrays just being kicked around by all the other bitch you know I think a lot of that is just the strength of the sense of iconography of the movie that like the Empire like you have a very clear sense of the different styles of like planes and technology that different countries have like the Valley of the Wind has this weird little thing that Nazca rides that seems to weigh like 15 pounds because the kid just the one guy just carries it over his head yeah well here's the thing with that right I think I mean I could be completely destroyed on this because the manga might explain it but I kind of think that maybe like there's atmospheric differences in this setting like I don't know how humans are able to breathe but like okay because you know back in the day we used to have pretty big bugs and they died because the atmosphere changed and that's why humans exist now and if you know that that's why Jurassic couldn't work even if you got the DNA is because the atmosphere is for different so I'm thinking that like the eco disaster that took place a thousand years ago changed like the air pressure and that's why you know you can you sort of gotten 25% of the way there so 75% of the rest of the explanation could just be a hand wave as to why giant stupidly designed planes like that are able to fly right because in real in the real world you can't even get anything like even a hundred times that lumpy to actually take off and so I'm thinking that's also why her tiny little glider can like work so well and maybe also why they can do those crazy 15 foot in the air jump sometimes it doesn't really doesn't quite hold up because I don't know how people can ever breathe without a mask in that case but if so I do think that's pretty genius like world building hand waves to excuse the cool fantasy airships that every fantasy artist wants to do all the time I figured out if I can shift gears a little bit why I don't like the aesthetic that much is because the world looks like the world of avatar looks like Pandora looks like Pandora I kind of agree I think Pandora was probably partly inspired by oh yeah actually no I was actually thinking while watching it James Cameron should cancel all four avatars or just all four avatars equals or just slightly recast and retool some things and then do just the Nazca movie in live action I rather have I okay would you rather have James Cameron because I was actually going to discuss this if there was a live action Nazca because I think it could work James Cameron or nobody or maybe oh uh fucking Peter Jackson Peter Jackson Guillermo del Toro would do a good job on the monster Guillermo del Toro holy fuck get him to fucking do the ohms and then get fucking Peter jack yeah just get all of them just to have all the good directors directed all at once to go back to what I'm saying the scenes are so detailed and like you know like intensely designed that it's hard to parse sometimes and I just feel like I'm looking at a bunch of lines and it's and it's I'm gonna sound like a real asshole but it feels kind of obnoxious and it feels like look at how beautiful the scene is but like it's hard to even like see what's beautiful about it that's kind of how the 80s were in a way like everything was very audacious to the point that there's a there are moments when I'm watching 80s anime where I'll see an image that's so detailed it is on screen for so little time that I just come away thinking why did you spend so long drawing that and only let me look at it for three fucking there wasn't any fucking twitter yet no artist had anything else to do with their time I kind of get it but like were you not watching in full screen I was okay I just was not it's a combination of like it's not that I literally could not parse it it's just that it was a combination of the compression not being very good on kiss anime and also me not caring about the basic block features of it like the basic like colors and just way that it generally looks I thought it looked like Pandora that I wasn't interested enough to pause it I do think if I was if I had watched it on anything less than the 12.7 gigabyte file that I watched it on like yeah the Jesus fuck if the details suffered at all I would definitely feel the hit you know so I feel like it's one of those movies that kind of improves with age as the I kind of like when I watch like something that's super detailed but I can't see all the details and it just makes it feel real to me like that VHS feeling kind of like I don't know if any of you saw the age bomber guy video where he talked about how like horror movies like low budget horror movies really took off in the VHS era because like just the shittiness of the picture made things scarier of course that makes things seem real area yeah and I think that I think that's part of why a lot of those 80s movies were so like ridiculous like that because you got to remember these would have been played on CRT's right unlimited cathode rays blasting not that this movie would have been first played that way but first played in the theater but it would have been like very bright and huge and in your face in the theater and then at home beloved on like these other TV so I think that watching it on a computer screen might be one of the worst ways that this movie could probably be enjoyed you know I'm on Google image search I typed in Nasaka backgrounds and even still seeing them in much better quality than I originally saw them they aren't doing anything for me well can't win every guy you know remember that guy who pops his head up and he says yeah do we have any orders and the guy says shut up and he says yes sir I love that that was actually the one joke yeah and it was very funny yeah that actually that line made me like rewind and then like switch to Japanese audio just because I wanted to hear what that guy sounds like in Japanese I do think the English voice is better he's like really slimy and just nonchalant that character of that like bad guy character so smarmy and like yeah and nonplussed about everything that was happening but I really like the whole okay did you what's the fucking giant metal planes people what's their kingdom called Shinji fuck Tor Mekia Tor Mekia whatever the thing about them that was cool that made okay if this weren't the case the preachiness would have like been taken up a couple notches the Tor Mekia or whatever the fuck they're called are like super just cynical and they're kind of like really level headed the other the other tribe the other fucking kingdom they're the more idealistic ones and they come in at the last minute they're all the self-righteous ones right but like the Tor Mekia are all just like yeah we know we're stomping around hey man it's apocalyptic bro survival of the fittest dog you know and they're represented by their they don't give a fuck because we learn way more about them in the manga and