I didn’t type this directly into the blogpost drafts like I did last time, but I nearly did. 

 

Context: on Saturday morning (yes, that means I’m writing this blog post late, but this isn’t senioritis, this was on purpose because this is what I wanted to write about) my dad woke me up at around four thirty so I could eat before fasting to make up for the days I missed during last year’s Ramadan. 

 

If you’d like to refer to this post, you’ll understand why pairing this with my horrible sleep schedule was… a bad idea. Like any person with a normal sleep schedule, my dad headed to bed after morning prayers. I, on the other hand, stayed awake. 

 

I could go into a whole schpiel into how my dad got up at four in the morning to prepare fishcakes from H-Mart with rice so that I would already have something to eat when I woke up even though he himself wasn’t fasting that day and didn’t need to be up that early, but I’m trying not to get super emotional about Fatherly Love Languages while he’s in Indonesia. 

 

Anyways – back to our scheduled program! When we last left off, I was wide awake at around five in the morning now. And my parents and I are subscribed to HBO Max for the year. 

 

So I went on a binge of the Studio Ghibli movies. Here’s a bunch of ratings/rankings of what I watched, plus maybe some of my thoughts. 

 

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind: 10/10

 

Starting off super strong, but really, there are no flaws in this movie. Definitely one of my favorites growing up, even if my mother never liked it as much because there were things that escaped her understanding (they escaped my understanding too). There’s a really great message about coexisting with every aspect of your environment, and there’s definitely a statement to be found in regards to what human pollution could do to our environment one day. 

 

This film is also outstanding to me because on a principle, I’m not a huge fan of post-apocalyptic cinema, but this proves to be the exception. Nausicaa as a protagonist also ticks off all the boxes of an ideal female protagonist without being a Y/N or overtly not like other girls. She’s headstrong, assertive, empathetic, and intelligent. 

 

If Willow Nagai is reading this, I think she’ll remember how heavily I recommended this to her. Our girl Nausicaa is an environmentalist queen in her heart and soul, and is also like, the most badass princess ever. Seriously, she gets shot at one point and willingly steps into an acid lake to protect her people and to protect one of the native species they live alongside. It’s iconic. 

 

Whisper of the Heart: 9/10

 

I docked a point off of this one because I’m single, bitter, and jealous of the two people in this photo. 

 

Whisper of the Heart is the most rom com-esque of Studio Ghibli’s films. Did I project onto the female lead, Shizuku, because she grew to realize her love of writing that stemmed from a love for reading that ultimately allowed her to self-actualize? Yeah, maybe. 

 

This film also introduced me to the song Take Me Home, Country Roads way back in the day, and I’ll always associate these two things together. Whisper of the Heart might not be for you if you’re not a rom-com person, although there are a lot of Easter Eggs and allusions to another Ghibli Film, The Cat Returns. 

 

Seriously, this is a romance. We literally follow the meet-cute of these two highschoolers, Shizuku and Seiji. I’m not kidding: Shizuku, Textbook Bookworm first notices who he is because he always checked out a book right before she did, which she notices via the library cards in the bookshelves (this set in like, the 80s/90s, so nothing was digitized yet). 

 

Is there a cheesy proclamation of love at the end? Absolutely! Will I begrudge the film for this? Absolutely not! It’s sweet. They’re cute. She was a writer, he was an aspiring violin maker. Need I say more? 

 

Ocean Waves: 2/10

 

Until I watched this movie, I didn’t think I’d say this of anything by Studio Ghibli. 

 

But I hated it. 

 

I’m not even exaggerating – I really, really disliked this movie. I think the two points I’m giving it are in lieu of its visuals and soundtrack, which were what made it bearable to sit through. Plus, our secondary male lead (Yutaka) wasn’t all bad, and I was about to say that our primary male lead (Taku, aka the guy in the picture) was pretty good too until I remembered that he also really annoyed me a lot throughout the film, so never mind. 

 

The whole thing is told in a super extended flashback, and our guy Taku here is essentially really down bad for this city girl from Tokyo (Rikako, also in the image) who moves to their country seaside town that I cannot for the life of me remember the name of. 

 

For awhile, I was really worried that my dislike of Rikako was some form of internalized misogyny. And then I rewatched the movie and was quickly reassured to the fact that no, it is not internalized misogyny. Rikako is a terrible love interest and friend – seriously. She spends the film exploiting Taku for money (like, hundreds of dollars worth), tries to pressure her friend Yumi to go on a flight to Tokyo with her after lying about the whole thing, gaslights basically everyone, and talks down to everyone because of their country accents. The one “good” memory that Taku talks about having with Rikako is one that he essentially makes up in his head. 

 

If Hannah Mitchinson is reading this, then she’ll remember the time we watched this film together and I spent the entirety of it in annoyance.

 

The Wind Rises: 7/10

 

I will never emotionally recover from this movie. I cried. I cried a lot. 

 

From my limited contextual knowledge, I’m 80% sure that The Wind Rises was based on true events. I think knowing that going in helped me sort of mentally prepare for the fact that it would be a bittersweet ending, but it still didn’t fully prepare me. 

 

I just did a quick Google search. This is based on true events. 

 

So The Wind Rises essentially follows the life of Jiro Horikoski, a Japanese warplane designer during WWII. It has very different vibes from other Studio Ghibli films, mostly because it’s a biography, but the studio is still able to insert magical realism into the story. That’s a term we learned last semester, and these elements really help to sort of give that Ghibli character to what is inherently a non-fiction, something that Ghibli doesn’t tend to dabble in. 

 

Again, there’s a very bittersweet ending that is characteristic of most Ghibli films, but it’s really well suited to this story – of course there’s a bittersweet irony to the fact that Jiro designed such beautiful planes that left such terrible destruction in the war.