In the land of make believe!

Spirited Away (2001)

Written and Directed: Hayao Miyazaki

All through our childhood, my sisters and I had been watching manga without manga was referred to as so. It was then just Japanese cartoon, with characters having big round eyes, cute demeanour and screechy loud voices.

Later, Japanese cartoons developed into separate entities grew wings and started telling more mature stories and themes. The written graphic form became known as manga, and animated forms that appear in games and films are known as anime.

I was recently introduced to Japan's eminent cult figure in the field of animation and direction, Hayao Miyazaki. His film ‘Spirited Away’ has been hailed as Japan's highest-grossing movie for 29 years. It also won the Oscar at the 2022 Best Animated Feature Film. BBC listed it in its 100 greatest films of the 21st century.

Partnered with Disney, this film infiltrated the four corners of the globe. Thanks to the vibrant colours, creative storytelling, and interesting characters, it looks like Alice in Wonderland on steroids. A lost girl, Chihiro, is in a weird world, only to be helped by many characters with Shinto-Buddhist backgrounds around her. She ends up saving the day and learning many valuable life lessons.

One of the reasons to live is to immerse yourself in a land of make-believe.

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Just to de-stress!

Bullet Train (2022)
Director: David Leitch

This movie gives a feeling of watching 'Kill Bill' or 'Pulp Fiction'. There is a Quentin Tarantino feel to it with much chaos and twists in its storyline. There are mindless fighting and meaningless killings. The storyline is so convoluted that it makes a Bollywood offering an Aesop fable with a straightforward storyline. Despite the violence and gore, the dialogue paints a picture of a dark comedy. And the scriptwriter must have been trying very hard to sound philosophical by inserting Eastern philosophy here and there. Coincidentally, the film is an adaptation of a Japanese story.

The story revolves around the high-octane somersaulting and shooting action upon a speeding bullet train travelling between Tokyo and Kyoto. A self-proclaimed harbinger of bad-lucked assassin codenamed 'Lady Bug' embarks on the train with a mission to seize a particular suitcase. He is merely filling in for another hitman who is hit with a bug. Unknowest to him, a gang leader and his henchmen are to get the absent hitman. Now, the gang leader's daughter also wants to kill her father. To lure another old enemy of his father aboard the train, she drops his child from a building.

This confusing plot forms the background of a CGI-filled meaningless entertainment that would excite the feeble-minded. Along the way, to lure intellectual discourse, they threw in hints of chaos theory, the randomness of life and the possibility of how the flutter of a butterfly can start a tsunami!

The makers of the movie have been accused of whitewashing the whole story. Even though the setting can be anywhere, not necessarily in Japan, and the characters just carry codenames, the filmmakers cannot be made to go off the hook. They stereotype Japanese service workers as docile, unresponsive people who are ready to take a proper bow in salutation even though there is total destruction and mayhem around them. And that is supposed to be light entertainment.

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Dream on!

Paprika (Anime, Japan; 2006)


Since the time of Aristotle, people have been fascinated with dreams. The ability of the soul to perceive without any sensory input had drawn many theories in trying to explain this phenomenon. In an attempt to justify its existence, some philosophers had invoked the work of the Divine. It had been many a time, in various cultures, been the way the Divine Forces used to communicate with mortals. Some had taken the subliminal message or even wild dreams to heart. They would take it as a test of their faith!

Sigmund Freud placed a lot of emphasis on dreams. He often rationalised dream as an expression of the inner suppressed emotions. In modern times, it tends to be looked upon as the a rebooting of the system before it starts operating again the following day.

Anime, animation movies from Japan, typically from manga comics have been gaining popularity beyond the shores of its production. What started off as simple cartoon stories have now evolved into many genres including the adult type. Paprika can be described as a science fiction with a philosophical twist. It kind of blurs the boundary between reality and dream, just like the movie, Inception.

An experimental device used to analyse dreams which is proposed to treat mental illness goes missing. There is an urgent need to retrieve it before it gets into the wrong hands.

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