Kusharna kind of comes from basically literally game of thrones like she has like five brothers and sisters and she's like one of the younger ones and they all have been trying to kill each other for like the throne basically forever so like the reason she has all those like fucked up injuries on her body she's Jaime Lannister basically she's basically a Lannister in fact she's a lot like Cersei in general but like without the you know without the age but like she's got that same kind of angry bite and much like Cersei in the manga you do eventually get to see her like lead major battles game of thrones as a manga there actually is a game of thrones manga I have no idea if it's any good but there's a very famous page of Gregor Kilgain like full page saying fuck the king um anyway she comes from the game of thrones universe so like where they are it's very much meant to be like the ultimate capitalist society kind of like the everyone gets everything by their bootstraps like idealistic and then the other one is like the highly religious everyone like forms as a wave and that's why those people understand the omu a lot more because the omu are collectivist as a bug as a species with a literal hive mind so like that's why they're sort of more in tune with the earth whereas the individualistic people again more explored in the manga but it's lightly touched on and I really do like how I kind of feel like everything you need to know about Naska is pretty much set in stone when she has the confrontation on the boat planes in the fucking forest with a wait what was her name the Lannister in Naska because gold girl is just so fucking she's supposed to be the hard head cool headed like one who can out scene everyone else but then Naska just like out scenes her by like pure Jesus of the story power you know and cause what's cool about Naska cause you know she's full tilt like super idealistic strong female protagonist character so it's like oh was she a Mary Sue and as Tom explained to one of his old old old videos from like 2013 being a Mary Sue kind of has more to do with whether or not the character is challenged than it has to do with whether or not the character is like a morally almost perfect person right and so Naska you know just from the first scene it's like okay so she's like pretty and smart and strong and tough and brave and like all the animals love her and all the people love her okay well what's good what's going to happen next oh shit she like tries and fails to save people like three scenes in a row then loses her shit and kills people and now she's like really afraid of herself right so when she fight what's up well I was just going to say my favorite one of my favorite things about it was like most of the time things get worse before they get better when it comes to her doing things even like even right at the beginning when she's like trying to calm down the little cute fox squirrel thing yeah it before before she befriends it like magically it bites her and she gets hurt so it's like that's like what happens well okay I got to get into that cause that is what I think is the core of Naska's character is that moment which is that Naska unflinchingly puts everyone else before herself and she doesn't even consider the idea of trying to get even and that's basically the difference between her and everyone else right including the ohms everyone else feels this need for vengeance this need to sort of like set the stage and be fair and Naska doesn't feel that way and there's not only does she have like she lets Teto bite her because she knows that like as long as he gets it out of his system he'll calm down and we'll be friends and she's just willing to sacrifice that bit of pain to make that happen because she knows that it's the best way to resolve the conflict so you know later on she rescues Kusharna without question doesn't matter that she just killed her father she rescues her from the burning building she holds her own life it's a hostage to the villagers which is probably my favorite scene in the movie is when like the guys are being stubborn and she's like telling them to take the luggage off their plane and then she just pulls off the mask and is like you'll die if you don't put on the mask she's like drop the fucking luggage she's literally saying like I will kill myself if you don't do what I say I mean she probably knew they were immediately gonna do it but it's just this is like her superpower basically and again like it is challenged in the scene where she flipped shit and then somehow was able to out just with all of her fucking ecology knowledge is just magically like stronger like a guy who's like six five six foot five with giant fucking armor right and then just like stabs you know four people and then she's like all right well I've had my arc now now I'm like gonna be serious you know now I'm not now I'm not gonna do that shit anymore so like her arcs basically over at that point in terms of like it's really funny that that scenes portrayed that way in the movie because I saw that the dad died and I didn't remember that happening in volume one so I went to go see how the scene plays out in the manga and the way it is is that Kushana and her people just kind of land off in an open field and they get out and like Nazca's like you guys need to get the fuck out of here like we don't you know we don't want you doing fucking around and they just have like this big night come out and she has like a one-on-one duel with the night and then Yupa stops them the same way he does in the movie but like there is no scene like laying waste to five or six guys that's it yeah there's a couple of like okay that was clearly consolidated awkwardly in translation moments where it's like why is this character doing this thing number one victim of that is why the fuck did they just immediately kill the king of this village they're trying to emotionally corralize their empire what the fuck the most the strangest thing was like they they smashed through a windmill they they start shooting immediately they kill the king they get the tanks and then what's her face golden girl says we come in peace join us yeah so it's not like that at all it's just a problem of like the reason that there was a fight at all in the manga is just that Nazca like doesn't want them there like she's very aggressive that like they they're supposed to have a treaty that they will not be fucked with and but like you know Yupa stops the fighting and then like the idea that Nazca's kind of afraid of herself is more of a subtle character note from that point more so than I think in the movie they just thought well like Nazca needs a more clear and fulfilling arc to propel us like to care about her through this early part of the movie so they have that happen but because it only really gets talked about the one time and there's no like resolution to that arc we don't