MindsBase

Well, I was going to let it go at a twitter, but I’m still thinking about it, so now it’s a post.

The kids and I drove for an hour to see the new Miyazaki film, Ponyo. (It didn’t come to my local theater in backwoods, usa.) We are huge fans of Miyazaki films, each with our own fav:

4yo loves Totoro for its lovable furry title characters, the soot spirits and the Nekobasu (the cat-bus.)

7yo loves Princess Mononoke, arguably the most gruesome of Miyazaki’s films, but perhaps the most realistic.

9yo loves Spirited Away, loves No Face and even Yubaba, but especially spider-legged Kumaji and her other allies.

My husband likes Nausicaa best. Not sure why — the insect thing?

And, of course, I love Howl’s Moving Castle. I love Diana Wynne Jones’ book (and its sequels) so that’s part of it, but Miyazaki put his own stamp on an already lovely story. It’s a love story with spark (did they use that as the tag line? They should have!!). Oh, don’t you love Calcifer? In fact, I would say the Door-Mat in MindsBase was somewhat inspired by Calcifer.

Now, I feel rather amiss not even mentioning Castle in the Sky, or even The Cat Returns or Kiki’s Delivery Service, all of which we also own and love.

So, back to Ponyo. I knew, going in, that this would be a younger story, more on the order of Totoro than Mononoke. But I really got my hopes up when the hip 20-something boy at the ticket counter offered “It’s really great!” when I bought the tix.

Here’s what was great about it:

• Watercolor artistry, oy yes.
• Spectacular visuals, especially the oceanic events. Depicting the waves as giant fish — brilliant!
• The magically-enlarged toy boat powered by a candle-fired boiler. My kids want to try to build one of those now.
• The old ladies. One thing I love about Miyazaki films (and Japanese culture in general) is the integration of older people as valued members of society.
• The smaller story of Ponyo and Sosuke is backdropped by the larger world of the mother, the father and the town dealing with the storms — LOVE IT!
• The wonderful details such as the ham radio, the generator and the Morse Code spotlight. My kids eat up this kind of stuff.
• The Sea King Fujimoto. Does he remind you a little of Howl? Great voice choice in Liam Neeson.

Here’s where it fell down for me. I never felt enough attachment to Ponyo or Sosuke. I never felt that Sosuke loved Ponyo the way a boy eventually needs to love a girl. He seemed to love her as a pet, but she didn’t end up as a pet, she ended up as a human girl. I needed to see them have some version of love as boy and girl — a girl who acted a little more like a girl than an alien experiencing the earth for the first time.

I felt like that was the promise, and not just because it’s the route Disney took on the Hans Christian Anderson classic. The opening scenes with Sosuke (at least the English version) spoke much of love — the love Sosuke immediately had for Ponyo and the love (shown by hurt when he didn’t return) Sosuke’s mother had for his father (and vice versa).

As the movie progressed and became more about Ponyo’s transformation (literally and emotionally) what I saw was Ponyo experiencing LIFE. I didn’t see her experiencing LOVE. So, in the end, I was left a little empty with where Ponyo’s story would go from there. Would Sosuke grow tired of Ponyo over the years, or see her as a sister (since all signs pointed to her being raised in his household). Would Ponyo really like being a human better if she wasn’t loved by Sosuke? Would she miss her many sisters and long to return to the sea?

Fortunately, my kids weren’t troubled by these same lingering questions. But they also haven’t begged for us to buy it when it comes out on DVD, which is often the first question after a great in-theater experience.

SO… compared to other Miyazaki films, it was okay. Compared to films like Open Season, it was “really great” — just as the ticket-boy promised.

= 3 nods

Now, go put all the Miyazaki films in your netflix queue!! Most are FIVE NODS!

(P.S. Is queue not the weirdest-spelled word?)

I love reading myths and legends. Wanna know why?

1. I enjoy the similarities between the stories of ancient peoples — in spite of their living in differing societies.

2. Myths are so rich in symbolism!

While the Greek and Roman myths get a lot of airtime, I particularly enjoy other ancient myths such as Asian or American Indian folklore.

This Nisqually Legend is a great one:

Long ago, people ate all the fish and game and so started eating each other. This was wickedness, so the Changer sent a flood to the earth.

Only one woman and one dog survived and repeopled the earth, but those people were primative, walking on four legs and living in holes in the earth. The had no tools or clothes.

