Microreview [film]: Ponyo by Miyazaki Hayao

Innocent child's tale, or meditation on the afterlife?

Miyazaki Hayao is the Lord of Animation, one who has had as wide a cultural impact as Walt Disney himself. His movies feature strong male and female characters, interesting storylines, stunning visuals, and fascinating technologies in ways unrivaled by any other modern animator. But that does not mean that all of his movies are created equal. Miyazaki has made the finest animated works of all time in My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away. On the other hand, he’s made some comparative duds (like Howl’s Moving Castle or The Wind Rises, both of which are not bad movies by any stretch of the imagination). I have already talked about some of my favorite Miyazaki movies on Nerds of a Feather. Today, I’d like to introduce the movie I am more conflicted about: Ponyo.

WARNING: The following discussion is spoilerific!

Ponyo tells an innocent love story between a fish-girl, Ponyo (or “Brunhilde” as her father refers to her), and a five-year-old boy, Sōsuke. Sōsuke finds Ponyo trapped in a glass jar on a beach. He frees her from the jar, only to cut himself in the process. In thanks, Ponyo licks his hand, healing his wound and initiating changes that allow her to transform into human shape. Thus begins a friendship, or a pure love story as told through the eyes of a child. Ponyo decides that she wants to become human, and the rest of the movie revolves around the adventures she takes with Sōsuke to make her wish a reality.

The most impressive aspect of this movie is its animation. The art is visually arresting. In fact, Ponyo features perhaps the most gorgeous artistry of any Studio Ghibli movie. Roger Ebert stated this perhaps better than I can in his own review of Ponyo:

"The film opens with a spellbinding, wordless sequence beneath the sea, showing floating jellyfish and scampering bottom-dwellers. The pastels of this scene make Ponyo one of the very rare movies where I want to sit in the front row, to drown in it. This is more than 'artistry.' It is art."

   

Still, in all honesty, I did not like Ponyo much the first time I saw it. The storyline appeared somewhat childish, the narrative and dialogue left important questions unanswered, and the characters acted in head-scratchingly strange ways. Take Sōsuke’s mother. She’s the epitome of a strong woman, one who has little problems taking care of herself, her family, and the community while her husband is away at sea. But whether driving through a tsunami or leaving her five-year-old son at home alone for no apparent reason, she continually chooses to put herself and her child at risk. Every driving scene is particularly cringe-worthy. 

But having a two-year old at home gave me the chance for a second take… then a third… and a fourth… and a fifth… I’m now at least thirty times in. Watching a movie this many times (granted, my attention now wanders more than I care to admit) has given me a different take. I now see quite clearly that Ponyo is much more nuanced and creative than I had originally thought. In addition to being a cute story that is safe for children, it seems likely that Ponyo is Miyazaki’s subtle and veiled meditation on death as he advanced in age.

Take Ponyo's given name, Brunhilde. Some have suggested that Ponyo is a deliberate incantation of the valkyrie Brynhildr, someone who served in some Germanic myths as a harbinger of death. Ponyo herself serves in a similar capacity, bringing a tsunami that wipes out the majority of Sōsuke's village, even reaching the lighthouse where Sōsuke resides. In the wake of that tsunami, Ponyo and Sōsuke may in fact bear witness the passing souls of the now-decimated community. As the two adventurers ride in a toy boat in search of Sōsuke's mother, they run into the whole town in small boats paddling toward the hotel on "the other side." Was this not a reference to crossing the Sanzu River, the Buddhist equivalent to the River Styx? Moreover, later in the film, Ponyo and Sōsuke approach a tunnel that Ponyo obviously does not want to enter. Going into it causes her to revert to her fish form and to fall asleep. Was this tunnel one that leads to the afterlife? Finally some of the people they meet on the other side act in ways that suggest they might no longer be alive (the grannies, for instance!).

I remain conflicted about Ponyo, even after my thirtieth take. On the one hand, it is a cute and innocent story of love shared between two five-year-old children. In this context, it is a great family movie and something my own two-year-old son can watch over and over and over again. On a much deeper and implicit level, however, it may also be Miyazaki's extended musings about life, death, and the promise of what's to come...

