Anime films I watched
The one that left the deepest impact on me would be 火垂るの墓 (or Grave of the Fireflies). Then Gilco has to come out with this product. Ewww...
Tip: Boing Boing
The rest are all by Hayao Miyazaki - Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle and Princess Mononoke.
Incidentally I watched Spirited Away alone in Japan, and you can imagine me struggling to speak to the box office counter staff - "that I want ONE ticket to this movie" in a hybrid of Japanese and English. I saw the trailer earlier on TV and listened to the soundtrack Itsumo Nando Demo. I liked what I had seen and heard, so when the weekend came around I headed down to the cinema nearest to my company dorm.
7 comments:
You know, I tried watching anime before (at the instigation of friends, naturally), but I couldn't quite grasp what they are about. Or rather, 95% of the story flew over my head and I couldn't understand the motivations of the characters. The graphics are really pretty though.
And my communication with Japanese, unfortunately, is limited to standing at glass displays at restaurants and lots of finger pointing.
Curious, have you formally learned Japanese or you picked up bits when you were in Japan?
I started learning 日本語 in the few months before I left for my internship. And while there, my weeknights were spent in a "community center" kind of language school. My classmates were mainly Filipino maids (really!) and bar girls.
It was really weird. Might write more about this in a later entry.
火垂るの墓 is good, but my fav is still もののけ姫. Great theme song they have too. Can try watching Jap movies too, if you have the time. :)
I tell you, anime only started making sense to me when I visited Japan. Now that I've also been to Kyoto, I think I am finally beginning to understand the Japanese psyche.
Yeah, that'll be interesting. But you know what my interests are.
Just wondering, was the language in the workplace English or Japanese? One of my friends had spent some time at CERN. He says that the language in the workplace is English, but his knowledge of French was extraordinarily helpful to navigate Geneva.
Everyone in the workplace spoke Japanese. Only my supervisor (who had his PhD from a UK university) could speak English comfortably with me in the office/lab.
I got thrown into the deep end, and that is usually how one can pick up the language fast. As a last resort sometimes, I used Chinese (aka kanji) characters to put my thoughts to my co-workers in writing.
Good training.
You may want to try Jin Roh: The Wolf Brigade. It is one of the last few full-length feature animes made on drawings on paper. It is a retelling of the story of Little Red Ridinghood. The music is very important to the enjoyment of the movie, so either watch it on a set up with very good sound system, or lock yourself in your room, put on a pair of headphones, turn off the lights, and watch it on your laptop.
Perfect Blue is another good anime flick, albeit more "adult" and disturbing. Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress is also a good anime movie. It actually shared the 2001 Grand Prize for Animation in Japan with Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away.
BTW, to one of the commentors, "Jap," is not a shortened form for "Japanese," just like "Chink" isn't for "Chinese."
Post a Comment