• JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    look, don't get me wrong, it's a classic, I get it. I watched it years ago, loved it. Now I'm making my way through the Ghibli catalog on HBOMax and there's some real bangers, some eh. But whatevs. Like don't think I hate it or anything. I just think that a lot of the love it gets in leftist spaces is based on nostalgia.

    Sure, the humans are victims of society, and ideally, we'd get a movie about them going off and fighting back against that society, but we don't we got a movie about how in order for them to survive they have to destroy the environment around them... but there's no reparations for the environment as the victim in the ending. There's no real environmentalist lesson that it gets applauded for. There's a Deus ex machina rebirth and a throwaway line about how the deer god never really dies. Humanity gets to go back to doing whatever they hell they want and we're just told that everything's going to be okay because the protagonist that couldn't stop them from killing the deer god is going to make sure they stay on the up and up. I don't want to keep debating it, call it disneyfied or whatever, that's just my take on it.

    • Z_Poster365 [none/use name]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      I think even if everything you said is true (i don’t agree that it is) your entire premise of judging the quality of art and film by how well it aligns with your ideological predisposition is fundamentally flawed and lib-brained. Based on the erroneous assumption that having art with good politics will fix anything in the real world, instead of just reflecting and crystallizing the world.

      The Chapos talk about this a lot, if directors and artists start listening to critique like this you get a lot of bad art with “good” messages

      • JamesConeZone [they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        The Chapos talk about this a lot, if directors and artists start listening to critique like this you get a lot of bad art with “good” messages

        evangelical "art" has entered the chat

      • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        And I think you're being dismissive of the environment's rights in a movie that's lauded as a big environmentalist champion. Everybody loses.👍😁

        • Z_Poster365 [none/use name]
          ·
          edit-2
          3 years ago

          “Rights”

          Yeah I don’t think we are on the same page at all. I just got done explaining how this movie uses dialectic materialism and not idealist concepts like rights or morality.

          This movie is a beautiful reflection of the themes and beliefs of the Japanese left post-USSR. I don’t know what more you want really, you want it to fit in a nice perfect box