Animated Discussions: Wolf Children by Mamoru Hosoda

I am not so much of a wolf ... as I am a rabbit. But you know that I love my cartoons and that I love Japanese cartoons particularly.
Yesterday I watched "Wolf Children" -  Mamoru Hosoda's 2012 film release, very reminiscent of the Ghibli tradition of fantasy family tales for all ages.

Its story is about student Hana who falls in love with a mysterious young man she sees at her college lectures. But his dark secret is that he is a werewolf, a race long thought to have died out in Japan. Their love affair continues and he and Hana go on to have two young children: a girl, Yuki (Snow), and a boy, Ame (Rain). Fate forces Hana to lose her lover and soon the intrusions of modern urban life prove too much for Hana and her tiny human-wolf children. Hana moves to a rural community and the film follows the family as the children grow towards adulthood. How can Hana raise them as a human on her own? And how will they live? As wolves or humans?

I enjoyed the film very much but somehow it missed something that I find in the Ghibli classics. It's not so much the visuals, I think, as in the story-telling. Ghibli or rather Miyazaki's characters can be subtly drawn in terms of ambiguity or gender "type". In Hosoda's film it seems that boys are expected to be "tough" wolves and girls to be more human "tender" and perhaps woe betide if they do not conform that easily. Mmmnn! (She do say stroking her old-lady chin thoughtfully.) But it's a great story which involved me and The Old Man easily on a wintry evening.

And I wouldn't mind getting hold of a copy of the the next Hosoda: "The Boy And The Beast".

Greydoll Reads The Women: Angela Carter and Colette

Sleepless nights a month or so back caused me to experiment with short stories as bedtime reading choice. Then too,  I fancied a break from gritty crime and instead to enjoy the company of ... not wolves as such but women.

Spurred on by listening to extracts from a biography of Angela Carter on the radio (The Invention of Angela Carter by Edmund Gordon) I raided my bookshelves and found a copy of her collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories - re-imagined and retold fairy tales including Bluebeard, Red Riding Hood, Beauty and the Beast and Puss in Boots amongst others. Each is a detailed tale spun from imagination, blood, eroticism, love and identity.  Angela Carter was a writer who loved language so much that her pages spangle and glitter with the relish of it and may not be to your taste if your relish is not equal to Carter's. Verdict: dark and toothy myths from female experience and imagination, rich enough for reading again and again. And if that ain't part of the definition of legend then I don't know what is.

But after this powerful dip into alternatives, I opted for another old favourite from my bookshelf - the French writer  Colette with The Rainy Moon, And Other Stories.
This is a collection filled with Colette's sharp observation and description in which, in the main, Colette casts herself as witness to and narrator of stories of love, obsession and relationship all set during the first half of the twentieth century. Her sharp but cool eye is as much a delight as her writing (in this edition translated from the French by Antonia White) and each of these short stories left me with something to think about.

Grey Doll Turns From A Life of Crime...To Magic: Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell

I loved the BBC TV serial adaptation of the novel "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell" by Susanna Clarke which ended last month. The story is a blend of alternate English history and fantasy with perhaps... an element of satire. The production is a terrific blend of script, performances, visual effects, sets and props... which re-creates the book's world beautifully. And I find this a great relief..... because I am a little tired of visuals produced by over-clocking the CGI in a production so that everyone and everything, including the light, appear to have been been fed through a single smoothing filter.

Not so with this one. So...every hat I own is taken off to director Toby Haynes and adapter Peter Harness. Eddie Marsan's "Mr Norrell" is pitch perfect - all timorous distrust, dull wig and little pot belly. Berti Carvel's "Jonathan Strange" is as dashing and Byronic as you could want. (The whole thing seems to take a nod at the distinctions and conflict between the Augustan Alexander Pope's "Norrell" versus the Romantic Lord Byron's "Jonathan Strange"....er... I think). Most of the performances were really strong so I would if I could not stop here with me glowing praise but......

Anyway, I love it all so much that I have downloaded the hours and hours of the spoken word version of the book from Audible and am plunging into its world of Georgian England alternate history and the battle between Theoretical Magicians and Practical Magicians all over again. A wonderful book, wonderfully written... and a long-time in writing (am I surprised?).

Note: Whilst researching Susanna Clarke, I see that she is the partner of (perhaps under-estimated) British sci-fi writer Colin Greenland, quite a few of whose books sit on my shelf from my sci-fi-reader phase. Well. There you go.

Graphic Passions : "Through the Woods" by Emily Carroll

Been reading/looking at... Through The Woods, just published in the UK by Faber & Faber.

