Real Dreams: From Seeds to Trees in Totoro

Before I settle in to think about a specific sequence from the second half of the film—where Mei and Satsuki germinate some seeds they received from the large Totoro—I want to set the stage a bit.  

My Neighbor Totoro is deceptively simple. It has little or no plot; it’s just a series of incidents in the lives of the Kusakabe family: two young girls, their father, and their mother. There may be a trajectory of rising intensity in these incidents—the final one, where Mei is lost—is more intense than any that came before. Much of the dramatic interest is generated by the Totoro and their interaction with the girls. As I’ve already noted, they don’t even appear until almost half an hour into the film, and then Miyazaki introduces them gradually. Once they’ve entered the story, we’re curious about them: Just what ARE these creatures?

And one of the things we’re curious about is whether or not they’re real in the terms set within the movie, which are not the same as the terms by which we judge the characters and events from the outside. From the outside it’s obvious that the Totoro are creatures of Miyazaki’s fancy. The question is whether or not Miyazaki has made them creatures of the girls’ fancy or not.

Granny introduced one reality principle when she explained that children could see soot sprites, but adults could not. Mr. Kusakabe accepted that and had no trouble believing that Satsuki and Mei had indeed seen soot sprites. The same principle seems to apply to the Totoro. The girls can see and interact with them—first Mei, and then Satsuki—but father cannot. Yet he seems to accept their reports at face value.

But what of the audience, what does the audience think? What do we make of Granny’s reality principle? Is that a rock-bottom principle within the film itself or is Granny just a superstitious, or kindly, old lady? And what of the father’s apparent acceptance of that principle? Are the Totoro real, within the terms of the film, or not? For example, when Time Out London named Totoro the best animated film ever made, it said the film was about “two small girls retreating into their imaginations to come to terms with the responsibilities of the real world.” Though it’s difficult to know how hard to push, the obvious implication of that statement is that, no, within the film itself, the Totoro are not real. The girls are only imagining them.

That’s an easy conclusion to reach. It follows from the tacit premise that reality is reality, there’s only one of them, and children are easily mistaken about it. To rest secure in that premise one must overlook Granny’s stated belief, which is easily done, and the father’s apparent acceptance of what the children say. That is also easily done. But that is not all that one must overlook. The film is more subtle than that.

Let’s examine a sequence that starts roughly 55 minutes into the film. Satsuki has written a letter to her mother and we see her mother reading it (while hearing Satsuki narrate):

Follow the Acorns: Revealing Totoro

Camphor Tree

Last evening I decided to take a break from pigs in Miyazaki and look at My Neighbor Totoro. Specifically, I wanted to take a close look at how Miyazaki introduced the Totoro, fantasy creatures that Miyazaki himself devised for this film. Having watched the film several times I knew that he introduced them on the sly, but I wasn’t sure of the details.

So I checked. The details astounded and delighted me. So much so that I couldn’t sit still as I stepped through the DVD from scene to scene and even frame by frame. Every few minutes I had to get up and pace the room a bit as I assimilated more evidence of Miyazaki’s consummate mastery.

The man knows how to make a film!

As you know, the story is set in rural Japan in the 1950s. The story centers on two young girls, Mei and Satsuki, and the Totoro. Along with their father, the girls have moved into a rural house that’s near the sanitarium where their mother is hospitalized. As the story opens the three of them are in a small moving truck traveling the final distance to their new home. They arrive, stop the truck, and start moving in.

About six minutes in – the film is roughly 86 minutes long – Satsuki and Mei notice a huge tree towering over the forest. Their father tells them it’s a camphor tree (that's it, at the head of the post). We’ll see this tree again; it’s a major motif in the film.

About a minute later – 6:41 – Satsuki notices an acorn on the floor in a room in the house. And another. For the next minute or so she and Mei will chase down acorns. Father suggests they’re evidence of squirrels . . . or rats (ewww).

The girls begin to investigate the rear of the house and, upon entering, detect soot sprites, which will have their attention for the next eight minutes or so, to about 16 minutes in. Soot sprites are small fuzzy balls of soot with eyes. There are lots of them, and they seem to have something to do with the acorns. The girls report back to their father, who has been joined by Granny, the old woman who’s been taking are of the house. She’s the one who identifies the little creatures as, yes, soot sprites, and tells the family a bit about them.

We now know that there’s a bit of fantasy in this world, and it's visible to children, but not adults – that’s what Granny said.