really I don't think it has that much impact well I am like of the belief that you don't have to have a character then go oh good my character arc is resolved for a character arc just sort of like be resolved it's just sort of like all right not going to keep killing anymore I don't feel like there has to be a scene where like she almost pulls the knife out dum dum dum dum but then she puts it back in dum dum dum dum I don't feel like you always need to have something like that I just feel like it would have been nice for her to be challenged again on that you know I guess later in the movie we do have the moment where she has the gun yeah I yeah I just find that like it's often overdone I find that like it's like it's kind of predictable when it's like oh when they're going to be toasted on it again like you know sometimes you can just drop it you know so here's my headcanon based on this and this is only going to make sense to people who've seen Psycho Pass so I don't know if I'm going to do it so in Psycho Pass there's a concept that the society is run by people who have criminally asymptomatic brains which means that they when they are committing a crime their brain does not like recognize what they're doing the same way that normal people do and therefore the system does not detect them doing criminal activity the way that it would with other people and so when they find a person like that they put their brain into the system and those are the people who run the society I think Nazca would be one of these brains because of the fact that she would happily commit crimes without thinking of them as crimes like she takes the so she's hiding the ohm at the beginning from people like clearly this is not something people think is okay or like when she lets the thing bite her at the start it's like she will put saving others before anything else and because she knows that's right she'll never even if she's breaking the law to do it it would never register with her so I think she would be criminally asymptomatic and her brain would be in the jars which makes sense because she's basically an archetype of a moral so I think that's pretty much what those brains are meant to be true since that's what Makishiva is it's interesting that like talking about the little cute mascot character animal thing that bites the shadow of her finger I really like it ended up being one of the mascot characters or like sidekick pets that I really liked at first because usually they're just really slapped in there they feel like someone else may die if main character doesn't get out of this perilous situation but they often don't add much like the one in fucking the one in fucking boy and the beast the one in fucking boy and the beast is literally just a little like circle blob with eyes that does literally nothing and almost never even shows up it's so fucking lazy but at first I really liked this little raccoon piece of shit because you actually watched the main character earn the right to have the mascot it doesn't just show up and love them for no reason but after that it doesn't really do anything other than initiate the one fan service moment in the whole fucking movie which I thought was pretty good I would say it was it inserts itself into the movie in a moment where like when she's about to leave like to go on her journey it just kind of jumps on her shoulder just like I'm the mascot we're doing this like I'm with you for the rest of the movie now like his name is Teto I think I thought he was absolutely disgusting I hated him he was vile he was vile I just wish he didn't even have an arc his colors made me like physically ill his design was like a digimon it's Pikachu you know what you're right I do think Teto exists primarily to draw young girls into this movie he's not even cute he looks like vulpix or something like girls like feral small fluffy cat like animals regardless of what they are people like that but that's what young girls like so I think that because the way that he's so at the beginning you know there's like a purpose to show this element of Nazca's development but like the moment he jumps on her shoulder and is just with her for the rest of the adventure for no reason it's officially like this is now a Disney marketing mascot character he does absolutely nothing he's just there to like sometimes appear and he can go ugh what did you think? I didn't really think much of him but I do like that the meeting of her when he becomes her friend he's so weirdly proportioned and his like tail is so it's just it's like Nyquil it's Nyquil to my eyes anyway what did you think of Nazca's tits that you got to see for like half a second so that the animal mascot could like get into her shirt I care far less about Nazca's tits than her weird bare ass just shoved my face constantly and not like sexy ways just like it's just there and it's just you know she's wearing pants right those are pants she's wearing wait what? yeah she is wearing skin colored pants but it's just an excuse to draw her ass yeah but like it was funny that I remember watching this on TV with my dad and he was like why is she naked what's going on there and I was like uh oh my dad's learning that if you pay very close attention the skin tone is slightly different from her pants tone but like barely it's a lot more evident on like the covers of the manga but like because they look more white but like Miyazaki when he talked about how he got into making anime he saw like the very first Toei anime film Hakujan and he said that he would go to the theater every week and watch the movie at a time when he didn't have a girlfriend because the main girl was like a girlfriend to him i.e. his waifu so he's a big waifu fan he's made lots of fucking waifus Naska is without question supposed to be a waifu like he wanted to draw her ass in tits because she's a waifu he just wants to get away with it he wants to do it in a classy way where you're not gonna fucking question it and he does this by having the character his characters like don't think of themselves sexually like they're very open with their bodies like if you watch all his movies all his characters will show their underwear continually throughout the movie yeah his fucking masterpiece of fucking like totally classy not fan service at all this is just how it would actually be is fucking kiki flying around on her broom and then just like bloomers constantly like taking up 20% of the fucking frame same goes for my neighbor Totoro the little girl's underwear always on screen Ponyo her underwear's always on screen and he always does it to where like no one fucking calls him out on it like people try to imitate it like okay you know the fucking like short film of like the girl on the fucking chair that bounces around the fundamentals for their logo there's times where like her fucking panties are showing and it like doesn't make sense