#mushi hime

[mofffun]

23/7 Kingohger Summer Stage REPO

programme:

11:00 Hero show

11:30 Cast Talk

11:40 Waking the King + OP live

~shake hands with heroes for purchase >2000~

Full cast.

I got here at 10:40am so the queue was already rather long. the paying tickes is numbered up to 1000 but you can watch the event for free as well since it's outdoors. Naturally I was standing further back (even though I didn't queue up yesterday.) Kinda feels like there's more people? but that'd be weird because there were geats-only fans yesterday too. maybe it's the sunday.

Hero show

part 1:

So the first part is Hero Show, but it's more just an interactive session. Act 1 has Red Yellow Blue fighting two foot soliders. Gira got a solo fight and then it's the Yan Hime combo fight. Shipper lens ON. Himeno did a cart wheel holding onto Yanma and Yanma princess carried Himeno for a spin attack while she ojousana-laugh! Yanma complimented on Himeno ("Yarujanika" "arigatou")

part 2:

Then the MOTW aka Bug Host shows up and makes small talk with the audience. He's a lot of fun, questioned if we really like Kingohgers so much and hate the Bugnaroks so bad, then asks again and says bugnarok fans can get presents. He also keeps reminding the crowd to beware of heat stroke and drink water. Even commented that "looks like there're a lot of idling adults at the back" haha.

A boy and a girl, both 4 years old are invtied to play musical chair on stage. The girl cried at the first round when the foot soldier took her seat. So the host pulled the boy aside and give him the "men should be kind to girls talk" while the foot soldier plays peekaboo to cheer her up. But they both sat on the seat in second round anyway. However the gift bag they won is 01 and Kiramei cutlery and stationery 😂 According to host, those are for "leftover stock for adult reasons"

Part 3:

Dango Mushi Jim is the MOTW.

the whole team appears on the stage and did the Kingohger Spell from ep10. Maybe it's just that line but Himeno's audio here sounds like it's cut from the ep. Rita also did the "taskforce" speech so it connects to Gira calling "Ohsama Sentai" and the others responding "Kingohger". Kaguragi gets a solo fight with his ep4 speech.

What I love about Papillon's suit action is they can't always wait for the enemy to come at them in order to fit the "immovable" image. they don't rotate in himeno's sense but they rotate to always face the enemy (himeno's earth versus rita's moon if you will) and always keeps the enemy at sword's length. Both today and G-Rosso's Rita-sama is good at fighting with just one hand and they'd put their other hand holding the cape at the back of their waist and that is so good. love that move where they hit the MOTW in the face with the pommel of the sword.

Blue and Yellow reappears and THE FIRST THING, Himeno runs to ask if Rita is ok. <3 They brought Rita offstage so it's Gira's solo.

the team gathers again and INFERNO plays. Gira ask everyone to do the finisher together but Yanma kicks him. Then they do the finisher together.

OP DANCE!

This Yanma is the tallest and has the most movement during the dance. Rita's steps the bottom limit of what is consider a step and their legs would not move fro the arm shakes.

Gira in suit is so cute he saw a kid dressed as Gira and excitedly waved and pointed to himself with Rita. who simply nodded. this went on three times.

Rita's wave is your old-man-government-leader wave. 90 degrees elbows/shoulder, palm 90 degrees turn between facing themself and their left.

Cast Talk

matsumoto hiroya hosting.

to be called "Sukapon Tanuki" to my face... shiawase!

声小さい！　*crowd cheers* *Yanma turns his back to the crowd but gives thumbs up high in the air*

Kaku introduced himself in Jeramie's voice "Kaguragi Dybowski, lordly king of this country Toufu... tosa."

Jeramie has to repeat now (name/a storytellier behind the times tosa.) so he follows up with the opening narration, than Kagu immediately interrupts him with a "too long!" to which Masahi: "Otto"

Part 1: Movie

Q1: memories about filming

Gira: performing with Sakurai-san (Debonica). the cast knew her from reputation and especially Himeno is jealous-in-a-good-sense about Taisei getting to work with her a lot.

Q2: with Hinagata Akiko (Iroki)

Kaku: (pretty much the same answer as yesterday) She is an approchable person so it seems she's quite different from the character setting before filming starts, but once on the job, there's an evil ruler aura about her.

Q3: RBP with Nakamura Shido (Rainoir)

Taisei said "Aoto and Yuzuyan"

something about his professionalism

one thing that made Aoto very happy is Nakamura's son's fave is Tonbo Ohger.

Erica was great at fanservice! She's always looking off stage and waved and made finger hearts at the crowd. I think as a model she's just really good at locating where the camera is.

Erica spoke of the assets and CG specifically made for the movie that impressed her, then asked the audience to raise their hands if they'll see it in theaters. She interacted with the audience like this again towards the end.

Yuzuki talked about seeing a new side of Rita again (pretty much same as bandai ad). It was fresh for her to film something different than TV's Rita. (I wonder if one'd use 'fresh' to describe it if they're just being their usual self but in front of the camera?)

Yuzuki is not very good at answering questions on the spot so sometimes either she says a lot of filler words or her greeting and answers to promotional questions that have been asked a thousand times sound rehearsed.

Yzy and So are truly close friends. they'd chat off-mic and at one point So pointed at Rita fans in the crowd for Yuzuki.

Part 2: Questions from cast members

Q1: "これからも一緒に頑張ろう　碧斗❤"　(Let's keep on working hard together. from Aoto❤) Host reads out the heart too.

Kagu tsukkomi said hey that's not a question, let's hear some questions

Q2: To Kaguragi, why muscles? from Jeramie.

