davemerrill

Driving back from work, I was listening to weather-report cautions of heavy snow forecast. One of the radio hosts brought up “Game of Thrones” and added the “Winter is coming” line a few moments later. I’ll admit I thought “it’s nice that property’s still being brought up, given what I noticed” (but only “noticed”) “about complaints about the way the show ended.” Before I’d thought much further into the subject, though, another one of the people on the show said he’d rather invoke Star Wars. Although I recall his line being a little off from “Storm’s coming, Ani!”, it still provoked a warm “not just ‘Star Wars,’ but The Phantom Menace!” feeling. (It took a little longer for the pedantic part of me to think about the line involving a sandstorm...)

To be fair, “you still can’t let the loudest complaints online hide the possibility of simple, uncomplicated enjoyment” might apply in both cases. I also wondered a bit about “yes, you enjoyed that Star Wars reference, but surely, eventually, someone’s going to quote the Disney stuff...” Before I’d quite finished my drive back, anyway, I did happen to wind up behind a car with what I could tell was a Star Trek reference on its license plate, and a “uniform emblem” sticker on its rear window. I counted that as fitting into the drive.

Driving into work these days means I listen to the city/regional news at half past the hour. After that, the people on the drive-in show start bantering with each other. Yesterday they were discussing an article on their service’s online branch about new species identified last year. While trying to turn the verbal descriptions of some of them into images in my mind (and contemplating how I seem less phobic towards spiders than certain insects), I heard someone mention how the species might look like “products of Studio Ghibli.”

I tried to tell myself again that it’s been some time since I was first aware of the anime studio and things have changed in general (to say nothing of “Ghibli has been the respectable name in anime for longer than you’ve known of it”), but I suppose it was too late; I’d already been surprised and amused. I suppose I did get to thinking of what I remembered of my most recent viewings of Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, the latest Ghibli movies I’ve seen (and they’ve been around for a good while themselves); it wasn’t until a while later that I thought of the giant insects in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, which just might be a deeper-cut reference (getting to the point of bringing up the trivia that Hayao Miyazaki and company weren’t called “Studio Ghibli” while they were making that movie).

“But it’s anime!” played its own certain role in unbending to the point of taking in a bit of “recent Star Wars.” I even emerged from “Star Wars Visions” supposing some of its nine animated shorts would be interesting to go back to. However, I hadn’t got around to that by the time a second Visions series, animated by studios from around the world, was announced. Whether or not my reactions to those new shorts amounted to a lower batting average than the original group, I still supposed I might go back to at least one of them... but still hadn’t by the time a third Visions series, returning to Japanese animation studios and even promising to follow up on some of the original shorts, turned up. Still, I did manage to find the time to watch these latest productions.
( Visions revisited and new )