Ghibli miscellaney

[steve_dash_o]

The cheap, extra DVD player I bought from Sarah is now officially hacked to Region Free! Yay! My Ocean Waves DVD plays! I can't wait to watch it. ^_^ Oh, and the other day I downloaded a copy of the music video Miyazaki animated, "On Your Mark". It's incredibly beautifully done. It doesn't make all that much sense in isolation, but "On Your Mark" was done shortly after Miyazaki finally finished the manga version of Nausicaa, which took him well over ten years because he kept taking breaks to work on movies, and also because he decided partway through the story that he was saying all the wrong things, and had to change directions. The video features two men rescuing and releasing a young girl angel who just happens to look very much like Nausicaa herself. It's seen by some fans sort of as Miyazaki's "goodbye" to her, and as Nausicaa (the manga and the character) is so important to me, that makes the video touching for me as well. There's some stuff about it in a transcript from a class that was taught at UT Dallas in 1999. The class was about how different writers and thinkers saw "the natural world", and one of the featured works was Nausicaa. The previous two transcripts are longer (the first one quite long), and are really, really good reading if you care at all about Miyazaki's work.

In other Studio Ghibli news, nausicaa.net reports that the Feb 22 release date for the next wave of DVDs has been dropped again. Could be another several months. (Some people have guessed that Disney wants to release the discs closer to the theatrical release of Howl's Moving Castle, which is at least plausible. The Japanese release is November 20, and I guess it'll probably make it to the US next fall. It's so far away... ;_;