Masahi: 気になる　I really want to know that

So: (Jeramie voice) Do you want to come to the world of muscles too? Muscles are good for you ;D　筋肉はいいよ

Q3: みんなへ　好きな季節は？　りたっち To everyone, what is your favourite season? Rittachi

(Yuzuki's last ig/cl live mentioned nicknames people called her. Yuzuchi was on the list but at the very last because only close friends from home would call her that. new people she met after entering the proffesion don't usually use it. those that called her Yuzuchi called her that day one they met. IIRC)

So: Summer. Though it's hot, what a nice time to hear sounds of life like cicada.

Host: suddenly became a serious/adult-like conversation?

Yzy:(host made fun of Rittachi) for Rittachi of course it's winter.

Taisei: Girachi is winter

Erica: [Moffun voice] Himechi is spring.

crowd/host doesn't really get moffun at first but yuzuki pointed it out.

[Host asks how to chi-ify Aoto's name] Aochi is summer. Because I get to meet everyone みんなと会いえる + *walks backstage index finger & arm raised*

Q4: 好きなセリフものまね immitate your favourite lines (of another character)

So: Ah I wrote that? Yzy: (tsukkomi) Did you forget?

host: (sth like) you want to do it so bad you did just that haha

So: well then I'll do Gira. "一草一木" line. eh what's next? Taisei follows up to "jakku no ou Gira!"

Erica: Kono Sukapon Tanuki! (i rmb she did the same thing in an interview but i forgot whcih. literally SO adorable my health bar is out)

Aoto repeast the tanuki line

Aoto: O~RE~WA~ JER~RA~MIE.... (make every syllable long like a skipping kindergardtener, got complained doesn't sound like jeramie at all)

Yzy: (in her own voice) ただわがままに　我が道を行く (himeno's catchphrase) (ah... so this is the world where yuzuki's got himeno's role...)

Masahi: (full kabuki face + gestures) Kaguragi Dybowski!

So and Yzy tsukkomi with the usual So Tsukkomi Pose.

Taisei: Then I'll do Onii-chaan! (He said Onii-chan yesterday too [CRY]) Shugoddom's King, Racules Husty. I am the nation. (same as relay interview)

the ep10 cockpit roll call! with jera! (evil king, wise king, queen of beatuy, bounty lord, immovable sovereign, king of the in-betweens)

Music live

original singer of Waking the King. I know he's experienced but he seemef to be quite popular? suddenly a rush of cheers from behind me when he appeared on stage. But his pitch and control was so good though. I like this insert a lot too and the first verse is just his vocals over piano and instantly gave me goosebumps.

he also sang the OP that he described as "a challenge". The cast reappeared after the singer asked us to "called for Kingohgers from your heart!"

The cast came holding their plushies and promote them.

OP DANCE IN REAL LIFE!!

They danced up to before the chorus then walked off-stage to greet the audience. They pretty much went around the whole paid area. Aoto was especially eager to wave at the audience. (It's between his blue hair and Kagu's head that I can spot from the back)

the dance was the energetic version from new op. The suit actors did the in-character dance before them.

When they came back onto stage after greeting, Taisei said something/bumped into Yuzuki and she did her 'clap knees laugh' thing.

Then it's the closing words (your usual "thank you for coming in the heat", "please support us and the film") and a group photo + countdown tiktok with the audience.

Aoto waved back during to the crowd during the photo and Yuzuyan said thank you after taking the tiktok.

there's a kid with a pillbug taxi prop in the front and a kid dressed as Shiokara with his baby brother as Gira. + girls in yellow princess dresses.

[mrplushgore]

More doodles of Chloe and Kagami with the Cat and Ladybug Miraculous (they may be in love?)

I finally decided on a name for Kagamibug; Tento Mushi, Japanese for Ladybug. Chloe has a pet name for her too; Akai-Hime, which probably means Red Princess. Chloecat doesn't have a name yet, though. Maybe Cheshire? Hmmm, that could work, yes.

[sailorstarr-chan4]

