Travel Bitten

The Great Escape
Have you ever heard of a place where you can go to and forget all your worries and chores? Such a place has been identified before, and rumour knows it by many names: Arcadia, Halcyon, the Hesperides, Haven, Paradise, Eden, El Dorado, East, and also West of the sun and the moons. The truth is, such a place has no name at all, and the splendour of it as it is described accordingly is but a pale shadow of what it is to really experience the place yourself. It is after all, a place where your desires are true and anything can happen, as long as you will it to be so.
However, to describe this place is to impose limits on your store of possibilities, and render it finite. Yet, a complete refusal would mean to deny oneself of a dream of blissful happiness, even if that dream is but a painted picture, a handful of coloured glass, mere effluence of a wholly inadequate nature.

And we realize this only at a point

Where they lapse like a wave breaking on a rock, giving up

Its shape in a gesture which expresses that shape.

-- John Ashberry.

I could sit here all day and look at pretty pictures, rendered all the prettier by some photo editing programme, and yearn to jump into that world in front of me, or I could get myself a plane ticket and see the wonder as it is in reality. A reality that I suspect will be at once grander in scale and yet only half as exciting as the colours on my computer screen

Poster Talk: Ponyo on a Cliff

image source: http://www.ghibliworld.com/news.html

More anime posters! This one is from Studio Ghibli's latest fare, Ponyo on a Cliff, directed by the venerable Miyazaki Hayao of Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi) and Howl's Moving Castle (Hauru no ugoku shiro) fame. Word has it that he is going back to his roots too, and CGI will take a back seat... wait. this sounds familiar... Anyway, it is true that unlike his last 3 works, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away and Howl's, Ponyo will feature more hand-drawn water coloured art.
Anyway, what you see up there is most likely the official movie poster for the film as so far, what's released on the net appear to be colour sketches for the film and unlikely as poster material. The guy in the middle is Suzuki Toshio, the publicity guy and producer for many many Miyazaki films, since Miyazaki has a habit of not talking to the press. Nevertheless, back to the topic.

The Ponyo poster is cute. Er. Actually, when I saw this, I got into a sulky mood since this really doesn't say anything more about the film than what fans I suspect, already know (namely, that it is about a 5 year-old boy who rescues a goldfish princess). Well, actually it does. The target audience seems to be about five years old. Darn. The sulky mood as some might have guessed is that the film really seems too kiddy for me to enjoy, which is sad. The theme song is also highly simplistic, almost like a nursery rhyme. Ungh. I'm almost worrying that this will end up something like Panda! Go Panda! which is beyond kiddy. Even young-at-heart adults would have found that painful to watch.

The poster's candy colours are appealing though. After the muted palettes in Spirited Away and Mononoke-hime, there seems to be a move towards pastels and bright pinks and yellows and blues - Howl's coat was...colourful to say the least, though echoes of the intricately decadent design from Spirited Away lingers in some of the scenes. Here, in Ponyo, I think there will be less of that decadence and rich art and that it'll look looser in design. I think the deep red from Mononoke and Spirited Away will also be taking a step back, if not from most of the film, it will be in the advertising. Besides, red is really too strong a colour when advertising for children.

Am I being subjective?
Yes.

At any rate, I am wondering if I will be giving this film a miss. Haha. Who am I kidding?

Wired on Wireless

Ohhohohoho. I am connected. My laptop is connected. Yay! I spent last night growling furiously about how I had limited connectivity on my laptop... and this morning I went online and had 2 read a bunch of messy forums and finally discovered the network key given by stupid singnet was a wrong one... sheesh.

Happy-esque

If happiness is a measure of wealth, then I am pretty poor.

Poster Talk: The Sky Crawlers

image: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2007-06-20/oshii

Right, this is Mamoru Oshii's latest film which I refered to in an earlier post. The poster has been out for some time and I can't gush enough about it. The design is deceptively simple. Some people naturally would complain that like their first teaser advert of blue sky and fluffy clouds, this poster tells us absolutely nothing about the film. I agree. The poster says very little, and I don't know Japanese, so it's worse, since the taglines are beyond my comprehension too. Nevertheless, allow me to endeavour with gushing.

Firstly, before we get anywhere, a caveat. I am one of those people who are overly fond of blue skies dotted with clouds, so I am defintely approaching this from a biased point of view. If we had that Oz poster, I would assure you that blue skies and a rainbow would have found it's way into the poster somehow. In my defense, it would have fit the theme very much.

Right, so, on to the Sky Crawlers poster. It's nice. The simple design is refreshing. If you park it next to posters that try to squash as many famous faces as humanly possible into the frame, it'll be crowded, looks like a star vehicle (which the film likely is), and more importantly, looks as though it is trying too hard. A poster like this stands out from the rest because of it being opposite - sparse composition, and no stars or characters or various other objects to distract from its clean design. And because minimalist is always tasteful of course.

If you ask me, this poster works for me because it tantalizes. Rather than trying to overwhelm with information, instead, it refuses to say anything, which induces curiosity. Far more can be said by remaining politely poker-faced and inviting speculation. Having said that, I would also add that such a poster attests to several things already. One, it is about aviation. Definitely. Two, it is definitely a wistful sort of film, not in the vein of Ghost in the Shell, which is all cyber punk; this one looks nostalgic, old school. CGI will be taking a backseat here. Three, it's attempting to straddle arty and commercial. In other words, it is tailored for the young movie going crowd. The plot, I suspect, won't be hard to follow at all, and there will be humorous bits.

All guesses of course. I have not watched it yet, and there is only a miserable short trailer out. I wonder if they'll be bringing in this to Singapore, this and Miyazaki's new film... At any rate, a pretty poster, and it says a lot. Really.

Burnt

Add to list of things wanted:
Ability to Mentally cause combustion Of little papery bits of unwelcome nEws