Wednesday, October 17, 2001

“Most people would say that entertainment must be enjoyable outside the purview of critical analysis, and yet entertainment, like everything else, is contingent upon an enormous amount of interdependent theories that together create a logical system which must be adhered to if anything worthwhile is to be produced.

“To make it so that a film is enjoyable without overt theorizing, the initial problems of motivation and identification — such as sympathizing with the villain or the hero’s hesitance at firing a gun — must be solved, or the ensuing action just becomes pointless.”

— Hayao Miyazaki (creator of My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, etc.), 1989, translated by Atsushi Fukumoto, Sheng-Te Tsao, and Steven Feldman. Entire interview.

I’ve been reading quite a bit of Miyazaki‘s essays and interviews lately. He has a lot of interesting opinions about animation, anime, and children’s stories.

Meanwhile, I’m doing…OK. Still trying to fight my porn addiction, which has wrapped its tentacles tight around my brain. I’m improving, slowly, but I have to fight odd battles.

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