Anime & Manga Updates: 2023 Master List

Anime/Manga Master Lists: 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023

~~~~

Manga, All Included:

Kiss Him, Not Me! (finished; vols 2-14)

Shinobi Life (compete reread; 13 vols)*

Ceres: Celestial Legend (finished; vol 5-14)*

Kobato (finished; 6 vols)

Skip Beat! (vols 38-40)

Full Moon wo Sagashite (complete reread; 7 vols)

Alice 19th (complete reread; 7 vols)

From Far Away (vol 1)

Mao (vol 16; later reread vols 1-16)

Rin-ne (vol 12)

Sakura-hime: The Legend of Princess Sakura (finished; 12 vols)

Sekirei (vol 10-12)

Noragami (vol 1-2)

Oh My Goddess! (vols 4-7)

Captive Hearts of Oz (finished; 4 vols)

Cantarella (vol 1-3)

[Note: * means I did not read the series all in a row, but overlapped them with others, particularly with the ones I ended up finishing.]

Finished:

5 series (Kiss Him Not Me!, Ceres: Celestial Legend, Kobato, Sakua-hime, Captive Hearts of Oz)

3 complete rereads (Shinobi Life, Full Moon, Alice 19th)

Anime, Finished Only: 27

Dragon Goes House-Hunting (12 ep)

When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace (12 ep) 

The World’s Finest Assassin Gets Reincarnated in Another World as an Aristocrat (12 ep)

Jing: King of the Bandits (13 ep)

Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha (13 ep) 

Made in Abyss (13 ep)

Kobato (24 ep)

My Dress-Up Darling (12 ep)

Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle (52 ep)

Ceres: Celestial Legend (24 ep)

Baccano! (16 ep)

Taisho Otome Fairy Tale (12 ep)

Wedding Peach (51 ep)

Komi Can't Communicate (24 ep)

Okami-san and Her Seven Companions (12 ep)

Kakushigoto (12 ep)

Love Tyrant (12 ep)

Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid S (12 ep, +1)

Brothers Conflict (12 ep)

Plastic Memories (13 ep)

Descendants of Darkness (13 ep)

Code:Realize ~Guardian of Rebirth~ (12 ep)

Code:Breaker (13 ep)

Meiji Tokyo Renka (12 ep)

Kokoro Connect (17 ep)

Rozen Maiden (12 ep)

The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, REALLY Love You! (12 episodes)

Incomplete titles below cut:

Unfinished in 2023: 58 (gave up 35; finished later 2; want to finish 21)

***: restarted (15 series)

(x)...(x): gave up later

(x)Outlaw Star(x)***

Trigun Stampede

(x)Idolish7(x)

(x)The Big O(x)

Noir

(x)Bottle Fairy(x)

The Irresponsible Captain Tylor

(x)Dragon Drive(x)

(x)Carried by the Wind(x)

(x)Galaxy Angel(x)

(x)Fate/stay night(x)

(x)Kagihime Eternal Alice(x)

(x)Bewitched Agnes(x)

(x)Miami Guns(x)

X

(x)The Good Witch of the West(x)

(x)Shakugan no Shana(x)

Bleach***

Urusei Yatsura (2022) (finished in 2024!)

Moriarty the Patriot

Black Jack OVA

Kekkaishi***

Spy x Family

Cardcaptor Sakura***

(x)Barakamon(x)

(x)Urusei Yatsura(x)***

(x)Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's(x)

(x)Petite Princess Yucie(x)***

(x)Saint Tail(x)***

(x)Happy Seven(x)

(x)Slayers(x)***

The Story of Saiunkoku

(x)Horimiya(x)

Gakutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo

(x)Hakuouki(x)

(x)Ultimate Otaku Teacher(x)

(x)Scrapped Princess(x)

Maison Ikkoku***

(x)Gakuen Alice(x)

Hunter x Hunter

Fairy Tail***

(x)Flame of Recca(x)***

Mushi-Shi

Code Geass

(x)Ragnarok: The Animation(x)

(x)Disgae(x)

(x)Pita-Ten(x)

(x)The Galaxy Railways(x)

Rurouni Kenshin***

(x)Karneval(x)

(x)Haruka Nogizaka's Secret(x)

Requiem of the Rose King

Bungo Stray Dogs

(x)Saint Seiya(x)***

(x)Angel Links(x)

Rumbling Hearts

Hanyo no Yashahime*** (finished in 2024!)

(x)Happiness!(x)

[gumballrightfoots]

now. i have the opportunity to either bully the absolute shit out of hime

ORRRRR

Be silly and mushy and sweet

which will i choose

[ra-yo]

[kuraragemonono]

[chillockscans]

If I die young bury me in satin Lay me down on a bed of roses Sink me in the river at dawn Send me away with the words of a love song

[ohdeerlings]

mushi hime rant hahahhaahfdsjh

just posting my long-winded summary i typed immediately after finished reading to talk about how bad it was; it ended up a lot longer than i intended and now i feel like i should at least keep what i put effort into typing =___=

so it starts with this guy who's been getting recurring nightmares of a girl who shapeshifts into a monster with a huge mouth and teeth eating him

one day a transfer student comes in and looks exactly like her(already outplayed trope of having dreams for no reason of reality that doesnt ever get explained, and it happens lots of times throughout

)around the same time strange events start happening around town: ex, truck driver found by police with markings of a mass insect attack, dogs and pets all getting attacked by swarms of ants and filling up the vet hospitals

the narrative goes back and forth btwn:

- the guy's (Ryoichi's) POV in class where he's just not approaching her and wary of her bc of his dream; he's Not Like Other Boys who get all horny over her bc she's perfect (beautiful, smart, mysteriously quiet, physically adept)

- and btwn this stereotypically wacky/eccentric scientist who was consulted by the police with the first caseturns out the scientist has been tracking down a series of seemingly unrelated murders that follow a clear path ending at Ryoichi's town

throughout the story there's some not so subtle dialogues about the earth going through global warming and species dying

the scientist spiels to some insignificant characters about how humans arent long for this earth, etc etc and how insects are amazing because of their adaptational abilities

he seems to know the transfer student girl, Kikuchi and is trying to track her down

meanwhile kikuchi is character-developed as some clearly dangerous but morally compromised monster-human hybrid who Only Preys on Bad Guys or people around at the wrong time

she gets hit on by some lecherous perv who asks her to karaoke and she actually agrees

there she straddles him and starts kissing him and then these tentacle things come ouit of her throat and go into his mouth

he slumps over and she leaves

the scientist-investigator duo are closing in on her and find the security camera tapes, from that they get a picture and show it around town to try to locate her

meanwhile Ryoichi is still like wow she's Scary and I'm Not Like Other Boys

then he happens to see her just as the old man from the karaoke bar (who seems to have not been killed and is just stumbling around acting drugged) finds her and attacks her

a fucking needle spike comes out of her arm and she defends herself by stabbing him and puncturing his skull and killing him

