I programmed a screening of Studio Ghibli in Liverpool and printed a booklet for ticket holders to take home as a souvenir. Here is the essay I wrote for it.
In an interview with film critic Roger Ebert shortly after the release of Spirited Away, Hayao Miyazaki, the movie’s director and the co-founder of Studio Ghibli, explained how “ma” influences his filmmaking. He clapped his hands one, two, three, four times. “The time in between my clapping is ma,” he…
In September 2013, Japan’s most famous animation studio, Studio Ghibli, invited 600 journalists to a press conference in Tokyo. Many thought they were about to learn of a new movie from the studio, or perhaps an upcoming exhibit at the Ghibli museum. However, the journalists were gathered for a rather more somber announcement: Hayao Miyazaki, the studio's founder and the creative genius behind many of its most famous films, was to declare his retirement.
This was not the first time…
I gasped when this stole Sam Campbell’s Cutty Sark For Maritime Greenwich joke.
Jia Zhangke's ambitious triptych not only explores how relationships erode with the passage of time but heritage, culture and traditions too. More words over at my Chinese cinema Substack.
A great movie about why we have a moral responsibility to bully rich nerds.
I was really lucky to see Boro The Caterpillar at the Ghibli Museum when I was traveling Japan last month. It’s a lovely, dialogue-free story of a caterpillar experiencing the world after he hatches from his egg, filled with a perfect balance of nature’s wonders and terrors. Unusually, the sound is created almost exclusively through mouth noises (maybe the sound had not been recorded yet? I couldn’t translate the gentleman who introduced the movie, who told us about its production). It’s quintessential Hayao Miyazaki; a total delight. I'm so happy he’s working again.