why her panties are showing like there's one time where she's laying down and for some reason her dress is like all the way up to rebellion it's like why did that get there this seems perverted now but like every Miyazaki movie it's like well you're definitely gonna go go go go go go galboro after this but this feels classy somehow you get away with it the funny thing about it is Isau Takahata does the same thing but with full blown tits in every movie like he shows little girls naked in all those movies I think the reason they do it is that they want the characters to be like totally unguarded completely innocent like you understand everything about them nothing is secret but without it being like weird or perverted so yeah they're really respectful in their characterization and like even though they have like pretty ass faces and nice hair and stuff like from that one opening her jacket scene you can tell that like Naska has like a pretty masculine build like she's got like some like crazy ass shoulders she kind of looks like an old Michelangelo painting if you know what I mean so like it's got it just checks off so many of the feminist requirements you know what I mean and I think that makes it like very palatable I really think he was trying to design like what he saw as like the perfect woman you know like like the attitude look and like you know morality of like what would be the most ideal human being to him which of course would have to be a cute girl because he's an anime guy and that's what I do but like I do think that yeah part of it is just to be very unguarded and one of the very unique things about Naska in particular I'd have to watch all of Miyazaki's movies to determine whether I thought he did this with like Japanese characters as well or if this is because the characters aren't Japanese but he displays just absolutely unguarded joy from his characters there's a scene when Naska meets Yupa where she just runs up and hugs him and spins around and she's fucking smiling like a reckless abandon and it's just like the happiest looking scene in the world and that is so non Japanese and so non anime like I can think of so many scenes in anime where two characters who haven't seen each other in years will like run up to each other and then stand and talk and like not even touch each other not even hug her how it goes all the way down to like character designs face designs I'm thinking about lots of you know but lots of typical face designs lots of more abstract ones or more off-kilter ones and you usually the expressions they excel at is like crying or anger especially you know in a lot of designs but Ghibli faces really excel at like big wide open colon D faces over like any other kind of expression I think yeah he's a he's got a knack for just displaying like I think it's just that so few other media tries to display that like it's almost embarrassing the way that he shows just like you know abject joy and he especially shows it in older characters who are sort of presented as like they they don't see any need to put on airs anymore like if you watch Kiki for instance like the old ladies in that movie are just so jubilant because like they have nothing to guard you know but then when you get to fucking Ponyo the old ladies are like the most like fucking realistic old people have ever seen probably because Miyazaki was able to then use himself as a fucking reference you know the way that they move the way that their heads move it's like wow I have definitely seen this exact 93 year old granny at like a nursing home like exactly this kind of personality I was really surprised no one is people you'll even see that in live action movies people don't like cast correctly for that shit yeah I should mention by the way that I have seen Ponyo recently in theaters in Boston I thought it was legitimately actually 9 out of 10 yeah yeah like okay so did you like a lot of people say that Miyazaki's movies used to be better like and they typically talk about like writing or like imagination I guess are there people who say that his original movies from the 80s looked better I'm I don't know if anyone says that it really depends on who you ask I guess I mean I would say that I like old shit aesthetically so I prefer like anything that's in 4x3 and anything that's watercolor painting I mean this movie is very the animation sells and everything look very shaky there's a lot less detail a lot less cleanliness and that's because of the fact that it was not like a fully formed studio basically like you know Hideo Kiyono worked on this movie is like one of his his first known like animation cuts he animated the god warrior and like that cut like really stands out as like though the animation moment against everything else that is the big fucking animation cut the movie yeah that's the thing like stuff like Ponyo and like Spirited Away and The Wind Rises they all have like shit like it's like back to back like almost no break from how the fuck did you even animate that moments but like not comparing it to today's standards it's mostly just the god warrior part that's like a well that that is an all-time classic moment of and the reason I brought up that Hideo Kiyono drew it is that he apparently took like you just saw an ad in the paper that they needed more animators right took the job so like that's how short like that's how understaffed they must have been that like they didn't have enough animators they were like looking for new people to come work for them who were good enough you know and they happened to net this guy who kind of ones up everyone they actually had you know and then fucks off to go back to Gainax. Yeah I have I have fucking seen that particular god warrior animation like a hundred thousand times before even watching the movie because of how many times we used it in my videos yeah and just it's good yeah I mean I that's my other headcanon for this podcast is that Hideo Kiyono literally is the god warrior. Okay so yeah please explain this headcanon. I just think that the personality of that animation like that god warrior is the same thing as Hideo Kiyono like they're indistinguishable to me like you can tell he drew it when you think about it and oh like do you mean like Ava was the first blast and then the rebuild was the second one. Exactly like I mean first of all the fact that the Ava is obviously somewhat based on the god warrior yeah the Ava is when they get released they have all this like goopy flesh and this it feels like it's like god warriors put on a suit of armor. Aside from the fact that Anno you know animated it he also made the god warrior short film in like 2014 the movie there's a short film about if a god warrior descends on Tokyo and it's just like seven minutes of a god warrior fucking up Tokyo made with miniatures which is what basically made Shin Godzilla possible. Like they made this short to