[Weirdelves]

This is how I'd order them:

Mononoke + Spirited Away
Then Totoro is wonderful, but definitely more childish
I guess then I would put Nausicaa, Laputa Castle in the Sky
Porco Rosso, The Cat Returns

and then Kiki's Delivery Service which was a bit shit. I still haven't seen My Neighbours the Yamadas or that one about raccoons or the newest one that came out last year. Also I really didn't like Howl's Moving Castle. Dunno why.

I'm a big Miyazake fan.

[Jordan~]

So far I'd say:

My Neighbour Totoro
Spirited Away + Princess Mononoke
Howl's Moving Castle

I'm watching Nausicaa tomorrow. I really loved Totoro. The image it paints of an animistic world - forests full of benificent spirits, a world of tangible magic - is so beautiful. It makes me feel like we're missing out in lacking anything similar in the west. A quote I read about the backgrounds sums it up quite well: "each tree, hedge and twist in the road [has] an indefinable feeling of warmth that seems ready to spring into sentient life"; as does the idea that Oga was "[updating] the traditional Japanese animist sense of a natural world that is fully, spiritually alive". It was something to do with childhood that I didn't automatically despise, which is a big achievement for a film. And that soundtrack can make me cry. It's so powerfully evocative of the whole aesthetic of the movie.
Without going into too much detail about Spirited Away, was I alone in detecting an enjoyable vein of anti-Americanisation and anti-commercialist sentiment? Regardless, I loved it.
I feel a bit more lukewarmly about Mononoke. Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful film, beautifully animated with a great plot, the ending just left me a bit cold. I'm not a very demanding audience - all I really need is moral catharsis and I'm happy, but when it's lacking I just feel unsatisfied. I was left with a feeling of wondering, "Well, what now? How do things get better?" Without wanting to sound like a pompous orientalist, perhaps I was bringing a pampered western expectation of cathartic healing so ingrained in us by our tradition of Greek plays and Arthurian legends to a culture that doesn't recognise it. There was no clearly defined victory, loss or comeuppance - I had to go and listen to the Totoro soundtrack to get over the amoral nihilism of it all.
Howl's Moving Castle was enjoyable, and helped me recover spiritually somewhat from Mononoke, which I watched just before it. There's nothing like a fairytale with an attractive male lead to chase away the existentialism.

[Wanbli]

We have just about the entire Studio Ghibli collection on DVD
My kids grew up with all of Miyazaki movies since they were toddlers.
We have a 10 year old Totoro stuffed animal and Cat-bus that has been passed down
We have friends who have visited the Ghibli museum in Japan and it is on our list of places to visit
My son had a rabbit he named Ghibli and read the original Diana Wynne Jones "Howl's Moving Castle" novel

I disagree about Kiki's - but then again it is about a real adolescent witch and metaphors on growing up. The city is beautifully designed and the film offers a younger age group a positive female character - it is a good natured tale for an age group that usually gets nasty corporate garbage

My list of faves:
Laputa: Castle in the Sky
My Neighbor Totoro
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
Spirited Away
The Castle of Cagliostro (Lupin the III)
Princess Mononoke
Kiki's Delivery Service
Howl's Moving Castle
Porco Rosso
Ponyo
Pom Poko
The Cat Returns

[Weirdelves]

Is Ponyo any good?

[ursulabear]

ponyo is cute. i liked it. my friend's baby looks just like her!

[Wanbli]

Ponyo is beautifully designed and fantastic characters.
It is a distillation of Hans Christan Anderson's "Little Mermaid"- which speaks to the "cost of being human" without dwelling on the gruesome aspects
An amazing movie for a 10 year old.

[Ceres]

I visited the Ghibli museum in Tokyo, it was quite fun
My favourite is Totoro. I'm more into the "childish" Ghibli movies, I guess.

[polliwog]

Peter Jennings Reporting: UFOs - Seeing is Believing

[Weirdelves]

http://documentaryheaven.com/fractals-t ... -infinity/

This documentary literally just changed my life. It's the most interesting thing I've ever seen.

[Jordan~]

I'm watching it, but oh dear, the list of popular documentaries...
* Apollo Zero
* The Perfect Vagina
* Louis Theroux: Most Hated Family in America
* Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
* Cannabis - The Evil Weed
* Collapse
* New Design
* We Are The Aliens
* Gasland
* I, Psychopath
...It's like a dark glimpse into the future of the Discovery Channel, except 75% of them aren't about sharks.

Edit: It started out a bit slow, but it got pretty cool towards the end. The stuff about fractal image compression was cool, I kind of understand how that works now.
I'm very sceptical about tying "free will" or the Jungian collective unconscious to fractal geometry. The perennial problem of the equation of chance with freedom is at play: if one makes all of one's decisions by rolling a dice or flipping a coin, one is not choosing freely; equally if the universe permits this kind of random decision to occur, we're not truly free, merely acting randomly, which is no more a form of free will than the 'choice' of the dice to land on 6, or the 'choice' of the electron to have an indeterminable position or momentum.
If there are fractals in the brain, it's because growing fractally is a very efficient evolutionary strategy: if our genetic instructions consist of rules for the construction of plans rather than complete plans, we can afford far greater complexity with far fewer nucleotides. It would be surprising if the fractal nature of our brains left no shadow on our awareness. Given that all animal brains operate in basically the same way, describing the omnipresence of that shadow in animal life as a "collective unsconscious" is slightly ostentatious. The term "biological universal" would be more apt. To mystify it is akin to ignoring the rationalistic explanation, much like ascribing cultural universals in humans to some supernatural force.

[ursulabear]

one great documentary is called "the cruise". you'd like it, jordan. another one of my favorites is called 'waking life" its a philosophical, rotoscoped pseudo-documentary about lucid dreams. directed by the guy who did 'dazed 7 confused" i recommended both to you, jordan.

[Jessie]

Shaun of the Dead

[polliwog]

Skyline

[Weirdelves]

[Jordan~]

Well, I don't believe in free will in the first place either, and I'm with you on the illusion of it being just as important. I was more just objecting to the rather perplexing use of fractal geometry to apologise for metaphysical libertarianism. Perhaps "mystifying" isn't a fair word to use - what I meant was more that the collective unconscious is something more esoteric than the idea that, say, all extant animals share certain attributes due to their common ancestry. As to the idea of the collective unconscious itself, I can find no flaw in the idea of an inherited psyche, it's just not apparent to me how it's a valuable distinction from the Freudian id, if we consider the id's origins. But then, I've always been a Freud man, much as I hate the way his work's been used.

[polliwog]

I love it when you talk like that. Psychobabble is one of my favorite songs.

[ursulabear]

I am watching Star Trek: the Next generation. data is my secret husband.

[polliwog]

It will be interesting to see what your children are like.

[Weirdelves]

I just got high with my friends and watched the first 4 episodes straight of the show Misfits. None of us could stop watching and it's 3am now. Sooooo good.

[ursulabear]