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +2 for the meticulous, hand-drawn artistry, which remains so much better than the current trend toward CGI.

Penalties: -1 for leaving so many questions unanswered; -1 for Sōsuke's mom and her death wish.

Multiple Views Bonus: +1 for making me think so much more deeply about this film than I had ever intended.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10 "An enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws"

Microreview [book]: The Apex Book of World SF, Volume 4 ed. by Mahvesh Murad

Set a course for great science fiction. Destination? EARTH!

The Meat:

Growing up as a white boy in the suburban American Midwest, the world often seemed like the spinning globe at the beginning of Universal movies, with the USA always front and center and everything else sort of bleeding away at the edges. It's a reality that is reinforced watching those movies, where outside the US and perhaps a few European countries, the world is a vast and dirty slum, good only for when you need somewhere for aliens to blow up or heroes to escape from. The xenophobia at the beating heart of most entertainment produced and marketed to me told a unifying story of the world, captured and condensed into a simple lie, that the only people worth telling stories about where white, straight, cis-males who spoke "proper English."

I would like to say that nowadays things have changed. In some ways, they have, as evidenced by the fact that this collection is made up entirely of previously printed material. The stories come from near and far, many of them originally written in a language other than English. And the quality is, for me, unassailable. Each of the stories that I had read at the time of their original release that appear in this collection I loved and included in my monthly short speculative fiction recommendation list. Indeed, "The Language of Knives" by Haralambi Markov is one of my absolute favorite stories from 2015, and uses an enchanting style and stark imagery to explore the roles people find themselves in: in their families, in their professions, in their ages. The story is at turns surprising and affirming, emotional and richly inventive. And the entire collection is filled with stories that stand up just as well.

My biggest issue with the collection, and probably the greatest trouble with collections in general and international collections in particular, is that there just isn't enough space for everything. I think there is a phenomenal effort to include works from all over the world, and the stories included range from fast and fun to heartbreaking and dark as hell. As a sampler it works quite well, and I think that's what it's purpose is, but it makes the organization of the collection as a whole somewhat jarring at times and in some ways it can't help but create a The West vs. Everything Else mentality, which is both necessary and frustrating. Necessary because the Everything Else is forced to share resources to be seen and heard, and frustrating because it creates a false unity that can flatten intersectionality. That said, I think the collection remains very conscious of the complex nature of the project it's undertaking and is obviously involved in a long game of trying to bring attention to stories that deserve to be read and examined and celebrated.

As for the stories themselves, I rather loved them. Thomas Olde Heuvelt's "The Boy Who Cast No Shadow" had me in tears with a story of friendship and coming of age and fragility and life and death. There are stories that I get to the end of and just sort of stare at for a while, eyes wet, and this was one of them, a powerful piece about expectations and visibility where one boy has no shadow, to reflection, and the other only reflects. So, so good. JY Yang's "Tiger Baby" was as good as the first time I read it, a piece about a woman pushed into a role and striving to match the image of herself in her mind, striving to become something powerful and dangerous. A story about the power people want to have and the power they do have and the vast distance between the two.

There are a lot of stories on display here, and despite the SF in the title of the collection many of the works are fantasy and horror. There is a bending of genre expectations as well as a bending of expectations in general. Because the stated purpose of the collection is to provide a showcase for perspectives springing from experiences outside the white, Western mainstream. There are stories of immigration and intolerance, like Zen Cho's excellent "The Four Generations of Chang E" (which, come on, manages to make a pun intelligent and nuanced). The story shows the shifting sands of otherness, the way that cultures are not static things but rather a complex set of expectations, beliefs, and small revolutions and rebellions.

