Zootopia (2016) or How Sad Happy Endings Really are

And, yes, this is the last film I've watched. It was couple of days ago in a poor neighbourhood in Thessaloniki, Greece. There's a lovely open air cinema over there, named after one of our 'national actresses', Tzeni Karezi (strangely enough, we have two of those, the first one being Aliki Vougiouklaki, you might have never heard them if you're not somehow related to Greece, but it's ok). Back to the screening: it had free entrance and it has sold out, meaning every single chair was taken and too many kids and families were sitting on the floor or on any random chair-shaped corner. I did the same and it was fun!

Is the Man Who is Tall Happy? (2013)

"Could anything be more brain tingling than the man behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep animating his afternoon spent with the great Noam Chomsky?" This is how the Penguin Think Smarter Newsletter presents the experimental documentary by Michel Gondry, but let me tell you one thing: experiments are always interesting, but not  always successful. 

Is the Man who is Tall Happy? (2013), the film which screens imminently in Edinburgh Film Festival, has already -lucky us- screened in Luxembourg Film Festival end of February; it was the only one that made me leave my cosy room and make my way to the cinema which was, after all, less than fifteen-minutes walk away. I cannot say I didn't enjoy seeing it. An extremely self-conscious conversation (and, yes, I love that) between Gondry, who was commenting between bits of dialogue on his French accent which was apparently hard to get, the phrasing of a question which was not clearly understood by the other party and so on so forth, and one of the greatest thinkers of our times, Noam Chomsky. 

Hand-made animation, funny and colourful intertwined with philosophical concepts on their way to their simplified version (sic). You know what? As much as I enjoyed watching this delirium of words and images, I couldn't help coming out of the cinema feeling confused to a certain extent. Why? Because it is humanly impossible to grasp 100% of what is going on on screen. You will get most of it, if you manage to stay focused -that becomes harder at times, exactly because of the "distracting" animation, but you won't have the feeling you fully "got it", except if you've studied Chomsky beforehand, I guess. Image and words are fighting one against the other for the viewers' attention, I'm afraid, and I'm not sure who wins in the end.

The Wind Rises (2013) as an ode to mortality

It was in France quite some time ago that I was acquainted with anime, manga culture and boys who loved playing video games. Interesting boys, in general, sometimes even exciting. At a later point,  when I realised that they were more boys than men, I felt disappointed. C'est la vie, I guess.

Spirited Away (2001), Howl's Moving Castle (2004) and that anime version of Metropolis  (2001) made my heart beat fast back then. Same goes for Akira (1988) -how did it slip my mind that as a child I was given a View-Master and an Astro Boy reel; that was the humble beginnings of my love for that which does not exist. It was Candy Candy who taught me romance, after all.

French boys are all around these days, but they grew up. They even learnt how to hide their liking for anime and video games. And Hayao Miyazaki created this other imaginary boy, Jiro who is dreaming of airplanes and seems to be very much like Peter Pans who don't want to grow up. The character Jiro Horikoshi is loosely based on the life of an engineer of the same name who designed Japanese fighter planes during the World War II. 

Jiro in The Wind Rises (2013) -title borrowed from a poem by Paul Verlaine which goes: "Le vent se lève! il faut tenter de vivre!" (The wind is rising. We have to try to live!) - is dreaming of flying planes as a child and finds peace and solitude on his home's rooftop, until he finds out that he's nearsighted. Amending his dream, he wants to design those "beautiful dreams waiting to be swallowed by the sky”, and as a student he daydreams when eating mackerel of the curves of his future planes, similar to those of fishbones. He succeeds in working for a company making war planes, and in fact his success gives a controversial feeling overall; in essence he is helping people kill and getting killed, but I guess fulfilling one's dream is the pointer here and not the unpleasant details. Too much analysis spoils the whole thing, as it's hard to believe that the boyish, sweet character that Jiro is in the film could actually design the  Mitsubishi Zero airplane used by Japan for kamikaze operations.

Images & audiences I miss: children movies

I take it that children are not bound to be unhappy; they've plenty of time to learn that life is full of hardship and effort. So, they are given the opportunity to connect with many a pleasant tales, bed-time stories, films and theatre plays. Hostility and failure is sometimes a major element in entertainment material for innocent souls, but one thing is quintessential: one will always win in the end. Happy ending rules in children's films and we wouldn't like it any other way.