show off that miniatures were still cool and this technology needed to be preserved and that's why Shin Godzilla got made the same crew as brought on but so so like yeah he's clearly into the god warriors and I also think it's interesting that the way the god warriors look and a lot of the look of the ships and stuff in this movie I think is inspired by like Jules Verne kind of fantasy like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea I know probably none of you have read any fucking neither have I read any of like 20s adventure serials or 1800s adventure stories especially when you have like people like wearing suits running around with steampunk guns on airships it feels pretty like pulp or like pre something like that. I mean and that's a lot of what like the world masterpiece theater shows that Miyazaki worked on felt like that you know like Future Boy Kodan the TV series he directed not too long before this and even loop on the third castle of Cagliostro is very much a pulp caper kind of thing so like I really think that like this the the style of the technology and like the weaponry and everything was more based on that and like the ships and stuff whereas like you know the biopunk aesthetic was applied to the environment and then like the the clothing and everything was more based on like ancient cultures on earth that were of the same area the stories kind of supposed to be set so it's like a really weird melting pot and I think that's what makes it so iconic and like I understand when when someone looks at a movie like Ponyo which is a technical marvel vastly beyond this movie in terms of animation but like it is just set in Japan and it's just like about a weird wacky world where fish take over everything so I get why some people would like consider this movie to be like vastly more imagine right like it's conceptually a lot less ambitious but like execution wise a lot greater and I don't know if anything on the execution level of the last like four Miyazaki's with the concept of something like Nazco would even be possible by any studio that will ever be made but like yeah there's there's like the moment in Ponyo where the fucking ocean goddess like swims underneath all the boats would be like the equivalent of like if the giant horde of ohms were all very meticulously intimately animated if you know what I mean right like that's the level that we're talking about there's a real funny moment towards the end of Nazco where an ohm is like walking away in the background while like just everything's kind of settling like the credits are rolling and it's very apparent that it's like seven cells that are just kind of moved one at a time you know yeah like it's just like said that each segment is its own cell and they didn't really animate it so much it's just scoot the cells along you know I thought that was clever. Oh it looks cool I like it and I mean it's a common technique but you know it's just it's it's just funny to think like they probably wouldn't have done that if they did this movie today right yeah yeah like in the beginning of the movie the ohm is just like a basically like a bunch of cardboard pieces that move in and out which I was surprised they weren't animated quite like that for the rest of the movie for the most part but yeah they clearly like even by like spirit of the way levels like they were like nope we have a crazy animal with like 5000 different moving parts we need 5000 guys please. I would say pretty much I would say everything from Princess Monadoke onwards is like another level like basically like and not I mean Totoro is another level up from this like Totoro is already an unbelievably fucking beautiful movie you know it doesn't have that same shaky feel everything feels more completed and like detailed but by the time you get to like Princess Monadoke onwards it's like Ghibli is no longer on the same playing field. I have like a not like a not crazy thing to say like if they made the movie today you you were mentioning the soundtrack and yeah also when they were running away from the giant bug thing I'm a shitter I was like man this this Sega Genesis soundtrack kicks ass and that was this movie is when I finally like decided to agree with you Digi your position on orchestral music because the experience of watching this film was a lot more unique than it would have been if it had a modern soundtrack and it frustrates me to know to know that if they made the movie today it would almost certainly have a 90% orchestral soundtrack because they could afford it now and they only used a MIDI soundtrack back then because they couldn't afford it. It's definitely a shame there was an episode of review when they talked about Escape from New York the red letter media show just watched that movie recently by the way it's here from New York is fucking stellar I still haven't seen it and I really would like to but they were discussing the soundtrack and Jay really loved the soundtrack of the movie which is composed by the director of the movie. Yes, John Carpenter he also did that for Big Trouble in Little China which is one of my favorite movie themes of all time. And Mike was making the argument that he would rather it be scored by like a traditional score because he's just like more of a fan of that and considers it more timeless because he saw it as like this this other soundtrack sounds like cheesy 80s music you know and then he played like a side by side where he like re-scored the scene and of course the 80s music a thousand times better and more fitting because you cannot divorce a movie from the era it's made it's always going to be obvious no matter how hard you try because the technology alone makes it obvious like sound fidelity I mean they don't make anime on cells anymore so like when you're looking at an anime on cells you already understand that it's from a certain time and it feels more right and more complete for it to use music that you know that that was the interpretation of what sci-fi sounds like in that period you know and we understand that watching it back and even outside of you know time periods and differences in technology yeah now that it just seems like every like audio visual media once it has the money to get an orchestra it must get an orchestra it just feels like oh everything we did before was just so undignified and bohemian and shit and I'm like I feel like soundtracks just are not respected in the same way that art and writing is now being respected in this fucking analysis explosion that we live in people think they're respecting it because they're just like oh man all this fucking he became phonium going on right and I'm just like no there's so much more you can do with soundtracks and I feel like people I feel like there's a white perception of OSTs as as just purely being in service of the work as basically a butt monkey to just like add in some flavor to