Listen to the Rain

The last night of class and I'm kind of sad about it. I'll be at Mishkan for meditation on Wednesday nights anyway, and I really liked having the chance to learn with everyone. I hope they do more of these.

This class was either going to be about prayer, or about Rabbi Akiva, and the rabbi chose Rabbi Akiva.

( One of the greatest rabbis who ever lived )

Notes from my second week of class:

( Week Two: Suffering )

CGDCT: Cute Girls Doing Cold Things. ❄️

I spent a chunk of today at an Anime Chicago discussion of 宇宙よりも遠い場所 / A Place Further than the Universe, which I watched all this week, much like my marathon of Violet Evergarden last month. I'm bad about that kind of thing.

Yorimoi is a great show, though, and I'm glad I went to the discussion because it pushed me to watch it, since otherwise I wouldn't have heard of it at all. And like every time I do this, took extensive notes that I'm saving for posterity here.

( Sora Yori Mo Tooi Basho )

Last year, I played in mutantur's Call of Cthuhlu game where we ran through The Sense of the Sleight of Hand Man, and while I didn't do full writeups of the sessions, I did take notes and save them. And now I'll leave them here.

( The Sense of the Sleight of Hand Man )

Ghibli's great but I haven't actually seen most of their movies, especially not the older movies that came out before I cared about anime (so, before 2002 or so. I was not raised on DBZ or Sailor Moon). So when I heard that Anime Chicago was doing a group discussion about Porco Rosso, an anime I'd actually heard of, I signed up immediately. I watched the movie two days ago and went to the discussion yesterday.

I even took notes during the movie! ( I take a lot of notes. Spoilers, obviously )
I gave it 7/10, based mostly on how I like Ghibli movies like Spirited Away much more.

The discussion was held in a cafe, so we all gathered around a table and one person gave a quick intro about Miyazaki's mindset when making the movie, like how he had been a communist in his youth and Porco Rosso was originally supposed to be set in Yugoslavia, which Miyazaki admired for taking a variety of different ethnic groups and forming them into a single society. He was sharply disillusioned when Yugoslavia fell apart during production of the movie, so now it takes place in fascist Italy instead. It was also supposed to be a 45-minute short so that JAL could show it on their flights, but that obviously didn't happen.

We also talked about how the movie kind of takes place in a bubble. It's post World War I, so Porco is the cynical veteran who used to fight for glory and honor and the Fatherland only to have all his friends die and his country change so much due to creeping fascism that it now has government agents hunting him. The sky pirates and bounty hunters exist in a liminal space, only possible because countries haven't asserted full control over their airspace yet. I described it as like the late 90s internet in my closing statement.

It's a bit like a farce but with a serious background. The Mamma Aiuto gang is a bunch of buffoons, who fire off a huge amount of ordinance but never kill anyone, and who open the movie by kidnapping a bunch of children who run roughshod all over their plane and treat it like an adventure. Everyone accepts that this is a world with a pig who flies an airplane. But in the background, Gina's third husband died in a war, just like her previous two, and the fascist Italian government is growing more and more powerful. The world of sky pirates and flying pigs, like the cherry blossoms in spring, is transitory.

I hadn't considered that Porco might have died, but I guess the ending is ambiguous to leave that possibility open. I figured it was a happy ending, with the curse broken--Fio says she never sees Porco again, but maybe she sees Marco--but it could be bittersweet. As the floating world (so to speak) fades, Porco fades with it. And I mean, Porco Rosso does take place during the interwar period. How much happy ending is there, for anyone, in the face of that?

I should have mentioned that.

It was fun! I'll definitely go again, once they find another anime I want to watch.

Edit June 29: And the person who hosted this meeting was at stephen_poon's house last night when he had people over to watch Cowboy Bebop: Knocking on Heaven's Door. Fun!