This blog began in 1997 as a single news page called Nucelus. In 2005, during a long wait to move into a new house, I decided to learn some php and MySQL and write my own blogging system, which became inkyBlog and which now powers this, my own Webbledegook blog.
Thank you to my brother, Murray Ewing, for help with some of the more challenging aspects!
But then a second run was announced, so last April (2023) I gritted my teeth (tickets shouldn't be this expensive), booked tickets for March 2024, and, at last, we all went up to the Barbican last week, two days before the end of the second run.
And I'm so glad I did - my wife and I loved it, the children loved it, it was a wonderful production. The staging was incredible, the acting was spot-on, the music was enchanting - it was all the things the film is - funny, heartwarming, moving and uplifting. Huge congratulations to the performers and creative team.
It's a long time since I visited the Barbican - in fact the last time was September 2008 ... on the eve of a hospital visit for an operation I had to have, we went up to see Osamu Tezuki's Bagi, introduced with a talk by the always marvellous Helen McCarthy. There was a splendid exhibition of Tezuka's art as well (prints mostly) which was astonishingly good - all part of the Barbican's Tezuka Season.
Hopefully Totoro will warrant a third run at some point, maybe a touring production, in which case I heartily recommend you get along and see it.
The webstrip version will be on hiatus for this next scene though - it's going to be available only to my Patreon supporters for now. But it's just a little skip and there will be more to come for everyone when I get onto scene 5 - so stay tuned!
The following is an article I wrote on High and Low last October and included in my 50'zine - copies still available.
Akira Kurosawa is my favourite director, but which is his best film? I vacillate between Seven Samurai, Hidden Fortress, Ikiru and High & Low, but High & Low might just edge it. Released in 1963, it is, for me, almost perfect cinema. The story is an adaptation of Ed McBain's King's Ransom (1959), the story of a shoe company executive who at first believes his son has been kidnapped and is willing to lose his hard-won fortune to save him, until he learns that it's his chauffeur's son who has been kidnapped by mistake - and he refuses to pay.
The book and the film part ways in a number of places. Kurosawa takes McBain's interesting moral dilemma, but rather forced set-up, and gives it a humanist spin, making it more exciting, logical, dynamic and overall more satisfying. Where McBain's Doug King refuses to pay and takes fake money to get the boy back, Kurosawa's Kingo Gondo (fantastically portrayed by Toshiro Mifune) finally relents and sacrifices almost everything he has to save another man's child. The roller-coaster of emotions is palpable through a number of starkly memorable scenes - the subdued chauffeur clutching his only child's jumper, Gondo sitting down to work with his old tool bag as the police rise from their seats with dawning respect, the discovery of the pink smoke over the city, and the shocking seediness of Yokohama's ghetto and underbelly.
The first half of the film is entirely set in the high-up house of Gondo, almost like a theatrical production - but the scene setting, composition and tension are masterfully presented. The action cuts suddenly to a speeding express train - a car in the book - after being still for so long (not that we realised) the jolting movement of camera and transport is exhilarating. Then the second half of the film commences - a solid police procedural set against the backdrop of Gondo, the destroyed but now revered man, and Takeuchi, the kidnapper, already in hell and pursued further and further into it. The Japanese title, Tengoku to Jigoku, translates more accurately as Heaven & Hell.
The film included four of Kurosawa's leading men - the unparalleled Mifune as Gondo, Nakadai as the lead investigator, with smaller roles for the great Shimura as the Section Chief, and Fujita, Kurosawa's first star, as the Police manager.
The book has King chase and fight the kidnapper, not to save the boy, but more out of anger at his own near-ruin. In Kurosawa's intense ending, the reflected faces of hero and villain merge, separated by fortune perhaps, but more - the film suggests - by the choices they made, the choice to do good or to do evil. High & Low is cinema storytelling at its finest.
Queen were the first band I became devoted to, discovering them for myself in about 1982 on a flight from Gatwick to Los Angeles (where my Dad lived) via the on-board British Caledonian radio show. Upon my return I saved up some pocket money and bought the recently-released Greatest Hits, playing it back-to-back for hours on end. Then I had the joy of discovering the albums - sometimes copying a tape from a friend, sometimes being able to buy the proper release for myself. I could barely wait for their next album, the first I bought in the week of release - The Works - and I wasn't disappointed.
Towards the end of 1984 a friend invited me to see Queen at Wembley Arena with his family - but a mixture of timidness and thinking the venue was so big I wouldn't actually get to see anything for the expensive ticket price meant I declined (a regret). I had kind of a hard time of it at school in my last couple of years, and one means of escape was plugging into my headphones and listening to Queen as I fell asleep. It forged an intimate connection that I just don't have with other favourite artists.
I can remember when and where I bought most of their albums, and there's a hell of a lot of nostalgia and bits of my life wrapped up in Queen's catalogue. For a while the band became quite uncool (maybe they still are, I'm not up on such things) and I'd sometimes not mention them if asked for favourite bands as I didn't want to have something so personal criticised or ridiculed. I still have a bit of that feeling now they're so widely popular, perhaps even to the extent of being considered a mainstream cliché ... I don't know.