he sees all that and shes like well guess you're my hostage now and takes him to his house

she's also attracted to him inexplicably, partially because He's Not Like Other Boys and shes like WHY ISNT HE SECRETING PHEROMONES FOR ME(she can smell that

)then there's a weird "erotic" scene where she forces him onto the bed and deep throats him with her mouth tentacles

then there's just a LOT of dialogue thrown at us at once with the scientist just explaining a shit ton to his investigation partner whose character clearly only exists for hte sake of exposition

turns out he had a colleague when he worked on a super secret gov funded experiment called biosphere 2 where they sealed off a forest and bombed it with radiation and pollution n shit

they found that it endured a lot at first and it was because of the bugs (?) that it did until the bugs disappeared and were nowhere to be found, then the forest just died

they looked around and found mutated bugs sleeping inside the earth

his colleague had a daughter back then with a terminal illness so out of desperation he injected the dna of the mutated insects into her, hoping their resilience would change her body to survive the illness

so she lived but she was clearly not human, farming off of her dad - she wasnt able to produce endorphins anymore so her tentacle things would secrete an enzyme to get hte host to produce lots of endorphins and she would take it, creating a dependency

bc she was the only of her species to exist she felt a need to procreate so she also kept trying to mate with her dad 

then we find out that her dad had an identical twin who was raised by foster parents - and thats Ryoichi's dad, making Ryoichi and Kikuchi technically cousins, and genetically half-siblings

so thats why she was Inexplicably drawn to that town, and to him

she was wandering through japan because at some point her dad tried to kill her for humanity's sake, but bc of a random flood their town was wiped out and he wasnt able to kill her and she disappeared/survived the flood thanks to her ability to mutate in environmental changes

meanwhile she's been keeping him hostage to feed off of his endorphins and creating a dependency in him for the enzymes she would give him

until his mom accidentally comes into his room and sees, then she runs away and dies falling down the stairs lol

then he's all like ytou're a monster!!!!! and she threatens to kill the girl-next-door character in his friend group who seemed to have a thing for him/vice versa

so he's like: ill do anything just spare her!!!! 

so she forces him to answer the door when his friends are like why havent u been going to class and tell them to fuck off/be a dick to them

while theyre walking outside after to go somewhere else the scientist sees the girl (Chiken) and is like hEY you look sad and depressed there's nothing possibly else that could make u feel like that except having your childhood crush abducted by a halfhuman-half locust succubus

he shows her the picture and she recognizes her and leads him back to the house

then he gets a rifle to try to shoot her and theres a whole fight scene where she uses her pheromones to call upon the insects to swarm

ryoichi is useless because he found his moms corpse lying in the bathtub getting consumed by maggots she asked to fully decompose the body

then the scientist gets a couple shots in and fends her off, meanwhile random police get in the way to stop what looks just like a home invasion and she disappears

they take ryoichi into the hospital bc all the endorphin harvesting and brain fuckery has him weak

then ryoichi's dad comes in and is like how do you recognize who i am!! to the scientist who explains

oh yeah that's the point at which we find out ryoichi and kikuchi are related

and then he's still having dreams where she vores him and he's both horrified and wants it

meanwhile entire city is getting swarmed by insects in a disaster scene with society breaking down etc etc

kikuchi tracks them down by following ryoichi's scent (?)

then they have one last battle where they try to use the dad as a distraction bc he looks identical to her dead father

and somehow the scientist just FINDS specific chemicals/enzymes to throw on her and weaken the part of her thats an insect

also earlier before she got there he  whips out the mutant insect dna out of nowhere? like the extremely valuable dna that he should have no business just finding/still carrying around

and is like

hey lets inject ourselves with this because humanity is getting wiped out and attacked by insects rn anyway, the only way to live i sto adapt

but no one does it (lmao pointless inclusion) 

then they defeat her in a big struggle with ryoichi getting farmed on by her again and instead of just taking it has a Miraculous realization past the drugs that oh no this person is killing everyone i love

and CHOMPS on her tentacle thigns while their mouths are connected

scientist injuects her with more random dna he has to compromise her mutant dna and the insect swarming stops bc of the internal biological shit happening and she's writhing oon the ground

then looks like she dies

they try to escape the basement theyve been in because its suddenly flooding (no reason lmfao)

on the way out they get stopped by a teacher that she pricked with her spike earlier on who's been missing from school and his "insect bite" changed his behavior/ultimately made him into a different part human part bug who tries to kill them

then kikuchi who -surprise- hadnt died!@!! shows up again but now she's blond and looks almost exactly like Ryoichi (who is blond) because the thing the scientist injected in her enabled her to adapt to the water and she's still a  mutatn but Less Evil Somehow and he's like i thOUGHT U DIED.... I ACTUALLY LOVE YOU.. 

then epilogue is the scientist goign through his life normally and the city is recovered from the insect swarm and he sees another random global warming thing in the news and is like

“its only a matter of time before humanity perishes, but now is not that time....we're good.............,,,,,,,for now...and i know somewhere underwater something of humanity's legacy will live on”

and it cuts to ryoichi and kikuchi hugging in a very Shape of Water way underwater with tentacle thigns cause they went to live in the ocean

then there s a bad window for a sequel showing the teacher guy - SURPRISE - not actuially dead and crunching on humans in a sewer somewhere

STILL A FUN READ

[atramulier]

mushi hime