Then, a giant bear with hypnotic powers came and started eating everyone.

So the Changer sent a Spirit Man with a face like the sun who also had powers. The Spirit Man modernized the people with techniques for fire and tools and clothing, after he taught them to walk on two legs.

He also told them that there were two powerful spirits, one good, one evil, and the Good Spirit had sent him.

He then went about the task of killing the bear (using seven arrows, symbolic of completeness) and doling out the valuable skin.

Then, Spirit Man made a house with one door and put all the disease and evil deeds inside it, then tasked the head man of a certain family to protect and never open the door. Generations later, only one old man, his wife and his daughter were the guardians. One day while he was away, the man’s daughter peeked inside the door and so let out all the sorrows of the world.

Stories help unite a people. Help them speak a common tongue. It makes you wonder — what are the stories that unite us as a people, as well as tying us together with the rest of humanity, past and present?

And, are we losing these common stories?

Who doesn’t love mazes? Raise your hand?

That’s right. Everyone loves a maze (and universals are always true! Unicursals??) But my favorite maze of all time is a little game that we played on my family’s Tandy computer. That poor Tandy — a KEYBOARD only computer (no mouse, no joystick, no controller of any kind) — had to be unplugged from the TV in order to plug in and play the Atari console. As a result, the more popular Atari got the lions share of the play time.

It’s hard to compete with Pitfall.

But there was one game I would bother changing over for. If I was in a dangerous sort of mood.

Dungeons of Daggorath.

Great name, huh? I re-purposed it (with changed spelling) for a MindsBase prog, actually. Dungeons of Daggorath was one of the first first-person, three-dimensional games. What? you say. Read that again. Since so many modern consoles games are just that (think Halo.)

DoD, as you can see from the screenshot above, had a simple line-drawn design. You simply typed in commands to move around the dungeon, looking for dark creatures to destroy. Three wonderful things about this game:

1. You had one life. Just one. And many creatures would kill you with just ONE hit… so what moves you made mattered. A lot.

2. You had to type on this spongy, sticky keyboard (was it sticky by design or was that my orange juice spills?) and boy, you were bummed if you messed up (see #1.)

3. You had this little heart in the middle of the screen and it made this little thump thump sound which sped up if you walked faster and when you were attacking a creature. If you fainted or died, it raced out of control — thththththththththththhhhhhhddddd!

And one more great thing. It was played in real time. Yes. You had a pine torch to start with, which lasted fifteen minutes. If you didn’t have a replacement torch by then, it dimmed, then darkened — and you were toast. No annoying clocks on the screen… just real consequences for not moving along, buster. Now all those poor people in Rivenshire village will be destroyed by the Evil Wizard.

But the greatest thing about it? They made a PC port of it, which you can download (free)! Enjoy! Oh, and here’s the manual.

There are things I miss.

I miss Ultima III, the one that came on 5 1/4″ floppies. The one where you were just a tiny figure moving about the landscape, talking in the towns and fighting in the woods. I loved saying “join me” to people and delighted when they said they would join my motley crew. I liked it better than Ultima IV because you could travel all night without the darkness swallowing you. I never knew what was lurking in that darkness.

Way back, I remember being frightened of the dark greenish pages and pale green pants with nobody inside them. My imagination created a horror movie-worthy villain out of those pants. I was most alarmed when they began to cry. It only made them more horrible when they shook like that.

I even miss Hunt the Wumpus, a text-only game played on the Wang computer that sat on our dryer in the laundry room. I imagined the Wumpus — big, hairy, many-legged, dripping with yuck, lurking in the semi-darkness of one of the rooms as I played Russian roulette with the doors.

What I’m saying is, I miss imagination, even in its darkest form. But also in its most wondrous! Now, everything is visual, three-dimensional, surround-sound, neon-sign. We’ve lost the subtle shades of emotion that imagination creates.

So, I decided to make my own world for my imagination to play in. It is made up of nothing but the twenty-six western letters and ten numbers. Eventually there may be a few line drawings and a glossy cover illustration, but it’s mainly just a world in my mind.

I used to have more vivid dreams. Perhaps I’m just too tired now to have many of them. Or too grown-up. I actually miss the terror that jerked me from the dream where I’m running from “bad guys” down my dark neighborhood streets. I’m running in slow-motion, of course, screaming at my legs to MOVE, C’MON MOVE!

So I knew that it would be endlessly fun to have my imaginary playground to be a dream. A shared dream.