There are stories with a scope that takes on the entire universe and stories that are intensely focused and personal (and some that cross both of those). There are stories that give their characters a happy ending and stories that dive headlong into tragedy and heartbreak. Stories that explore what it means to be human in a global way. Take Vajra Chandrasekera's "Pockets Full of Stones," a story about family and isolation and also invasion and threat in a way that's difficult to understand or predict. It's not a happy story, but it one that shows the way that humans can be global creatures, social and able to reach through the walls of difference that separate us from each other. And the collection as a whole does an excellent job of building that global consciousness, that awareness of isolation and connection that is integral to being human.

And in the end I love what the collection manages to do, which is to take a collection of unique and strong voices and create something of a harmony with them, a symphony. Each piece, each place that is explored and personal history that is examined, both stands on its own and also illuminates the collection's theme of world science fiction. The result is a collection that shines with great stories and an important message: that to limit yourself to reading only stories coming out of one country or one situation is to ignore not only a richly diverse world of published stories but to blind yourself to the increasingly global nature of humanity, with all the complexity and nuance that entails.

The Math:

Baseline Assessment: 8/10 

Bonuses: +1 for an amazing range of science fiction and spec stories, +1 for making my laugh and cry in the same collection

Negatives: -1 for a few choppy transitions story to story

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10 "amazing and important and you read that like right now" see our full rating system here.

--

POSTED BY: Charles, avid reader, reviewer, and sometimes writer of speculative fiction. Contributor to Nerds of a Feather since 2014.

REFERENCE: ed. Murah, Mahvesh. The Apex Book of World SF, Volume 4 [Apex, 2016]

Thursday Morning Superhero

There are some pretty cool things happening over on Kickstarter from IDW Games.  I admit I was a bit skeptical about IDW moving into the tabletop sphere, but so far the kind folks at IDW Games have delivered some solid additions to my tabletop.  Since SDCC bits of information have been trickling out about the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game.  Yesterday morning it popped up on Kickstarter and looks very promising.  What has me most intrigued is the involvement of Kevin Eastman.  Cleary not a gimmick, Eastman appears to be heavily invested in this game.  Not only is it connected to the current arc of TMNT comics from IDW, Eastman played an active role in the dice pooling mechanics.  Check it out here and let me know what you think!

Pick of the Week:
Nailbiter #20 - Wait.  No.  That didn't happen.  There is no way I read what I just think I read.  Let's backtrack a little bit.  Barker and Finch wrap things up nicely in Atlanta, but as they close in on arresting Vaughn for the string of former Buckaroo residents who have been murdered, he mentions a mysterious Master who might be part of the cause as to why residents of Buckaroo grow up to be serial killers.  Barker is dealing with her own flashes of violence and fears she might turn at any moment, but this new development is very promising.  Joshua Williamson is a big tease.  Whenever he reveals more,  you realize that there is still much more that remains hidden.  All I know about the mystery, is that it is so big and horrifying, that the FBI and others who know about it will do everything they can do so it remains hidden.  They won't stop it, they will only cover it up.   At least Finch's partner, Carroll, who recruited Finch to Buckaroo way back in the first issue, is finally waking up from his coma.  Without spoiling anything, it is worth the wait for his awakening.

The Rest:
The Walking Dead #151 - Robert Kirkman gives us a very interesting Walking Dead this week.  It opens with some good old fashioned zombie hunting, but the meat of this issue is what might be ultimately setting up Rick's downfall.  All he is wants is the trust of the people, but all he is doing is putting his people in charge.  It seems like he is opening the door for Negan to plant a seed of mistrust in one of his caregivers to really shake things up.  The revelation at the end was pretty good, but I think Rick's tunnel vision is going to lead to his end.  Not sure why, but I feel that he only has a few more issues left before Negan finally does him in.


Paper Girls #5 - I am still not 100% sure what is going on, but I know that the girls are caught in the middle of a battle from beings from the future.  It is a war between the older generation and the younger generation and it isn't clear who we should trust yet.  This book has come a long way from the 80's Goonie-ish movie vibe from issue #1.  It has molded into a sci-fi mystery that feels right up Brian K. Vaughan's alley.  The only downside is we have to wait until June for the next issue.  I guess that gives you time to catch up on what has been a very enjoyable series.