[canmom]

Animation Night 130: Hayao Miyazaki’s Aeroplane Movies

Oh that Hayao Miyazaki! We sure have a slightly complicated relationship to him here on Animation Night!

See for example...

Animation Night 70, where I talk about his early career and years as a Toei union man, up to the founding of Ghibli;

Animation Night 100 where I tell you about one of my favourite ever films Mononoke-Hime;

Animation Night 111 where we look at the fascinating My Neighbour Totoro-Grave of the Fireflies double bill of 1988.

Tonight, we’re going to look at two films, Porco Rosso and the controversial The Wind Rises, which indicate his particular arc through life in, honestly, a rather sad way. Putting them alongside each other to see what we learn...

If there’s one thing old Hayao loves, it is aeroplanes - particularly planes from the early-mid 20th century. No surprise, really: his dad Katsuji Miyazaki ran a company Miyazaki Airplane, which manufactured parts for world war II aeroplanes such as the infamous Zero fighter plane. (Put a pin in that one!) Despite working to arm the Imperial Japanese military, Katsuji was able to get out of actually serving in the war by telling his commanding officer that he didn’t want to fight when he had a wife and kid, which somehow got him discharged with just a lecture.

The young Hayao, born 1941, was therefore surrounded by planes, which were the source of his family’s comfort. He spent his earliest years fleeing from American air raids, suffering from digestive problems, and watching his stern, intellectual mother Yoshiko suffering from spinal tuberculosis (though she ultimately made it to 1983, at age 72). At school in the 50s, he took an interest in manga - which in those days naturally meant Osamu Tezuka; he also went to see drama films with Katsuji such as Meshi (1951).

In ‘58, he saw Toei’s Legend of the White Snake (白蛇伝 Hakujaden), notable as the first colour anime film, sneaking out from studying for his exams. The film had a profound effect on him. In Starting Point, he writes that he fell in love with the film’s heroine Bai-Niang, and yet gradually started to imagine how he might have done the film differently to better show the secondary characters.

Hayao went to university to study political economy with a focus on ‘Japanese Industrial Theory’, and at the same time, started drawing in earnest, cranking out thousands of pages of manga and spending a lot of time sketching and chatting politics with his middle school art teacher. The 60s and 70s were a high point of left-wing activity in Japan, the time of the Japanese New Left and the Anpo protests against the US-Japan security treaty (c.f. Toku Tuesday 33 on Nagisa Ōshima for a truly fascinating filmmaker who rose to prominence at this time!) So Miyazaki fairly naturally became a Marxist, and stayed such as he got his start working in animation, which I’ve covered in other posts.

So at this point perhaps we can see the curious contradiction that sits in so much of Miyazaki’s work: he genuinely loves aeroplanes and other kinds of military hardware on a kind of aesthetic level, and yet this sits pretty curiously against a worldview that went from Marxist to environmentalist and has no love of war or nationalism.

With all this in mind, let’s take a look at a few of Miyazaki’s early depictions of planes. First would be his work on episode 21 of Moomin (1969), by TMS entertainment. On this infamous episode, Miyazaki’s senpai Yasuo Otsuka called in his protégé to handle of all things a battle scene with planes and tanks - one which infuriated Tove Jansson, already dissatisfied with the tone of the adaptation, to the point that she pulled the show out of TMS Entertainment and A-Pro’s hands and gave it to Tezuka’s rival studio Mushi Pro instead.

(I can’t find any embeddable version, but I did get my hands on this episode eventually! Lain bless soulseek.)

This did not deter Miyazaki at all. In his work on ‘Green Jacket’ Lupin III Part I, which he co-directed with Takahata and Masaaki Ōsumi as well as animating several scenes, we start to see his love of mechanical detail shine through once more. Miyazaki’s plane obsession would shine through even more strongly with his direction of two episodes of ‘red jacket’ Lupin III Part II (1980), under the pen name “Tsutomu Teruki”, directing animators like the spectacular Kazuhide Tomonaga as @kbnet​ documents here. By that point his style had matured - the character designs and motion feel like something drawn in Ghibli’s early years, and the plane backgrounds are astonishingly dense with detail. The Castle of Cagliostro is by comparison relatively light on aeroplanes, but truly elevates Lupin’s car to a character - not to mention the film’s ridiculously elaborate finale where the characters battle through an enormous system of gears.

In between these two Lupin jackets came Future Boy Conan, where we start to see Miyazaki find more things to say about planes than “damn cool!”; a full of wonderful plane adventures, yet they also represent the sinister forces of industrialism which destroyed the world once and threaten to do it again.

In an essay from 1979 that opens the collection Starting Point, Miyazaki remarks on the qualities needed to animate a plane on Conan, giving a sense of his philosophy around animated machines - and his perfectionism:

Quite a few of toda’s younger animators plunged directly into this line of work because they were fans. But if I were to ask them to draw a picture of what they think a chaika (a flying boat in Future Boy Conan) would look like in flight, they would only be able to imagine what they had previously seen on past TV anime shows. And I wouldn’t be able to use their work as a result.

To draw a chaika flying in a truly original fashion, you would need to have read at least one book on the history of flying, and then be able to use your imagination to augment what you have read.

This is followed by an anecdote about Russian pilot, and builder of the first four-engine biplane, Igor Sikorsky - the man who for Miyazaki “symbolises the way men really fly”.

Miyazaki of 1979 seemed to have a lot on his mind about the relationship of humans to machines. He criticises the mecha shows of the time for a lack of focus on how the character creates and maintains the machine: “the protagonist should struggle to build his own machine, he should fix it when it breaks down, and he should have to operate it himself”. And true to form, when Miyazaki’s films portray machines, there is as much loving depiction of the maintenance as the actual machines in flight.