Sutan gets a Totoro birthday cake and visits Ghibli Park

On at least one occasion, probably more, Moe (aka Kimono Mom) has mentioned that her fans are familiar with anime. Anime also shows up in the videos here and there, at least on two occasions very prominently, but also a bit here and there. Sutan is fond of Miyazaki’s film, My Neighbor Totoro (so am I).

Go to Ghibli Park to Meet Totoro! | Travel to Japan

Here is an episode where the family visits the new Studio Ghibli Park outside Nagoya. They’re visiting the Grand Warehouse. Here’s how Sam Anderson describes it in today’s New York Times:

The most theme-park-like area of Ghibli Park — the place that you will see all over Instagram — is called Ghibli’s Grand Warehouse. From the outside, it absolutely lives up to that name. It is a big giant warehouse: hulking, boxy, utilitarian. It looks as if it might contain a municipal swimming pool — which, in fact, it once did. (An identical building, right next door, still contains an ice rink.) Now the building is stuffed with Ghibliana: a dense bonanza of references and tableaus and scale-model buildings. It is colorful chaos. There are fountains and staircases and bright mosaics with Ghibli’s signature creatures worked into the patterns. There is a children’s play area featuring Totoro and a giant Cat Bus. There is a grand old-fashioned theater that plays charming short films never released in theaters. (I saw one about a group of preschoolers who imagine their way out onto the open sea, where they lasso a smiling whale.)

The Grand Warehouse’s main draw was an exhibition called, wonderfully, “Exhibition: Becoming Characters in Memorable Ghibli Scenes.” It is a series of life-size tableaus from beloved Studio Ghibli films into which visitors can insert themselves. You can run on top of a giant fish with Ponyo, pose with a robot from “Castle in the Sky,” enter the cluttered clubhouse in “From Up on Poppy Hill” or stand with the hunters from “Princess Mononoke.” Or, the most popular choice, you can sit on the train next to No Face.

They arrive at the Grand Warehouse at 6:09 and see a giant Totoro at 6:46 and enter the Cat Bus at 7:08. They’re out of the park at 9:02, where they meet Moto. A bit later Sutan notes that Totoro didn’t move (9:48). Moe reports on the day over a meal of chicken wings.

Happy 2nd Birthday SUTAN!

This is fun. Moto makes Sutan a Totoro birthday cake. From 5:35 on we see him planning and making a Totoro cake. The design is based on the scene that comes just after this frame:

Totoro is lying on his back at the bottom of a large camphor tree. That’s Mei on his belly. She’ll climb up a bit further and then lie down on Totoro’s belly. At about 5:53 Moto is sculpting what I assume is a marzipan figure of Mei. Starting at 9:35 Moe talks about putting acorns on the floor of the apartment to re-create the scene where Mei follows a path of acorns that eventually leads her to Totoro. At 10:51 Sutan spots the acorns.

World Building: Hayao Miyazaki

This is reprinted from The Valve, 2006. Neither Howl's Moving Castle nor Ponyo had been released at the time and I'd not yet seen The Castle of Cagliostro.

I'm vaguely and generally interested in the ontology, if you will, of fictional worlds. Not ontology in any direct philosophical sense, where one worries about the nature of ultimate reality and the relationship between fictions and the real world. Rather, more in the sense that ontology has come to have in cognitive science and computer science: What kinds of things exist in the world, what are its laws?

Realistic fiction offers an ontology that is (supposed to be) congruent with the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, mind, and society. I supposed I ought to add the caveat “as they are locally understood,” but I wish to bracket that for awhile. Yes, it's a necessary qualification. But I'm in a down and dirty intellectual mood at the moment and so can't yet be bothered with cultural complications.

But not all fiction is realistic. Much fiction contains beings and events that defy various laws of mundane reality. Though it is easy and convenient to think of mundane reality as a baseline condition and other realities as elaborations upon or deviations from such reality, I suspect that any dispassionate survey of fiction in all its forms will lead us to the conclusion that the realistic is but one mode among many, adopted at certain times and places under certain circumstances. Something like that.

To focus this discussion I am going to concentrate on the films of Hayao Miyazaki. And, truth be told, I would be perfectly happy to confine the discussion to those films as I find them exceedingly rich. I started thinking about this problem while asking a very specific question about one of those films, Porco Rosso: Why a pig? Early in my foray into anime I read a paragraph about this film that said that, except for the fact that the protagonist is a pig, it is more realistic than most of Miyazaki's films. By contrast, the line on Spirited Away, which won the 2002 Academic Award for best animated film, is that it is fantasy gone riot. So there you have it, from almost realistic to fantasy squared.

