#this may perhaps be influenced by having watched frankie and johnny last night which i believe may be of the type of movie im seeking

[friend-dogor]

actually wait in relation to the last post about ghibli and how it is aestheticized into bland and toothless images of comfort, it's got me thinking abt Ursula K Le Guin again

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.

(from The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, 1973, top of pg.2)

i think that the original post is guilty of this to a degree, seeking to refute the idiocy and simplicity of focusing on the "happy" themes of ghibli movies my instead shifting attention to the horrors and pains contained within the text—those which could be seen as intellectual, needing perhaps a more sophisticated understanding of environmentalism and geopolitics.

but, furthermore, i think i'm guilty of it even in trying to defend miyazaki's often returning narrative commitment to hope and environmentalism and anti-war sentiment and kindness—after the last tag, i wanted to add something about "i know that putting kindness above pursuit of power feels like a baby theme for babies" because it Does, to me. "be kind" is, like, the first and simplest rule most of us are taught as children, be kind, don't hit your brother, be kind, share, be kind.

i don't refer to this as one of his more challenging themes, of course, because why should i? we all know to be kind. of course, i refer only to topics of war and environmentalism and grief as challenging. kindness is simple!

(nevermind that one of the biggest challenges for myself and a lot of people i know is how to stop being cruel to oneself after decades of practice and learned examples and instead to learn to be kind and forgiving with one's own mistakes and failures and perceived flaws)

and i wonder two things: 1) is it possible that the self-aestheticization of miyazaki's movies (for example, the rapturous visual attention paid to food, the attention paid to soft chairs, pillows, small and pleasantly cluttered environments, with plenty of natural light, lush plantlife and endearing creatures) contribute to miyazaki's more "challenging" messages, and if so, that there's a degree of success in people remembering the thick-cut bacon and eggs on toast from Howl's Moving Castle before they think of Sophie Hatter's town on fire because of the king's war? Has Hayao Miyazaki succeeded in making war and destruction at once horrifying and banal, but a simple good breakfast fascinating and compelling? ——not to say that people who simplify the movie to Only the aesthetics are right. they still aren't. they exist in dialogue with the destruction and it's ridiculous to sever the two. but is it possible that the majority of people thinking first of the "cozy" elements of Studio Ghibli's work is not nonintellectual and reductive, but rather contributes to a larger point of attention?

2) i ought to find other examples of media which do not treat "happy" themes or "light" themes—(i struggle even to talk about the category i mean without dismissing it entirely as Simple, or mischaracterizing it. i mean things like kindness over power and compassion over fear, things like that) which do not treat the themes as childish or nonintellectual, but also do so without fetishizing violence and suffering as Special and More Deserving of Thought than Simple and Stupid Good Feelings so that i can kind of investigate this concept a little more