We’ll fast forward now, since I talked quite a bit about The Castle of Cagliostro, Nausicaa and Castle in the Sky back on AN 70, and Totoro back on AN 111. I haven’t covered Kiki’s Delivery Service yet, although you can trust we will before too long! No, the first film of interest to us tonight is a bit of an oddball in the Ghibli oeuvre; well known to fans of the studio but not quite as much of a household name. That’s Miyazaki’s flying pig movie, Porco Rosso (紅の豚 Kurei no Buta).

^ here’s your obligatory Yoshinori Kanada-animated background animation scene!

Porco Rosso is Miyazaki’s first movie to not just feature planes, but be truly overwhelmingly about planes. Set in a vaguely Mediterranean world, it expresses Miyazaki’s nostalgia for a lost era of flying before he was born, and yet it’s also tinged with the impending horror of the second world war and the recognition that the planes that Miyazaki loves so much are above all weapons.

Unlike many of Miyazaki’s movies, it centres on mostly adult characters and its narrative arc doesn’t really move to any sort of definite resolution; it’s more a portrait of the era, or rather, Miyazaki’s fantastical imagination of the era, in which there can be sky pirate families flying with dozens of children and, of course, a man can get transformed into a pig. The central character of the film, the eponymous Porco Rosso (so called because he’s a pig (porco) that flies a red (rosso) aeroplane), is an outcast due to his pig curse, but also perhaps because he insists on flying for himself rather than for the Italian military, a stance that is already becoming obsolete.

So Porco ends up adopting a young aircraft engineer - a bishōjo character in the spirit of The Castle of Cagliostro - who is eager to see the world. The largest conflict in the film is Porco butting heads with an arrogant American pilot over the affections of Gina, a woman who runs a bar for pilots - yet the two are clearly more similar than different.

By this point Studio Ghibli is well-established, and Miyazaki can take his pick from some of the best animators in the entire industry. So we see not just Yoshinori Kanada, but also sakuga aces Mitsuo Iso(!!!) and Shinya Ohira(!!!), and with Ghibli money they can truly go all-out. All that attention to mechanical detail, the buliding of machines, is there. Events like the testing of an aeroplane engine are accompanied by incredibly complex multi-layered shots that only a drawing demon like Ohira could accomplish. Only someone whose grasp of 3D form is as precise as Mitsuo Iso could animate some of these shots of subtle wobbles in the pre-CGI era. And on top of that, the colour design of Michyo Yasuda is there in all its beauty, Joe Hisaishi truly came into his own with a score as wistful and nostalgic as such a film demands; it’s an incredibly accomplished work of animation. 

But, planes though.

One of the film’s most memorable scenes - one which unites the two films we’re going to see tonight - sees Porco fly up high into the sky to a kind of flying graveyard of aeroplane pilots. It’s here we especially see the ambivalence that obsesses Miyazaki: he finds aeroplanes one of the most beautiful things in the world, idolises their pilots, and yet of course this period of aviation was an incredibly dangerous one, and moreover the aeroplane development was catalysed by war and soon would lead to a level of destruction never seen before in human history with the bombing campaigns of the second world war.

It would be natural to imagine that the workshop where Porco recruits Fio may in some way resemble the workshop run by Miyazaki’s parents - in spirit, as he imagines it, if not in detail. Like Miyazaki Airplane, this workshop in Italy cannot be doing anything but supplying aeroplanes to Mussolini, and indeed we see Porco utter one of the most quoted lines in the film when he tells his old air force buddy “I’d rather be a pig than a fascist.” even though this leaves him essentially a fugitive, on his own with a plane and a girl (like half his age I guess?).

^ This swarm of tadpole-like children was animated by Masashi Ando.

If you actually read Miyazaki’s comments about his dad, it seems a little different. Far from being lovingly crafted, Miyazaki writes, Katsuji would make defective parts and bribe officials to look the other way. He would go to nightclubs right into his 70s and ask Hayao if he’d started smoking yet.

At the time this film came out, Hayao Miyazaki’s father Katsuji would die only a couple of years later, in 1993. We can find a short piece that Hayao wrote about it in Starting Point (page 208-209, My Old Man’s Back):

...And after the war, he had no sense of guilt about having been involved in the military arms industry or having produced defective parts. In effect, for him war was something that only idiots engaged in. If we were going to war anyway, he was going to make money off of it. He had absolutely no interest in just causes or the fate of the state. For him the only concern was how his family would survive.

(...)

When he died two years ago, those of us who gathered together agreed that he had never once said anything particularly lofty or inspiring. If I have one regret, it is that I never discussed things seriously with my old man. From the time I was young, I always looked at him as a negative example. But it seems, after all, that I am like him. I have inherited my old man’s anarchistic feelings and his lack of concern about embracing contradictions.

So the actual reality of aeroplanes around Miyazaki had little to do with the romantic images we see in his films. But that ‘lack of concern about embracing contradictions’ seems important...

In 2013, 20 years after Katsuji’s death, Miyazaki would direct a new film, The Wind Rises (風立ちぬ Kaze Tachinu, lit. The Wind Has Written) - to date, his last film, although of course like clockwork he’s since come out of retirement to work on another one. Ostensibly, this film is a biopic of Jiro Horikoshi, the inventor of the Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter plane so vital to the Imperial Japanese war machine.

However, if you look into the details, you soon realise that the story present in the film - particularly its central element of Jiro love interest and eventual wife Naoko Satomi - is a complete fiction. Jiro Horikoshi did marry and eventually had five children, but there is very little information about them, even in Horikoshi’s own autobiography. An article comparing the film against it remarks...