Though I have considered trying to arrange Miyazaki's films on a continuum from Porco Rosso to Spirited Away, I haven't made any serious attempt to do so. What I have done is written a relatively brief paragraph or three about each film and provided a phrase characterizing its ontological style. The descriptions will be more meaningful if you've seen the films, but should be somewhat intelligible even if you haven't. (Summaries and dialogue transcriptions are available on the web.)

Though, as indicated above, I recognize the limitations of treating mundane reality (as recognized in the 19th century European novel) as a baseline, I have, in practice, found it convenient to assume such a baseline. This runs into trouble with the first film I consider, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, which is set in some exotic world. Exotic though it is, the world of that film nonetheless seems to recognize a distinction between the mundane and the extraordinary, which is associated with princess Nausicaä. As a cognitivist, one of the questions that confronts me, then, is: How is it that we recognize such a distinction when the world as a whole is strange?

None of Miyazaki's other films seems to posit such an exotic world. All the rest seem earth-based. What is interesting is that from Nausicaä through Porco Rosso Miyazaki seems to be positing a base world of some type, but then allowing highly focused deviations from, or, if you will, extensions to that base world. But two of his most recent three films - Mononoke, and Spirited, (I do not characterize Howl's Moving Castle as I do not have it at hand, though I saw it when it was in theatrical release) - don't seem to be quite like that.

In Mononoke there doesn't seem to be a focused extension. Conversely, in Spirited the “extension” swamps the film; that alters the dynamic between the baseline reality and the extension.

Ultimately I would like to arrive at some characterization of the relationship between the film's basic ontology and its thematic concerns. This is obvious enough in Nausicaä and Mononoke, where Miyazaki's ecological concerns are well served by worlds in which animals can marshal effective resistance against human encroachment. But this goes a bit beyond my immediate concerns.

Some Animals and Animal/Humans in Miyazaki

In private email Tim Perper suggested that it would be interesting to compare Marco/Porco, pig-man, with the animals and “hybrids” in other Miyazaki films. Interesting, yes. But also exhausting.

Still, I decided to at least map out the “space.” In this post I list each Miyazaki feature, listing them in the order in which he created them. I then make some brief remarks about animals and hybrids in those films. At the end I conclude that Howl and Sophie in Howl’s Moving Castle provides the most interesting comparison with Marco/Porco and Gina/Fio in Porco Rosso. Thematically, Ponyo makes an interesting comparison with Porco Rosso, though that takes a little explaining. I do not even attempt to formulate an overall statement about Miyazaki's use of animals and animal-human hybrids. That's way beyond the scope of these informal notes.

Note: You might want to view this post as a complement to the earlier post in which I sketched out the different worlds in many of Miyazaki’s features.

* * * * *

Castle of the Cagliostro (1979): This is a naturalistic film, albeit one with a great deal of physically implausible action. There is one significant animal in the film, a dog that is the beloved pet of Princess Clarisse and that remembers Lupin. This dog is just a dog.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984): This is a strange world, filled with strange creatures. In particular it is filled with insects that are large, horse-size, to very large, whale-size. The ohmu appear to have telepathic powers and are able to communicate with Nausicaä. While these insects are strange, they are not ambiguous within their world. They are what they are.

The world also has one living Giant Warrior, which seems to be an organic creature constructed by humans as a super-weapon. Again, strange, but within its world, it is not ambiguous.

Castle in the Sky (1986): No animals play a significant role in this film. There are two very large robots which, as such, have been artificially constructed. And there is a mineral, etherium, which has some kind of bond with Sheeta, legitimate successor to the throne of Laputa. As for the few animals, I recall some birds and some ancient fish on Laputa, but that’s it.

My Neighbor Totoro (1988): This film has some very interesting creatures. There are dust gremlins, several totoro, and the cat bus. Though the adults seem to know of such creatures (Granny especially) they are visible only to the two young girls, Mei and Satsuki. They are ambiguous in that it is not clear whether these are simply creatures of the girls’ imagination or whether they are real enough, but simply invisible to adults. As far as I know all of these are creatures that Miyazaki has made up, though the cat bus owes a debt to Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat.

While the movie is named after the Totoro, they are not the protagonists; Mei and Satsuki are. Within their world there is nothing particularly problematic about the Totoro.

Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989): Kiki, the title character, is a witch. She can fly; other witches, such as her mother, apparently have other powers in addition to flight. Kiki has a cat, Gigi, who appears to be able to talk. However, midway through the film Kiki looses her witches powers and can no longer fly. Nor can she understand what Gigi is saying. When Gigi “talks” she, and we, hear only ordinary meowing.

This seems similar to the moment in Porco Rosso where the sleeping Fio awakens to see, not Porco Rosso, but Marco Pagot. And we see him too. This is a ‘deviation’ from the ‘baseline’ state of the movie, which is that everyone in the film sees him as Porco, including us. So, in Kiki, the baseline is that Kiki can understand Gigi, and so can we. When the baseline fails for Kiki, it fails for us.

Adam Savage builds a Totoro costume [What costume are you building for the next major festival?]

Adam Savage is an experienced special effects designer and fabricator who has a YouTube channel where he shows how to build stuff. In this video he is building a Totoro, one of the creatures from Hayao Miyazaki’s film, My Friend Totoro. The video is fascinating. Note several things: 1. He is very experienced in doing this kind of thing. 2. He has a well-equipped shop, lots of tools and materials. 3. He works without a plan, so he has to figure out how to do it. 4. He improvises a lot.

Why am I posting this video? In the first place, how people make things interests me. Beyond that, I’m thinking about a more playful future.

If we’re going to be living in a world where we only have to work 15 hours a week, we need to fill a lot of time. We are going to be spending a lot of time playing, in one way or another, and preparing for play. Why not build costumes?

Of course, Americans have one annual costume festival, Halloween. But for the most part we regard costumes as being for kids, though adults have costume parties as well. This or that community may celebrate a Victorian Christmas, where people get decked out in Victorian ware. And so forth. But only the well-off can afford to have really nice costumes.

Why not a world where everyone has, say, one bespoke costume a year? I’m not imagining that everyone would make their own. Few people have the time to work up the skills Adam Savage has, nor does it make sense for every family to have such a well-equipped shop. But I’d think that in a world arranged for different (more playful) purposes such skills would be more widely distributed in the population and well-equipped community workshops would be common.

* * * * *

Addendum: Multiple Totoros at Comic-con!

Top Posts at New Savanna 19 Mar 23 [& notes about why]

Every once in a while I make a post about what’s going on here at New Savanna, though I tend to include action at my Academia page under that tag as well. Back in August of 2019 I took a look at top posts. Back in August of 2013 I took a look at the all-time most popular posts, as of that time. I gave counts for the top 35 posts.

It's time for another look, though I’m not going to survey the top 35. I have something different in mind.

This shows the action from the beginning, in April 2010, to the present:

Notice that big spike there around 2017. I have no idea what’s going on there. Here’s a short post about it.

This is Blogger’s list of the top ten all-time posts:

The counts are off, moreover, when you take a closer look, those really aren’t the top ten. I’ll look at the in a minute.

But let’s take a look at the list as it stands. The top post is about Ninja Scroll. That’s one of the earliest posts I ever did and it has been the top post as long as I’ve been checking. Five more of the top posts are about animation, either Disney or Miyazaki. While I’ve done many posts featuring photos of irises, that particular post has only one photo. It’s a nice photo, but I do not know why it has proven so popular. I assume the popularity of Joe Rogan post is a function of Rogan’s popularity plus Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris (it’s about a well-known fight scene). The Hilary Hahn post is nice, and I believe benefited from being listed over at Marginal Revolution. Finally, we have that old post about what’s popular here. Why’s it so popular?

This table gives more accurate counts for those posts, along with direct links to them. Thus, whereas the Bogger states had Ninja scroll at 138K, the true figure seems to be 142K. Going to the bottom, we have 3.08K for Hilary Hahn vs. 3.59K. But look at the disparity for Pigs in Spirited Away, 3.67K vs. 14.2K. Something’s messed up. I have no idea what, but I decided to do some looking around.

Top Ten Posts at New Savanna Listed in order according to Blogger’s order and not by “true” count March 19, 2023
Sex, Power, and Purity in Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll [Rape]	142,091
Secrets of Pink Elephants Revealed	94,000
Horikoshi’s Wife: Affective Binding and Grief in The Wind Rises	54,877
Irises	10,082
Two Rings in Fantasia: Nutcracker and Apprentice	9,435
Joe Rogan and Joey Diaz call “Bruce Lee vs. Chuck Norris”	6,338
Disney’s Fantasia as Masterpiece	8,236
What’s Popular and Why (April 2011)	5,961
Pigs in Spirited Away	14,212
Hilary Hahn on daydreaming as a mode of practicing music, of priming yourself to go with the flow in performance	3,590

Since animation is by far the post popular topic, I looked at animation posts. I’ve created tables for Miyazaki posts, Disney posts, and other animation.