Obi-Wan & Anakin #2 - The steam punk adventures of Anakin and Obi-Wan continue as they attempt to find who sent the distress call on the ancient Jedi frequency.  The waring factions on this planet, the open and closed, appear to have no middle ground.  After their planet was left for dead, these two competing factions have been vying for control.  While the main story is entertaining, the gem in this issue is the flashback that gives us a glimpse of how the Emperor began to corrupt a young Anakin.  We don't see much, but possibly enough to bring me back for issue #3.




POSTED BY MIKE N. aka Victor Domashev -- comic guy, proudly raising nerdy kids, and Nerds of a Feather contributor since 2012.   

Microreview [book]: The Fifth Season, by N.K. Jemisin

Jemisin has set a new standard for what an epic fantasy novel can and should look like.

In a much more standard fantasy novel you have a hero or a group of heroes on a quest to defeat some sort of a big bad and save the country, maybe the world. In The Fifth Season, the world is continually at risk of being destroyed, but the end of the world only means the end of human civilization. The world goes on.

For more than ten thousand years the world has undergone a series of cataclysms which have marked a "Fifth Season", a time of death and destruction which invariably brings the human population to a subsistence level at best. So few survive the passing of a new season.

But this is where the world itself is a character, perhaps the main character. The Pangaea-esque world continent is known as The Stillness, which is notably ironic because this world, this continent is anything but still. Wracked with near constant earthquakes as the continent is crisscrossed with fault lines and volcanoes ever on the edge of erupting. The reason there is any stability at all is the presence of orogenes, men and women who can harness the geologic power of the planet. They can quell earthquakes or cause a volcanic eruption. With their control over the earth, orogenes have ensured the survival of the city-state of Yumenes, home of the orogene school The Fulcrum.

Naturally, The Fifth Season opens with the destruction of Yumenes done with such power to eventually split the continent and blot out the sun with ash. This is the end of the world, again.  This is a season marking cataclysm, but it is one, strangely, so easily forgotten because once Jemisin brings the reader into the stories of the three viewpoint characters of Damaya, Essun, and Syenite, we are so engaged with those individual stories that the fact that the world may have just been destroyed again somehow fades into the background.

Ultimately, that is where the heart of The Fifth Season lies (and where it should lie). The entirely separate journeys of three women, three orogenes, are what binds the novel together.  Except, it isn't so much a "journey" or an "adventure" in the traditional sense.  Things change, the characters move from one place to another, but their journeys are as much about overcoming the expectations and oppressions of others and also the societal status quo as it is about them reaching any set destination in their lives. Those destinations aren't fixed locations.  If anyone is truly transported on a "journey", it is the reader.

Damaya is taken as a child to learn to control her orogene powers at The Fulcrum, and it is partly through Damaya's story that we, the readers, recognize just how oppressive this world is. Orogenes are taught that even as they learn to control their powers, they must be in turn controlled because they can never truly be trusted. Damaya's assigned Guardian breaks her hand just to demonstrate that it is he that is in control, not Damaya.

Likewise, where Syenite is a fourth ring orogene (giving her a certain amount of status and power), she is not only still under the control of the Guardians, but she is also given to Alabaster, a ten ring orogene, because orogenes must produce children. Neither of them have much of a choice. The ostensible story for Syenite is to travel with Alabaster to another city and clear out the harbor of traffic blocking coral. Syenite's real story? Discovering the limits of what her choices really are.

Essun's story takes place during the novel's present day, but the inciting incident of her story isn't the breaking that will cause the world to end (so we are told in the introduction), but rather the murder of her son. By her husband. Who then kidnapped their daughter.  This is the story of an adult woman dealing with the unspeakable.

While the worldbuilding in The Fifth Season is superb and extraordinary, it does not hold a volcano's breath to how strongly written the novel is and just how incredible these three women are. The nature of the terribly oppressive world of The Stillness, really of the Sanze Empire, is examined through the lives, actions, heartbreaks, oppression, heroism, grief, discovery, and amazing characters of Damaya, Syenite, and Essun. Jemisin will rip your heart out.


