In what Miyazaki has announced is his last feature, the great animator tells the story Jiro Horikoshi, who designed Japan’s devastating WW2 fighter, the Zero. Visually stunning, the film seems to avoid moral questions implicit in its subject.
Japan’s legendary Studio Ghibli is, of course, best known for the epic animated fantasies of Hayao Miyazaki. Although most of these films focus on young characters with appeal to children, the films themselves are complex and deal with serious, mature themes. Less prominent are a handful of films which have no fantasy elements – in […]
I went to see the new Studio Ghibli release a couple of weeks ago. The Secret World of Arrietty (2010) is based on the Borrowers books by Mary Norton, mostly written in the ’50s. These stories of little people who live in the walls and under the floorboards of houses, “borrowing” unwanted scraps from the […]