Most Popular Miyazaki Posts March 19, 2023
Horikoshi’s Wife: Affective Binding and Grief in The Wind Rises	54,877
Pigs in Spirited Away	14,212
Follow the Acorns: Revealing Totoro	9,326
Miyazaki Notes 2: Castle in the Sky	6,193
Real Dreams: From Seeds to Trees in Totoro	6,876
Miyazaki Notes 2: Castle in the Sky	6,193
Porco Rosso 3: In the Minds of Women	5,626

 

Most Popular Disney Posts March 19, 2023
Secrets of Pink Elephants Revealed	94,000
Two Rings in Fantasia: Nutcracker and Apprentice	9,435
Disney’s Fantasia as Masterpiece	8,236
Domestic Tranquility, NOT: Disney’s Pastoral	6,682
American Mythology in Disney’s Dumbo	5,040
Roustabouts, Trains, Elephants, and Crows	4,373

Other Popular Animation Posts March 19, 2023
Sex, Power, and Purity in Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll [Rape]	142,091
Sakaki Rides a Dolphin	7,256
Samurai Champloo: Graffiti and Baseball in Old Japan	4,745
Porky in Wackyland	4,140
Intimate Enemies: What’s Opera, Doc?	3,739
The Hottest Man in Siam	2,304

I’m particularly pleased that The Hottest Man in Siam has done so well. It’s about a Walter Lantz cartoon, “The Greatest Man in Siam,” which features an amazing dance sequence, two people doing the Lindy to a really hot trumpet solo. The post is mostly screen shots of that dance sequence. It’s hard to find online. The last time I looked I couldn’t find it. But maybe someone’s put it up again.

 

Post 6000 here on New Savanna – My oh my, how time flies!

My first post at New Savanna went up on April 14, 2010. It consisted of a single Mimi & Eunice strip by Nina Paley and was called Pay Up. If you follow the link you’ll find the strip isn’t there; broken link. But I’m pretty sure this is the one:

It looks like I did 188 posts with Mimi & Eunice, mostly up through 2012, which seems to be when Paley stopped doing them. However, I’ve just discovered that she did a series of The Jenndra Identitty Comics in late 2018 which will not please the woke among us. Looks like I’ll have some more Nina Paley to post.

Here’s a tweet, some concept art for Hayao Miyazaki’s Totoro, one of my favorite films by one of my favorite film-maker. I’ve posted quite a bit about him – including extensive analysis of his most recent feature, The Wind Rises.

Hayao Miyazaki's concept art for My Neighbor Totoro pic.twitter.com/zVWuexvgxg

— 41 Strange (@41Strange) July 13, 2019

I’ve been posting tweets since September of 2018.

And here’s a post I did to mark post number 2500: 2500 Posts: What Have I Been Doing at New Savanna?. That went up on July 14, 2014 and included five photos and one diagram. It also included some accounting of what I’d been up to most recently.

I’m pretty sure that, back then I’d intended to do another such post to mark #5000. But that came and went and I didn’t even notice it. It was fortuitous that I picked up on #6000. Will I catch #10,000? Will I even be posting then?

Who knows?

But 6000 posts! Can you believe it? There are 1969 photo posts – I know this because they’re all tagged with “photo” and the analytics gives me a count of how many posts are on a tag. Almost all of the photos are mine, though a very few are in tweets. These posts all have one or more photos in them, some perhaps as many as a dozen or more. Most of them are without commentary. But a few have light commentary, and fewer still have extensive commentary.

I try to vary my choice of photos from day to day. Sometimes the photo or photos for a given day will be in counter point with other posts on that day.

Roughly speaking, the other 4000 posts or so are divided between long-form posts in which I think about various subjects – literature and literary criticism, music, cultural evolution, computers and computing, psychology of various kinds, some autobiographical pieces, and so forth – and posts linking to articles by others. There’s no easy way for me to count the long-form posts. I’d guess there are less than a 1000 of them. Less than 500 or more? Can’t say. But this is where I do much of my thinking, out loud and in public. Some of them are more polished than others, and I use various writing styles as the topic warrants.