The more I think about The Fifth Season, the more I appreciate it and appreciate the various nuances it contains, and the more I anticipate but can scarcely imagine where Jemisin is going to bring us with the forthcoming second volume The Obelisk Gate. The Fifth Season is a gut punch of a novel: uncomfortable, unbelievably wrenching, and stunning. Brilliant.


The Math
Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 for Jemisin's examination of friendship and family , +1 for three strong as hell female protagonists. These women are fully realized.

Penalties: -1 because some events in the novel will be legitimately too upsetting for some readers.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10 "Very High Quality / Standout in its category". See more about our scoring system here.


POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Writer / Editor at Adventures in Reading since 2004, Nerds of a Feather contributor since 2015. Minnesotan.

Reference: Jemisin, N.K. The Fifth Season. [Orbit, 2015]

Microreview [book] : Europe At Midnight by Dave Hutchinson

A complex, intelligent follow-up to Europe In Autumn

Buy it here or via publisher Solaris books

Europe In Autumn (review here) was a favourite of mine a couple of years ago. It managed that trick of providing a challenging read full of complex scenarios and political intelligence without ever stopping itself from feeling like a great spy thriller. Its sequel is equally challenging, taking the springboard of the first novel's brain-warping twist and running with it. I say 'running', but Hutchinson again takes a calm, detailed pace, keen to keep us feet-on-ground with small moments like people actually needing a drink or some food, or noticing the weather, as well as plunging through byzantian conspiracies and violent confrontations.

For those wishing to take on this series without spoilers, please stop here and go off to read Autumn.

Have they gone? Sure? I can hear one of them still putting on their coat?
Okay, cool.

Right, the rest of you I can only assume have read Autumn, don't care about spoilers, or are the kind of person who walks through doors marked 'danger, keep out' with a wry grin. That last set of people will identify with Rudi a little, the last book's hero (who, spoilers, makes a slight return here), but less so with Rupert and Jim , our two main protagonists here. Jim is an intelligence officer in London of the future, the future we know from Autumn - a Europe dissolved and decimated by a virus. Rupert is, meanwhile, a resident and key official of the mysterious, dystopian world of the Campus, and Hutchinson boldly starts his tale here, slowly revealing the dark history of the place, before moving focus to meet Jim and follow a case that leads us first to the big reveal of Ernshire in book one, and then connects through to the Campus world.

More details than this would ruin a compelling, profound and moving story but suffice to say I recommend this novel whole-heartedly, with one piece of advice - stick with it. Like many a great political thriller (like with Le Carre, whom it references again) and many a complex sic-fi world-build, you need to allow the soil to form before you can run free across its land, and Hutchinson isn't immune to the needs of info-dumping at times (but who is), yet some elements are deliberately mysterious without character-motivation, particularly in the early chapters on Campus. So some patience is required as he holds back information seemingly purely for the sake of it at times. This is me stretching for issues however in a novel that challenges, entertains and moves me in such a way that anything else I read this year is going to have to be something special to match up to. The horrific climax to this book brings home how close we are to such horrors today - Hutchinson fractured Europe grows more likely every day - and all the mystical portals up canals don't dilute the harsh reality he bases his excellent fiction on.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 for scaring me with just how close the future world of Europe is to our own; +1 for some excellent humour ( including a future vision of the Eurovision Song contest ) that my review failed to touch on which lightens some of the info-dumps necessary
Penalties: -1 minor quibble but it feels in its primarily male and old-school characters a little too 1980s rather than 2050s

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10 “well worth your time and attention”


Written by English Scribbler

6 Books with Science Fiction and Fantasy Author Lois McMaster Bujold

Lois McMaster Bujold is the author of nearly thirty novels and story collections. She has received the Hugo Award for Best Novel four times (tying Robert A. Heinlein for the most ever), twice won the Nebula for Best Novel, and her novella The Mountains of Mourning was a winner of both the Hugo and the Nebula Award. Bujold is most well known for her long running Miles Vorkosigan series. 2016 marks the 30th anniversary of the publication of her first three novels (Shards of Honor, The Warrior's Apprentice, Ethan of Athos).