the tone of the scene and to not be part of the art itself and I find that I think you might be right and I totally disagree with that whole thought process for sure right the same thing with video games um like I am I am paying a guy to make music for video games I haven't even really started making yet because I'm like the music of any game I make must be great and I need to take all the time it takes to make good melodies because I know that shit takes forever and I know that most games don't have good music because they just sort of like dump the duty of making the soundtrack toward the end I was actually talking directly with Florian Hemsel a good fan and friend of the show like programmer for the original Binding of Isaac for people who don't you know haven't watched the episodes he was on so a guy with actual industry experience and he told me like why are you talking about soundtracks now why not just make the whole game first and then do the soundtrack and I'm just like no that's why soundtracks aren't good that's why the Binding of Isaac doesn't have a soundtrack anyone remembers it's just why like people people just don't give a shit people just think oh people just think that the orchestra is just the default you know and where you're missing out on so much I'm with you Davoo this is a point that I resonate with thank you I yeah I've always held the the thought that like sound is more important if not it's as important if not more important than visuals when it comes to anything I would say especially for a movie a movies are like movies live and die on pacing most of the time and music is like the beat I think one like vastly unappreciated part of movies is fully work and like sound effects and how those can like change scenes entirely Nostica has great sound effects I love all of the fucking like super cheese like I love all those they sound super old and iconic there is one sound effect that made me giggle because like one of the huge ships like that has like ski legs I don't know how else to describe them like you know it's like a plane that has legs to land on that are like skis and it lands and it sounds like wheels like skirting rubber on pavement even though it's like skis landing on dirt just was really funny a warning joke do not pay attention this will not be interesting I think for the PCP anime movie our soundtrack should be comprised of acapella and also normal boots intros ask sounding chiptune rock end of joke continue podcast I completely agree with that you know the the sound of this movie is definitely great the animation is legendary the shot compositions there's a lot of really iconic looking not just backgrounds great character animation moments but one of the things that stuck out to me as someone who's watched every every frame of painting video a thousand times is the very akira kurosawa sq crowd shots where like they there's one moment where nasca's about to like jump out of the plane after she's been saved by the like the mother of the woman who died at the the start of the movie and like she's about to like jump out the hatch and everyone in the room is looking at her like and she turns back and it's this is really iconic shot of like her framed by like 30 people um it's cool shit and it reminded me of kurosawa even though I haven't seen any of his movies I've just seen the every frame of painting video at least on one occasion I picked up like it even helps you like tell the story I guess probably in every fucking scene but like the one that stood out to me was yeah when she gets abducted by the fucking more fanatical society and she then gets rescued out of her little prison cell by some of the you know just to get every day onlookers who are like yeah we're totally on your side we're gonna bust you out of here and these characters did not have a scene before this and no lines of dialogue but you saw them in the airship reacting to everything and kind of getting a vibe on like what they were feeling and clearly that hinged not just on like the facial expressions of the people looking through those little windows it was also like the framing and like the body language and everything so yeah really fucking important to the story it means you can like get shit done all in one scene and I mean for what it's worth all of those characters would be more fleshed out in the manga like that the people who help her escape there will all be important later in the story but like that's why they would be so detailed and like show up so much throughout the scene I am I want to get this out of my head before I fall asleep this this one observation that the only like new thing that I noticed about the film this is sort of like not related to anything anybody was just saying but it was the thing that Davoo noticed as well that the Valley of the Wind people have big bushy beards and mustaches yes the mustaches are fucking ludicrous they're huge and fat and and the the nations of the other people the men don't have beards they don't have mustaches and just so happens that the Valley of the Wind people live near the forest they know what it is and they know the spores and they know all the stuff so I feel I headcanoned in my brain that they must grow their beards bigger because it's like a natural filter for the spores like as a backer at what point in the movie did you develop a headcanon I think it was just when I realized all of the characters in the Valley of the Wind had beards and the great swordsman sits right next to the king to the king that's what I wrote down the same fucking beard and I'm guessing that Lord Dupa's hairstyle that's weird like you know shaving on both sides but not down the middle probably has something to do with comfortably getting the helmets on and stuff so yeah the beards the mustaches were probably a world building consideration so that was pretty cute yeah I like world another great world building consideration around that part is when when Lord Dupa comes to the village there's like a brief scene where some random woman comes up to him and is like this is like a newborn baby of the village will you give him like a strong name her it was a girl whatever give her a strong name like I thought that scene was really great for establishing like what kind of reputation Dupa has that like this is how people see this guy it's like oh he's in town let me go fucking run by the latest baby and get like the local badass to name him before he can fucks off again you know we never know we never hear the name plot hole not a plot hole I just wanna know is he gonna name it Norsica after the prophecy girl I hear by W Studio Ghibli I also had written down I like that Norsica is one of the is a heroine who hurts people and gets hurt a lot and you don't see a lot of female characters who get like I mean it's more common nowadays cause everyone's trying to make that point but like Norsica not only