The Montreal show was filmed in November 1981 just after the band's world tour for The Game had ended. In fact they were a little grumpy at having to get everything back together again for the two Canadian shows just so they could be filmed for Saul Swimmer's new MobileVision format, ironically a less successful rival to IMAX.
But watching the show you wouldn't necessarily know it. Perhaps the tempos are little more racing, and Freddie gets a bit short with the audience a couple of times, but the performance is incredibly professional and tight, with one classic song hot on the heels of another, again and again. With nine albums behind them, they had plenty of material to dip into - though there's nothing from Queen II or their soundtrack to the 1980 Flash Gordon movie (two songs from the latter were played but didn't make it into the film). Under Pressure, their brilliant collaboration with David Bowie, was performed and included - the single released just a few weeks previously and the highlight of 1982's otherwise poorly received Hot Space (though I love it).
Apart from a short documentary at Bradford's National Museum of Film and Television many years ago (the home of Europe's first IMAX screen), I'd never experienced a full IMAX film before. It was an immense event, the picture and sound almost overwhelming the senses, and creating a tremendous live-feel performance. Often Freddie Mercury's head filled the screen, his rather magnificent profile almost 40 feet high (it would have been 65 feet if I'd seen it in London!). You could see in detail how hard the entire band worked - Freddie (with his incredible voice at its height) and Roger in particular were consistently energetic, with Brian May playing his Red Special just like the scientist he is, every note seemingly analysed and presented with mathematical clarity - not at the cost of any feeling, it should be said. John Deacon did his thing - underpinning the entire operation with precision, sometimes melodic, sometimes just plain fat and funky.
Considering two out of the four shows at our cinema had been cancelled due to the heating issue, it was a surprisingly small audience - perhaps about 25 people or so? In the row in front of us were four teenage girls, about 14 years old, and a few rows down were a couple who looked about 80 - so quite the age range.
All in all, a fantastic close to a stormy weekend, and while not quite the same as seeing the band in person - no longer possible, of course - it was an incredible show and a superb way to see a concert that I'd gladly do again (once I've saved enough pocket money!).
Mahito is a young boy whose mother is killed in a hospital fire during WWII, after which his father evacuates him to the countryside where he is to live with his father's new wife - his mother's sister, the pregnant Natsuko. In the lush grounds of the old family estate Mahito discovers a mysterious ruined tower, said to have been built by a recent ancestor, and is harried by a grey heron who tells him his mother is alive and can be found.
All this leads to Mahito entering a dream-like world of shifting realities and weird creatures - swarms of aggressive pelicans, the cute, inflating Warawara, the militaristic and culinary parakeets, and the mysterious fire-girl, Lady Himi.
For much of the time the purpose of the characters and the world is unclear, leading to quite a bit of plot disorientation which probably reflects Mahito's state of mind quite well. There are no rules in this fantasy realm, and as soon as you think you've found your feet and direction, the floor falls away and a new scene takes its place.
It's incredibly rich, both visually and in ideas. Sometimes these will recall previous Miyazaki works - the tower with the bath house of Spirited Away, the little paper cut-outs from the same film, the Warawara beings with Princess Mononoke's Kodama spirits, the partnership of Mahito and Kimi with that of Pazu and Sheeta from Castle in the Sky, the depressed, melting Howl with the fake mother apparition, to name a few. But it doesn't rest on past glories, it's a unique, beautiful and very personal piece of work.
The animation, as you'd expect, is masterful. It's the time taken with the little details - the way a character balances before moving, the way a texture reacts to touch, a billowing in the wind. The sounds too add a whole dimension to the film - footsteps on a polished wooden floor, the age-old click of a door handle, the whiz of an arrow. Alongside Joe Haishi's wonderful score, it all builds up to a veritable feast for the senses.
Where does The Boy and the Heron sit alongside Miyazaki's classics? It's hard to tell at the moment and I definitely need to give it another watch to take more in. I immediately enjoyed it more than his previous film, The Wind Rises, but it's hard to dislodge long-time favourites such as Nausicaa, Castle in the Sky, Princess Mononoke, Howl's Moving Castle, Kiki's Delivery Service, etc, even if it's just on grounds of accessibility (I saw it with my two children, 12 and 10, and they enjoyed it but were, I think, somewhat bemused).
Spirited Away remains, for me, Miyazaki's masterpiece, and while Heron doesn't touch that, it has Miyazaki's quality, his heart, his magic, and comfortably sits alongside his other greats, which pretty much every one of his films has been.
This was published back in 1994, and I've been tinkering with the idea of a remastered edition recently, which would include new scans as I currently only have scans of some old A4 photocopies, which are not the best.
It's very different work from the style I've developed since then - I always say I used The Tempest to get rid of all my fiddly little lines! But, while the drawing is less professional, I still have a great fondness for it.
Amongst the art are a few pieces that were never published, like these early character studies (with Ariel as more strongly female). No definite decisions yet, but it's interesting to see the work again after so long.
I knew I had a few somewhere, but had forgotten that it was actually 4 or 5 boxes, right at the back of the garage. They were double-boxed, so are in great condition, despite languishing there for nearly ten years!
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