Watership Down (Rosen, 1978) is, without a doubt, one of the pivotal cinematic experiences in my life. It captivated me at a very young age with its danger and darkness. It also taught me a number of valuable lessons, things I have thought about ever since. Fortune favoring the bold…
Episode 147 – Spirited Away
Spirited Away (Miyazaki, 2001) truly represents a vision of one person – its director, writer, producer, and animator Hayao Miyazaki. Miyazaki, the most prolific creator at Japan’s Studio Ghibli, was inspired by the 10-year-old daughter of a friend to bring to life a young heroine whom other young girls could…
Episode 105 – Invention for Destruction
There is simply nothing like Karel Zeman’s Invention for Destruction (1958). Taken from the pages of some of Jules Verne’s greatest adventures, these images combine to form one of the greatest cinematic pop-up books ever committed to film. The amount of painstaking detail that must have been involved in bringing…
Episode 021 – The Tale of the Princess Kaguya
It’s been a long time since I have been as immediately taken with a film the way I was with Isao Takahata’s The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013). We don’t often feature films that are this new on the show. Typically, for a movie to make its way into…