The other 3000 to 3500 (or more) posts feature material by others, generally with quotations, often extensive, from the sources. If I’m linking to an academic article I’ll include the abstract and sometimes material from the body of the article. Depending on this or that, I may comment on the linked material, sometimes just a sentence or two, but sometimes at greater length. Let’s say that half of these posts (but I don’t really know the percentage) are on topics I’m actively thinking a posting about and so constitute research. The other half is just things I’m interested in, often current events.

More later.

* * * * *

One other thing. I don't know what I've got here. Sure, I know roughly what I've got, and I've got that ridiculous tag cloud over there to the right. But when I go roaming through the archives I find things I've forgotten about.

Always.

It's like that, no?

Totoro bus stop, for real [sorta']

Japanese grandparents create life-size Totoro with bus stop for their grandkids https://t.co/ZF4leSBEKy vía @mymodernmet pic.twitter.com/Jb0logvk3b

— Carmen (@sinremite) August 19, 2020

Miyazaki: Greatest Living Filmmaker?

I want to step back from my descriptive and analytical consideration of specific sequences and motifs in Miyazaki’s films and confront a question that’s been on my mind as I’ve been doing this work. Fred Turner, poet and scholar, put the question in a post, Who is the Best Film Maker in the World Today? His answer: “That, in my humble opinion, is Hayao Miyazaki. Miyazaki mines all human myths, all genres, even our dreams.”

That’s what I’ve been thinking about. How would you argue that point? Turner’s post is short and provocative. He indicates in general terms his sense of the terms and dimensions of Miyazaki’s achievement. But he doesn’t offer an argument.

And that’s one thing that puzzles me. THE best, I’m thinking, the ONE and ONLY best out of 100s and 1000s of filmmakers? Why not a weaker claim, that he’s a film-maker of the highest order? But still, what would it take to argue that weaker claim? A theory of what art does and why it’s important in human life and culture, surely we need that. And from that we can derive criteria by which to judge art and apply those criteria to Miyazaki.

I doubt that Turner’s done that in arriving at his judgment– and I don’t say that as a criticism. I’d guess that his judgment is an intuitive one. He’s a poet and a scholar and has devoted his life to studying art and to producing it. He puts Miyazaki’s work though his accumulated experience and out it comes, the judgment that Miyazaki’s the best living film-maker.

Still, I want more, I need more. How to get it?

As I thought about the question, even while I reviewed several films – Porco Rosso, Spirited Away, and, most recently, My Neighbor Totoro – I thought about Harold Bloom’s claim that Shakespeare invented our modern sense of the human of personality, and that’s why he’s great. He invented it and subsequent writers elaborated and developed his invention.

Could a similar claim be made for Miyazaki? Of course, we are still very much in Miyazaki’s time, and he in ours. We aren’t in a position to look back on what he did, and one what others did with it. We can only guess at the future.

What’s Popular, and Why 2

The first time I blogged about this topic, back in April of 2011, “Sex, Power, and Purity in Kawajiri's Ninja Scroll” was the most popular post on the blog, with 3,476 page views. It’s still the most popular, only now it has 27,338 hits. “Secrets of Pink Elephants Revealed” is now the second most popular, with 11,428; back then it was third at 1419 hits. With 6589 hits “Two Rings in Fantasia: Nutcracker and Apprentice” is third; it was sixth two years ago (for some reason I didn’t record the number of hits).

The most interesting change is that the second-place post from two years ago, “Naked Flicker Sex Erotic Bodies” at 1,464 hits has now dropped to sixth place, with only 4302 hits. What’s Popular, and Why is in fourth place with 4,814 hits. It didn’t even show in the rankings last time, of course, because it WAS the post. Truth be told, the popularity of that post is one reason I decided to revisit the topic.

These are the only two posts in the top ten that ARE NOT about animation (see list below). Four of the eight animation posts are about Disney features; three are about anime; and the last is about a Warner Brothers cartoon. That more or less tracks my interest levels in animation.

Twenty-three (23) of the top thirty-five (35) posts are about animation and other one uses a Road Runner cartoon to make a point about current affairs. Judging from those numbers you’d almost think that this is an animation blog. To be sure, I’ve written a good many posts about animation – I’ve tagged 148 posts with “animation” – but I’ve put-up over 1900 posts.

Animation Styles: Europe, America, Japan

Michael Sporn has an interesting post comparing animation styles.

The US tradition came directly from the wonderful work done mostly after hours at Disney’s studio in the 30′s. They learned how to time animation for weight, for mood, for expression and for balance... These people all mastered their timing. They knew what they were doing and did it as planned. The animation never does what IT wants to do, but it is controlled by the animator and his (her) timing.