Today she shares her "6 Books" with us...

1. What book are you currently reading?

I just finished the galleys for the upcoming 30th anniversary reprint of THE WARRIOR'S APPRENTICE, which probably would have been more fun if I hadn't proofed it three times last year for e-book and other ventures. There can indeed be too much of a good thing. To give my brain a vacation I am about to start on MAELSTROM by Jordan L. Hawk, Book #7 in an indefensibly addictive paranormal-historical genre-mash-up romance series. (Book #1 is titled WIDDERSHINS.)

I have a couple of more-earnest tomes out from the library, MEDIAEVAL GREECE by Nicolas Cheetham, recc'd to me by Harry Turtledove, and MAHABHARATA: A MODERN RETELLING by Carole Satyamurti; we'll see if my brain recharges enough to tackle them again before they come due.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

Two by Ben Aaronovitch: BODY WORK, which is a graphic novel side-story from his main RIVERS OF LONDON series -- I'm waiting for the collected edition on paper, come summer -- and the 6th novel in the series, THE HANGING TREE, due out in June. Interested readers should start with the first book, titled MIDNIGHT RIOT in the US, or RIVERS OF LONDON elsewhere -- I reviewed it when I first read it, here.

3. Is there a book you're currently itching to re-read?

I keep thinking about the fantasy series by Megan Whalen Turner that starts with THE THIEF, and keeps getting better, but I may need to let my last re-read age a bit more.

4. How about a book you've changed your mind about - either positively or negatively?

DUNE by Frank Herbert blew me away when I was fifteen and reading it in the Analog Magazine serialization with illos by John Schoenherr. When I last dipped into it, a few years back, it didn't hold me; I kept arguing with the biology, among other things. It remains memorable, though.

5. What's one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

This list could be as long as my arm, but I will particularly rec the works of SF writer Cordwainer Smith, who was unlike any other writer then (the 1960s) or since. He wrote mostly short stories, only a few novel-length works; his work has been most recently reprinted by NESFA Press and Baen Books. Strange, lyrical, biologically prescient.  

6. And speaking of that, what's *your* latest book, and why is it awesome?

"Awesome" is not for me to judge, but "latest" I can do: GENTLEMAN JOLE AND THE RED QUEEN, the 17th (!) book in the Vorkosigan series, is due out in hardcover February 2 -- Groundhog Day, I note.

Not an action-adventure, not a political thriller, not a mystery, not YA, not a dystopia, not grimdark. It contains a romance as a major subplot, but (as revealed by the structure and sequencing) that is not the main plot, which is, in fact, SF-nal. "Character study" is not an unfair summation, but characters in the context of technologically driven social changes in their world.

The "Red Queen" part of the title refers to several things, in that metaphorical way titles do, but most of all this. (I use it as sort of a synecdoche to encompass all of the bio-evolutionary themes of the book, before people gallop off being too literal about it. Although if they insist, there's Vicereine Cordelia's red hair, natch.)

I believe it is not the case that new readers have to read a pile of other books before this one to get a complete story in this kit, batteries included, if I've done my job as I hope. But I haven't found one to test the theory on yet.

Also just out is the Blackstone Audiobooks edition of the novella "Penric's Demon", a tale in the World of the Five Gods, aka the Chalion fantasy series. It first appeared as an original e-book last summer. It will also be released later this year as a slim hardcover reprint from Subterranean Press. 35,000 words. I've found I have to keep yelling "NOVELLA!" at people -- rather a lot of readers seem to have charged into it thinking it was going to be a fantasy epic, and been brought up short at the end.



POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Writer / Editor at Adventures in Reading since 2004, Nerds of a Feather contributor since 2015. Minnesotan.