The Story of the Zero Fighter is 80% plane design ideas, measurements and stories surrounding Jiro’s career. There’s so much focus on the construction of the planes there’s a measly 20% left for autobiographical material.

According to that article, Horikoshi’s autobiography describes his initial thrill at reports of the Zero’s success in the invasion of China, then later, the psychological impact of a bomb striking nearby and his gradual realisation of what a war actually meant. It’s an arc towards increasing horror at the measures the Japanese Empire was taking to win the war with it, particularly the announcement of the Kamikaze suicide-bomber tactic:

Jiro was approached by the press to write a short essay on the Kamikaze, but he declined. He found it too emotionally difficult to think when he looked at photographs of smiling pilots boarding Zero’s, knowing they were doomed to death. Sobbing, the only sentiment that encouraged him to put pen to paper was dedicating his writings to the families who had lost their loved ones in the war. In the haunted depths of his mind he wondered why Japan had not just given up the war, and why they had gone to such measures with the Zero’s.

Very little of this arc makes it into The Wind Rises. Nationalism is glimpsed only at the margins. In one trip to Weimar Germany, Horikoshi witnesses a Jewish man being pursued; later, he meats a privately anti-Nazi German man at the hospital who talks briefly about how foolish nationalism will make a country ‘blow up’, and his final oblique conversation with the dream-ghost of his idol, Italian aircraft engineer Giovanni Cabroni, about what it means to build planes when they will be tragically be destroyed.

Instead, we find Miyazaki draw in a different source for the primary character arc of this movie: a novel by Tatsuo Hori that also has the title 風立ちぬ Kaze Tachinu. Set in a sanitarium much like the one in which Horikoshi spends the latter half of the film, it tells the story of the relationship between a nameless protagonist and a woman dying of tuberculosis.

It seems an odd connection at a glance: why would you take this seemingly entirely unrelated novel and apply it to an actual historical person? To me, the most plausible answer is that this isn’t really a film about Jiro Horikoshi. Because recall that, of Miyazaki’s parents, his mother also had spinal tuberculosis, and his dad also made planes for the war. Yet, the Horikoshi of this film hardly resembles Katsuji Miyazaki either, who we’ve seen was far from a workaholic like the film’s Jori Horikoshi. Instead, this would better resemble Hayao himself. So instead, it seems to be using this historical setting as a kind of place to explore Miyazaki’s feelings about his parents, his own craft in animation (wedded to the technical industrial world as it is)...

Inevitably that’s a pretty fraught thing to do! More so than any of Miyazaki’s other films, the film sparked a lot of controversy, mostly for how it handles the topic of the war. You could argue that like, OK, do you need a movie to moralistically lecture you on how invading most of Asia was bad? Must it rub our faces in the atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy to be a worthwhile movie?

One answer is that with the amount of modern nationalism and historical revisionism out there, it might not go amiss for national hero Hayao Miyazaki to take a stand there! But honestly it’s more that, with such subject matter, seems to go out of its way to avoid showing what the Zero was actually used for. The main tragedy, as far as Horikoshi was concerned, seems to be that so many pilots of this beautiful aeroplane die; that his pursuit of engineering beauty was corrupted by worldly matters like a war.

Which isn’t necessarily a completely inaccurate portrait of the real Jori Horikoshi’s attitude to his creation. The quote that inspired the film was “All I wanted to do was to make something beautiful.” But then this film goes out of its way to emphasise Horikoshi as a caring family man, a wholly sympathetic character, when to much of the world, Jiro Hirokoshi is a symbol of....

That. (And that’s the low estimate. It could easily be four times higher.)

But let’s look at how it relates to old Hayao and the contradictions he talks about living. If not to the same degree as old Isao Takahata, Miyazaki is an infamously exacting and demanding boss, heavily correcting nearly every cut that passes his desk. He’s spent his life working at a frankly kind of insane pace and expects his employees to keep up. Studio Ghibli has at least one dead body on its hands. Yet if you look at his films, they’re all about freedom and romanticism and the importance of enjoying nature. In Totoro, the dad is pulled away from his desk to play outside by his children. Probably not a good idea at Ghibli.

Then there are all the family relationships, all the way from the panda in Panda Kopanda to the mother in Ponyo. But Hayao Miyazaki was a distant father (he writes in Starting Point that his children were basically raised by their mother), and infamously callous to his son Gorō when he attempted to direct a film that Hayao didn’t think he was ready to handle.

Can we analogise animation to an aeroplane? It is beautiful in much the same way as an aeroplane is: elegant shapes, the technical coordination of many disparate parts to achieve an effect that would perhaps otherwise sound far-fetched (a flying machine? a picture that moves?). What’s the cost of animation? Well, thankfully nothing comparable to killing millions of people. But it is not a light undertaking. It is something that does eat lives. Is that a comparison that Miyazaki would have had in mind? I doubt it, honestly, but it’s what occurs to me faced with this film.

Thus I read the film’s Jori Horikoshi is a strange emotional blend of Hayao Miyazaki himself, an idealisation of his father or perhaps the sort of man he wishes his father was, and the real man who invented an effective fighter plane which helped enable his country to pillage most of Asia. And the rest of us? Well, the person working through these contradictions is Hayao Miyazaki, at the head of one of the highest concentrations of skilled animators the world has ever seen, so it’s going to be shared with nearly everyone. Would it probably have made more sense to do this in something like a manga, instead of a high profile movie? ...Well, I think so. But that’s not what happened, so we have this movie.