The European style is a very different animal. The timing is flat. It’s usually even paced and moves robotically forward, not always by going in a straight line. The weight is always soft; the emotion is almost nil. The drawings are often beautiful, but there’s no real strength behind that movement.

And then Japan, mostly Miyazaki, but Sporn also mentions Satoshi Kon:

The Japanese market, of course, is very different than the rest, and, thanks to what Miyazaki has been doing and his success in doing it, things are changing radically. Where he once blended in with the Anime animation that was all present, things are now changing to more of an emotional, Western appeal. My Neighbor Totoro started something, that changed wildly when he did Spirited Away and Ponyo. When I saw The Secret World of Arrietty, I knew things had changed completely. There was real character animation on the screen. One character was different from the next, and a lot of it had to do with the movement.

Japanese kindergarten with a Totoro theme

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A post shared by 環境活動家/Climate Activist🇯🇵 (@shiina.co)

Partial translation of the Japanese: 

Introducing solutions to environmental problems → @shiina.co

"Kindergarten walking 30km a day"

In this video, I'm going to show you how to do it.

Today’s world on the front page of the NYTimes: Iran & China, Fired Federal Workers, Digital Telescope, Video Games, Chatbot therapy, Abuse of Women in India, Juneteenth

So, I got up did this and that and then, as I often do, went looking in the NYTimes for something to excerpt for New Savanna. I saw a bunch of stuff. So I decided to post a bunch of quick hits on a variety of items. The idea is to indicate the scope of things by “sampling the space.”

A U.S. Attack on Iran Would Show the Limits of China’s Power

When China helped negotiate a peace deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia in 2023, it hailed the breakthrough as a victory for Chinese diplomacy and a sign that America’s chief geopolitical rival had emerged as a major power broker in the Middle East.

But as President Trump openly ponders deploying American forces to join Israel in attacking Iran, the limits of China’s clout in the region are coming into focus.

China has much to lose from a runaway conflict. Half of the country’s oil imports move in tankers through the Strait of Hormuz on Iran’s southern coast. And Beijing has long counted on Tehran, its closest partner in the region, to push back against American influence.

Seeking Jobs and Purpose, Fired Federal Workers Form New Networks

When Scott Gagnon was fired from his government job earlier this year, he and his laid-off colleagues kept in touch to vent, comfort each other and share job opportunities. It quickly turned into an informal but crucial support group.

And they happened to be uniquely qualified for the task, having worked at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a relatively small agency within the Department of Health and Human Services.

“It was very familiar territory for us to rally around each other, knowing that we’re all going through this trauma, being separated from jobs that we all loved very much,” Mr. Gagnon, 49, the agency’s former New England director, said in an interview.

Their ad hoc network, which meets virtually every couple of weeks, mirrors the way hundreds of laid-off federal employees are dealing with the stress and pain of abruptly losing their livelihoods as part of President Trump and Elon Musk’s slash-and-cut-some-more approach to reshaping the federal work force and government programs.

The Universe’s Darkest Mysteries Are Coming Into Focus

To reach the top of Cerro Pachón, a mountain at the edge of the Atacama Desert in Chile, astronomers take a drive of two hours up a winding, bumpy road. The lush greenery at the mountain’s base slowly gives way to the browns and yellows of the desert. Eventually, telescopes rise in the distance, the sun glinting off their metal domes.

The newest eye on the cosmos is the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which houses the largest digital camera ever built. For the next 10 years, the telescope will take advantage of its station under Chilean skies, some of the darkest on Earth, to conduct an astronomical survey more ambitious than any scientific instrument that came before it.

From that survey, astronomers hope to learn about the birth of our Milky Way galaxy, the mysterious matter comprising much of the cosmos, and how the universe evolved into its current arrangement. Perhaps they will even uncover clues about its fate.

They will also use the telescope to home in on millions of transient objects, “faint things that go bang, explode or move in the night,” said Tony Tyson, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Davis. That includes gorging black holes and collisions of dense, dead stars.

Studio Ghibli’s Majestic Sensibility Is Drawing Imitators

Hayao Miyazaki and his colleagues at Studio Ghibli craft pictures that are so delicately drawn and convincingly textured that it seems as if we should be able to step right into them. Think of the bustling bathhouse of “Spirited Away” or the bucolic Japanese countryside of “My Neighbor Totoro.”

But as viewers, we are never able to actually enter these worlds of tender emotions, whimsical characters and, perhaps above all, vivid locations that set the imagination ablaze. Movies are made from flat 2-D images; they remain tantalizingly out of reach. [...]