hurts people very badly which is probably why like Disney would probably have a difficult time like actually marketing her as like a Disney princess even though her and Kushana technically are Disney princesses in a way yeah but uh but yeah she does like literally murder people at the beginning and like you could it's ambiguous whether she killed anybody but like one of the guys on the floor there's like blood down the wall like from his face like she definitely fucked him up and she gets like shot twice there's a lot of blood yeah Sydney also wrote that the incomplete god warrior is a metaphor for the incompleteness of the story which yeah I guess that makes a lot of sense I definitely think cause in the original well not technically original but in the manga the god warriors are built up through the entire story like they do not show up to the very end of volume 7 and so I really think that in the context of the movie they just hadn't earned it like the god warriors showing up what it felt out of left field cause it's like such a massively like a huge power spike you know to happen at this point in the story um so the idea that like the god warrior as a concept is literally not fleshed out in this movie is not fleshed yeah we're just gonna throw them in because like we have to have some indication of it cause it's like the most iconic imagery of the story but like how can we incorporate it in this much smaller version of this epic war tale uh I guess we'll just have like a half a half complete one like fire a beam and then just die and like that's kind of interesting in its own way of like having that be all the weapon amounted to was just like this barely like alive fucking weird creature um incidentally hyper light drifter like the entire fucking aesthetic of that game is just the god warriors like shit the imagery of the dead god warrior is like everywhere in that game yeah that's the kind of that's the kind of uh we know when hippo said Miyazaki movies are very inspirational to any artist that is very much what it's like it's similar to how like I've heard some people say that like a lot of the classical uh compositions a lot of the old symphonies they contain so much shit that like entire genres be spawned from like individual parts fucking canon indeed like the song pocket mouse canon is like basically all of pop music yeah Miyazaki some of those movies can sort of be like that for like artists you know like some rinky dink indie studio it's just like well how much aesthetics do we have let's just take one thing from a Miyazaki movie and make that us and make that the entire game yeah um I have read down that uh I really like that the weapons are all made of ceramics I don't remember if they actually say that in the movie but like yeah that's how you I love that like all the swords are drawn in that way where like everything's kind of a knife everything's very thin and like white yeah wouldn't be surprised if it was just because Miyazaki was like that'd be a really cool like type of weapon not like the dirty gray shit it's like all like clean and shiny it makes like a ting sound it'd be like so fucking cool guys like I'm just gonna like totally like have a reason why they have to always use them and not just regular steel yeah that's another element that I think just harkens to like the genreness of it that like you know it is supposed to be just like a unique 80s fantasy epic you know on some level and like or even borrowing from like those old travel epics and it's like that you have to have your iconic item just like how Frodo has like that sword that you know that can have replicas made of it forever everything in this movie is very well marketed by which I just mean good like yeah the best marketing is just to have the strongest iconography and then you can market it forever because it's super fucking memorable indeed and Ghibli does use that as marketing like they sell products of everything from their movies that fucking little kid singing the la la la la song was I was really annoyed that they never sang it on key at any one point it was always off on one of the notes that song is weird as fuck I undecided how I feel about it like it's a little too cheesy I think like if I feel like it should have been like the kid sings it or whatever but then there's like an orchestral version of it that is not out of tune but they they never do that it's always just the kid yeah that's a little weird I've written down speaking of kids the the little girl at the end of the movie like screams out Hime Nesama that's how she refers to Naska which would translate to like princess big sister right and like none of the versions of the movie I watched like translated it as anything other than just the princess because like there's no comfortable way to translate that in English but I just thought it said a lot about how like Naska is perceived right that even though she's acknowledged as a princess she's also big sis I mean it still came through just in the way that really all in that first scene like it's all about showing you that this is a small village so it has sort of a family vibe to it but she's also princess I also wrote down that she does literally murder herself at the end she like straight up just stands their arms open it gets fucking squat like like knocked thousands of feet through the air by the ohm like ostensibly dead probably did die and then they kind of like brought her back like ash ketchup style yeah I was going to say like they totally ripped off Pokemon the first movie the almost it must have been like what the fuck we'll totally do that scene guys like seriously I when when the guy was the ohm was like bringing her up very very slowly above everything I was expect I wasn't expecting this but I was imagining that he just let her drop and just look to end it did it again it's like playing with her corpse damn and then everyone watching was like oh oh let's go this is fucked up that would be weird and then they eat her so my last note and my biggest complaint about the movie is that it does just kind of end like yeah you blink and it's just over like she saves the valley of the wind and there's just like a few shots of like okay here's everybody else it's over and like it feels again I do feel like the movie left it leaves a lot of unanswered questions and kind of sweeps it onto the rug because that last scene is so long like it feels like a lengthy proper climax and it only really deals with the relevant characters you know like kusharna only sort of steps in to do the god warrior thing and it's kind of like here she did have something to do in the story but again like none of the characters arcs really go anywhere except for naska they just kind of made it a story about saving the valley of the wind because they're needed to be an ending and that scene doesn't even like involve the valley of the wind the manga