It's a first book by Canadian illustrator-comics artist Emily Carroll...(although she has contributed to anthologies in the past) and it's made up of five short horror stories which seem to be being billed as "for children".
Well... in many ways I never do grow up... so I am happy to be horrified by Carroll's black, white, red (with the occasional swish of rotting green) drawings and hand drawn text... which bring us these dark tales from the forest, where something dreadful always abides... it being a place that is an eternal source of fairy tales of the Grimm kind.

It is hard not to gallop through these stories.... OK. I gallop through these stories.... BUT I know that I will pick up the book again and savour the artwork and the lingering thoughts left by these pungent little tales of the Undead, the Other, -  and the Things which are not what they seem.
Here's what The Independent  has to say in a recent batch review.

Animated Discussions: "The Maker" by Zealous Creative

The Maker is an award-winning animated short by Los Angeles based production company Zealous Creative - who produce ads, corporate videos and short films.
Devised as a vehicle for a music score by Paul Halley and using the puppets of Amanda Louise Spayd the end result is a wonderful tale of the excitement...and pain behind being "A Maker".

You can watch an accompanying, fascinating, short that describes the long journey of  "making" of "The Maker" here.

"The Returned" | Sundays | Channel 4

I Be Watching "The Returned" On Sunday Nights...

OK, so only one episode so far.... but I am intrigued with the cool French tone of this sub-titled serial concerning the Dead what have come back. And in true French elegance without rotting flesh, teeth and bits dropped off. Oh-la-la.

Give it a go, why don't you.  "The Returned" Channel 4  Sundays at 21.00 hrs. You can catch up on 4od aussi.

Even The Old Man do give it a go when I assure him there be none of the other  bits above.... bloody stumps, decay, grizzly teeth etc. Things what he do not like.....

Mrs D Ponders Crime: "The Woman Who Wouldn't Die" by Colin Cotterill"

Mrs D is very fond of Colin Cotterill's crime books featuring Dr Siri Paiboun.
Set in 1970s Laos, they feature the elderly Dr Siri who is both National Coroner and a late-onset shaman. As well as crime and resolution the books are witty, satirical and ... dare she say it ... have a supernatural element.

It do make Mrs D remember her librarian days in the "halls of academe" when her first humble post was as an assistant in the South East Asia Department.... long, long ago... This was not a supernatural experience in the main but ... come to think of it ... was prob'ly about the same time the admirable Dr Siri be operating.

You will find a review link to the latest in the series, "The Woman Who Wouldn't Die", over on the Euro Crime Blog.

Travels With My Film Life: "BathTub", Louisiana - Waters Rising

Speakin of climate change...

We do watch "Beasts of The Southern Wild" and so we be in the shanty community of BathTub, Louisiana as the glaciers melt and the waters rise and five-year old  HushPuppy have to learn how to stand on her own two feet and find her own fierceness to survive. A fantasy set in a future world.... though how far in the future?.....rooted in the struggle of a drowning community that has major echoes of Hurricane Katrina. A lot of the film's "stir" is down to the amazing six-year old star in Quvenshane Williams as HushPuppy.

Animated Discussions: David Elwell & Gareth Hughes: Gloam

Re-blogging a post and video from Animated Review. Animated Review: David Elwell & Gareth Hughes: Gloam: In this atmospheric short from David Elwell & Gareth Hughes we see a wonderfully animated CG character wandering a dark forest alone....."



So this is a spur of the moment share.... because..... I did just consider this "dark forest"  thingy in the the 12 year old Judderman ad. And then too Mrs D have just read John Connolly's "The Wrath of Angels" set in Maine and therefore rabbiting on to me about the mythy, supernatural, age-old thing about forests.... Brothers Grimm, Twin Peaks, ya-da-ya-da....

So Animated Review have happened to pick out "Gloam" - a little short from David Elwell and Gareth Hughes about something in the Dark Woods. Have a look-see.

R.I.P. Ray Bradbury 1920-2012

When I be a sprout of a teenage schoolgirl... back there in the 1960s... I did buy myself a copy of Ray Bradbury's "The Day it Rained Forever", a Penguin collection of short stories.
Where would my darker imagination be without Bradbury? My psyche rattled for years with the aftermath of "Something Wicked This way Comes". Midwest America would never be the same.

I think he be such an important influence we never knew it. Bradbury wrote "Fantasy" before it became a byword for dragons, wizards, medievalism and works that stretch into at least eight titles. His imagination be prodigious.

Never mind reading his political opinions... George Dubbya be such a good thing... yada-yada.... It will only disappoint. Well me anyway. Why do so many American sci-fi writers turn out to be such raving right-wingers?

Sigh... Good-bye Ray... and thanks for all the stories.