Inevitably for a late Ghibli movie, this film is crazy good looking. No Yoshinori Kanada anymore since he died in 2009, but Shinya Ohira is still alive, and he is absolutely capable of handling a Kanada-like background animation sequence. One of the most breathtaking sequences is the portrayal of the Great Kantō Earthquake by Atsuko Tanaka and Taichi Furumata, which combines both brilliant multiplane shots and unbelievably complex full background animation scenes of waves rippling through houses and streets. Tanaka also handled these mindblowing shots of cloth flowing in the wind as Naoko paints that form the film’s major recurring image.

The film uses slightly more digital compositing effects than the 90s pre-digital Ghibli films. For the most part the colours are just as lush as those older films, and there’s even very effective use of CG with handpainted textures now and then; Ghibli weathered the transition to digital a lot better than many studios.

And yet, despite all of this, it is a movie that leaves me feeling pretty unsatisfied, like a lot of late Ghibli movies. Hayao Miyazaki has said that he’s attempted to move away from familiar kishōtenketsu structures and try something novel, but when I watch films like Howl’s Moving Castle, I’m left wondering like... what did all of that amount to, in the end? For all its spectacle, what is this film even saying that Porco Rosso didn’t say... honestly, say better?

Maybe I’ll find an answer on a rewatch. It’s... far later than I planned to start, but if you’re willing to join me, please hop into twitch.tv/canmom and we’ll watch Hayao Miyazaki’s two big films about planes! And I’ll show you the Moomin thing too.

[zenevpower]

Gensokyo Festival  Day 21:  What’s In a Name?

So,you know how ‘Momoyo’ means ‘eternity’,’hime’ means ‘princess and ‘mushi’ means ‘insect’? Well......

[b0ba-chan]

“thats a good kitty. keep your legs spread for me.” issei breathes hotly against your ear as his fingers toy at your clit through your panties. he watches as your face contorts, trying to keep your hips still for hime to keep going. your jaw was clenched and heat starts to spread throughout your face and body. issei tsks and presses his rough fingers against your lips, urging your open you mouth.

as you open your mouth gapes open, issei pushes your panties aside to make contact with your pulsing bundle of nerves. he takes advantage of your open mouth and grabs your tongue, pulling it out so you little noises can fill the stale air. you whine out, shifting your glance to issei who has all attention to you cunt, sliding a finger into it slowly.

“this little pussy is swallowing me right up.” he coos, making you shiver against his broad chest. you moan out as drool starts to lather on his index and thumb, claming weakly around his wiggling middle finger. he gasp and flinch when he curls his finger, which is already turning you to a fucked out mess. he adds a second finger in, only to watch you to get all mushy against him.

you were already spasming around his fingers, getting sloppier he starts relentlessly finger your cunt. he gives you no time to adjust to the thickness, only amping up the volume of the slick between your legs.

wailing out, you weakly try to grab on his wrists to slow him down. you squeal as clear liquid starts to spray from your cunt. he speeds up the past to drag on your orgasm, watching your silents screams were forced out of your throat.

as your high starts to dissipate, he slowly drags his fingers out to run his soaked hands through your folds.

“sloppy little cunt, could barely even handle two fingers.”

[littleeyesofpallas]

Mushi-kanburi Hime[虫かぶり姫]: "Bug-Head Princess"

aka Princess of the Bibliophile.

(as in "Bugs-on-head," not "Bug-for-a-head")

[heavensickness]

tysm!!! i enjoy horror and lgbt mangas the most, can u rec some more of that?

Making this list took a long time bc I've been reading horror mangas since I was 12 lmao, if I remember more I'll add them: (Favorites are in bold)

Starving Anonymous

Emerging

Fuan no Tane

Ousama Game

Doubt - Judge - Secret (it's a triology)

Jinrou Game

Jinrou Game - Beast Side

Jinrou Game - Crazy Fox

Pumpkin Night

Signal 100

Chainsaw Man

Hideout

Goth

Corpse Party

Dragon Head

Distant Sky

I Am A Hero

Ibitsu

Higanjima

Litchi Hikari Club

Ichi the Killer

Shiki

Shigurui

Sweet Home

Bastard

Another

Death Sweeper

House of Dolls

Anamorphosis No Meijuu (If you like grotesque stuff, anything by Shintaro Kago is recommended. Most of his works are too absurd for me but he's one of the best guro illustrators tbh)

6000

Anything by Junji Ito; Tomie, Uzumaki, Gyo and Yami no Koe are highly recommended

Kami no Kodomo

Saiteihen no Otoko (this one rlly hit me hard idk why)

I HATE THIS ONE BC IT NEVER ENDS AND GETS MORE AND MORE ABSURD WITH EACH CHAPTER BUT I CAN'T QUIT: Freak Island/Kichikujima. I hope it ends soon so that I can be finally free

Mahou Shoujo of the End

Mahou Shoujo Site

Ajin

Killing Morph

Tales of the Unusual (webtoon)

The Vault of Horror - A Collection of Nightmares (webtoon)

Friday: Forbidden Tales (webtoon)

Chiller (webtoon)

Unknown Caller (webtoon)

Strangers From Hell (webtoon)

Duty After School (webtoon, I love it so so so much. It really affected me)

Dead Days

Koishou Radio

Aku no Kyouten (also has a movie)

Fukushuu Kyoushitsu

Devil's Line

Kuro Ihon

Chimamire Sukeban Chainsaw

Tomogui Kyoushitsu

Shiga Hime

Kiriko Kill

Tengoku ni Musubu Koi

Jiisatsu Circle

Apocalypse no Toride

Torture Tournament

Ashita no Esa Kimi Dakara

Doku Mushi

Fukushuu Kyoushitsu

Kyoushitsu Jibaku Club

Rule - Annihilation Classroom

[morgenlich]

♧ :3

mutual meme!

You’re my: beloved ❤️

How I met you: WELL I started following you because you were like The RusLiet Writer™, but it was actually i think like another year or two before you started rp’ing and we started talking even tho i didn’t realize it was you at first sfsdsds

Why I follow you: well we are bffs at this point sdsds but you post/rb some great content ofc

Your blog is: a v good reflection of your personality tbh

Your URL is: i will be honest i have never actually bothered trying to figure out what it means past the -hime sfdfdd

Your icon is: pretty :0

A random fact I know about you: you dislike mushy foods that’s ok more mashed potatoes for me

General opinion: 💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗

A random thought I have: we need to hang out irl again <3

[ra-yo]

Mushi hime