Enter video games, which allow players to explore immersive 3-D environments and satisfy many fantasies: the sword-wielding savior, the slayer of fantastical beasts, the fleet-footed time traveler.

The influence of Studio Ghibli — which turned 40 this week — can be seen throughout the industry, notably in recent additions to the Legend of Zelda franchise. Breath of the Wild (2017) and Tears of the Kingdom (2023) each offer pastoral experiences tinged with menace, similar to many Ghibli pictures; their cel-shaded graphics also evoke the studio’s exquisite painterly style. In Tears of the Kingdom, Zelda’s devoted knight Link moves between floating land masses that evoke those in “Castle in the Sky.”

Kids Are in Crisis. Could Chatbot Therapy Help?

Ashland, Ohio, is a small rural city where Akron Children’s Hospital has one of its 46 pediatric clinics. Last winter, I met Kristin Seveigny, the clinic’s mental-health therapist, in her office there. The hospital hired her two years earlier, at a time when the pandemic had exacerbated a nationwide crisis in adolescent mental health. [...] Among adolescents, one in five reports having unmet health care needs.

The situation in Ashland mirrors those trends. The practice conducts 6,000 wellness checkups a year, each lasting 15 to 40 minutes. [...] “In this area, a lot of counseling offices are not taking any patients, or there’s a six-month wait.”

That lack of availability was a big reason that Seveigny and Cunningham agreed to try out an unusual tool: a smartphone chatbot, designed to teach coping skills to adolescents during their wait for an appointment with a therapist. Patients needed a referral to download the app, called Woebot, on their phone. Once they did, it would periodically ask how they were feeling; patients could also start a conversation with it anytime. [...]

Unlike ChatGPT and other popular chatbot models, Woebot was not “generative A.I.,” that is, capable of generating unique responses by consulting the internet; all its messages were preapproved by psychologists to deliver, primarily, a type of treatment known as cognitive behavioral therapy, in which patients learn to identify and reframe negative thoughts. Seveigny and Cunningham couldn’t see what their patients wrote to Woebot, but the data — for instance, the time of day when users logged in and for how long — was stripped of identifying details by a third party and sent to the app’s parent company, Woebot Health, for analysis. [...]

Later:

“Right now, there’s clearly an A.I. arms race to make bigger, smarter A.I. models,” says John Torous, director of the digital-psychiatry division at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “Safety will have to unfortunately catch up.”

This is especially concerning when it comes to therapy chatbots geared toward children, who are among those with the greatest need and — as digital natives — among those for whom app-based therapy is most likely to resonate. One solution has been to hire people to supervise multiple A.I.-led conversations at a time.

Under Pressure, Officials in Western India Move Against Abuse in Sugar Fields

Authorities in western India are taking steps to improve labor conditions for sugar cane cutters after a court ruling and an investigation by The New York Times and The Fuller Project highlighted serious abuses of workers.

Journalists revealed last year that women in the Indian state of Maharashtra were pushed to get unnecessary hysterectomies as a way to keep them working in sweltering sugar fields, unencumbered by menstruation or gynecological ailments. The sugar cane-cutting system also has used child labor, pushes young girls into marriage and locks families into debt bondage.

The sugar industry is overwhelmingly controlled by the state’s political leadership. And major Western brands like Coca-Cola and Pepsico have profited from the system. Government officials, regulators and companies have for years done little or nothing to address these abuses. Politicians say that changing the labor system would cut into sugar profits and make it impossible for factories to compete.

In Harlem, a Juneteenth Celebration Revels in the Rhythms of Jazz

The sound of horns and percussion permeated Harlem, causing neighbors to poke their heads out of windows to listen to the colorful sounds of jazz.

It was Thursday night — Juneteenth — and the sun was shining after a brief downpour. The Big Band Jubilee, an annual live music celebration, had been delayed for a bit by the weather. But now it was in full swing, and musicians and dancers had taken to the streets.

Ava Johnson, 62, rocked to the rhythm of the music next to her sister, Peggy Salano, and a sea of people. Before the event, Mrs. Johnson had stood in the rain under a covering for an hour, anticipating a night of jazz in a historic Manhattan neighborhood.

“This is where it all started,” Mrs. Johnson said. “This is where our ancestors Dizzy, Louis, Ella and all of them, I’m sure, walked through this neighborhood and played their music. So it’s like coming back home to be here and to celebrate our history on this day.”