it's just like an unrelated battle scene that happens to have this moment in it where you know she does sacrifice herself and get you know lifted up by the omu and all that but it's not in service of saving the valley that is just like a circumstance invented so the movie can have an ending that has any emotional connection to naska at all you know yeah yeah i mean i got more resolution than i was actually expecting like about a third of the way into it i'm like okay this movie is setting up so much shit that there's no way it's gonna actually like be i have to put this on screen oh god wait what what's going on in the google doc notes it must have been monchi oh shit i just closed the notes what is this shit i google search naska of the wind ass what the fuck it'll be on screen in the fun i didn't even realize there was a notes document that's it for the first episode of the ghibli cast i guess as you all know this movie is a town ten it's a ghibli movie of course it's good i mean obviously duh my overall review of this movie is i don't really think it is fully functional as a movie but as a moment to moment experience it's enjoyable it's like you just every scene is so complete and you just kind of experience a full reality of a scene and you think like wow that was a neat thing that happened that chase with the giant bug or that aerial battle or that scene of naska doing something heroic that sure was cool and then the movie just kind of ends and you're like well you know like i guess i'll watch the next one yeah i would agree with that that boy character i thought i could swear he was like a love interest but i guess he just doesn't do a single thing i think he's presented more in that way i feel that way about everyone but here i'm not here to be the bad guy and to say that this movie is bad because again i don't think it's bad it's just a matter of i'm not attracted to the aesthetic or anything about the movie whatsoever i don't think that it's bad where's frog fractions 2 where's frog fractions 2 alright well so the next ghibli movie we're going to talk about is going to be castle in the sky don't worry i won't be on that one everyone who's mad in the comments i liked having you on this because i mean i didn't want to be on i didn't want to be on i said i won't be on guys and he was like nah got no muchy come on i just think that it's important to represent like the breadth of ways that people engage with these movies because of the fact that like a lot of people if we made a podcast that was just like me and devu being like here's everything that's amazing about naska then any kid who watches it who doesn't really like the movie and doesn't get why like yeah they're like well i didn't enjoy it like okay everything you guys are saying sounds true but like i still thought the movie was boring and like that's how i felt about this entire podcast i was like yeah i mean okay well my review of the movie is i don't know how many rewatches it could hold up on because i end up really just connecting with this idea of it being this like literalization of environmentalist desires i guess you know and i don't i don't know how long that kind of appeal can last in me like it's not a movie i want to watch again right now i i definitely felt like because i had seen it fairly recently i felt like i was rewatching it too soon watching it again like not to say that i didn't enjoy it but it was like i didn't need to experience this version of nasca again so soon especially when i still haven't re-read the manga which is one of my favorite manga so like i do consider the manga maybe not a 10 out of 10 but close to it it's one of my favorites but again so much of what it gets into is like much bigger broader political intrigue that has time to build i would have liked to have read it before this i mean i didn't want us to talk too much about it because of the fact that it's just the whole in the podcast anybody who watched yeah that too but anybody who was in the podcast who had just seen the movie would have nothing to contribute to that and i think i exhausted talking about it more than i even probably should have in the span of this but anyways the next one's castle in the sky and i'm gonna have a gimmick on this show because of the fact that i had those weird head cannons for nasca if you have weird head cannons for castle in the sky don't try to make up new bullshit just if you happen to have them post them in the comments and maybe they will be read if i think they're interesting or funny if you have like or if you have like an analytical point you don't think i'd bring up just like okay tell me bring up stuff you want me to talk about about castle in the sky that you think is unique and if there's anything i want to say i'll bring it up on the show that's interesting we're just becoming fucking jack films off-shoring have to work to the audience yeah well i'm i historically i'll say this that and i'll lead into the next podcast with this i have seen castle in the sky twice both in very bad circumstances once was like on tv with commercial breaks and the other was like with my ex-girlfriend and neither one of us was paying attention so like i don't like the movie but i'm looking to have that opinion swayed by watching it again if i end up not liking it i'd like for there to be like commenters who could tell me good i remember really liking it so i will be there for that opinion peace watch chibi bakas it's also an anime show me and him are on it i'm not weird i don't say anything i'm hugely interested in every show it's like a brain blast and it's kino have you done more than one of those have you recorded a second one we've done three the second ones come out it's about kari kano and i have an excellent meltdown because i think i didn't realize the anime is bad is like an absolute lie and corruption of the youth and in fact anime is kino and it is perfect and kari kano has made me feel live again after watching 6 out of 10 marvel movies and i watch kari kano when i feel like my heart's beating i belong in the world i'm so glad that young people can catch on to kari kano because that show has literally been underrated for two decades you said there were two scenes near the end that gave you a pulse and nasca was the god warrior scene one of them i said it was it was when nasca gets her butt acid when the town gets pillaged it would have been so appropriate if it had been the god warrior scene because that's also fucking kediakiano doing it that was also cool but also i still didn't care still didn't care alright well alright i have no idea when the castle and sky podcast will actually drop so i encourage the audience to just watch the movie whenever and you'll it won't be so long that you'll have forgotten it unless you really don't like it so yeah that'll be that but i'm about to move so i can't make any guarantees thanks for watching