“People who design machines and airplanes {or buildings}, no matter how much they believe that what they do is good, the winds of time eventually turn them into tools of industrial civilization. They’re cursed dreams. Animation, too. Beautiful yet cursed dreams.”
― Hayao Miyazaki
Every day that goes by I feel the pull of anprim just a little more...
I'm not 100% there, but Black Seed Journal gave me a lot to think about, especially the articles by Sever (PDF) and the article My Mind Below This Beautiful Country.
I know he made up a lot of it, claiming that he'd rather indulge a liberating madness than an oppressive rationality, but I was surprised to learn how much of it is... Archaeologically sound. The idea of cities being the beginning of class and major climate change is true, and the poetic language of it gives emotional weight to facts that are already compelling.
I read Against the Grain (PDF) first, which is the just facts archaeological / political science version. Then I read AH,AL second and it let me think about ATG in some deeper ways I wouldn't have otherwise. Sort of like reading theory and then thinking about it on mushrooms.
PS, if you like Perlman, before he was an anprim, he wrote a really good pamphlet from an anarchist perspective about his participation in Mai '68
Seriously, this is a banger of a thread, loving these recs
Miyazaki founded Studio Ghibli together with Isao Takahata. Here is a scene from Takahata's film, Pom Poko, where a bunch of racoons beat up cops with their balls.
https://youtu.be/YFPaSIy--50
It's honestly really good and wholesome. It blows most Disney movies out of the water.
Yes, they are actually tanuki, which is more literally a raccoon dog. The english dub calls them racoons, though technically incorrect.
Apparently the inventor of the loudspeaker regretted his invention after seeing the Nazis use it at Nuremberg
I mean, you can only beat yourself up so much, they would've just had an ordinary rally and things would've progressed the same
The Nausicaa manga is fantastic. It's a shame he lost his Marxism when the Soviet Union was falling. Think how much more based his movies would be than they already are.
Yeah. I feel like with shit like climate change it's easy to see why he kinda lost that view on historical materialism as there was a whole other factor that could destroy the world before communism is achieved. It was the 80s and Marx was deader than dead until basically 2011 onward. His anti civ turn still has allowed him to make amazing movies.
He's also still clearly a materialist, like, in Kingdom of Dreams and Madness (the source for this quote) he talks about analyzing the news by thinking about the material cause of each news event and writing it on a white board.
I don't think Marx left him as much as he thinks it does (need to watch this doc).
Miyazaki's work is so fundamental to the way I think about a lot of things. I think he literally shaped my dreams / / the form that my dreams take. I am sympathetic to anti-civ / anprim shit, because, yes, ultimately machinery and industry has produced mostly suffering and destruction of nature. Sadly, though, I think the only way out is through. We're looking down the barrel of 6C of warming by the end of the century. We can't go back to our natural environment, we have totally destroyed it. That world is gone forever. There's really no winding back this process. Once the methane has all released and broken down into carbon again, I think we will be able to start some sort of large scale carbon capture and maybe bring levels down safely after a century or two. That's all in the long term of course. We also, I think, don't need to touch on the size of the current human population in proportion to its relative natural carrying capacity, which even under good environmental conditions, likely far exceeds what it is capable of, even if you don't strictly stick to a hunter-gatherer economic system and implement some sort of low-carbon, low intensity agriculture, like even if you do feudalism with modern science and no lords, you still can't feed and house and give a place to shit to everyone. We're probably gonna have to live largely artificially soon, certainly in some places that's already the case for certain times of year.
All this needs a lot of energy ⚡ but that's okay because we have plenty of ⚛ fissible ⚛ material
I love Miyazaki, his anti-civ, pro environmentalist message in every movie hits so fucking hard. I saw spirited away a few weeks ago and the way they make all the stuff come out in gushing nasty goo, was so well done.
I think planes we're more about the aesthetics for him, the whole ' if it looks sexy it'll fly' thing
Whenever I seriously consider the possibility that anprims are right, my gut twists.
Ultimately, the joys and passions of my life - computer programming, video game design, tabletop roleplaying, science fiction - are products of industrial society. What do I have without them? What am I without them? Even at the times when I can believe that the anti-civ view of how society should be organized is necessary for the greatest good, I can't imagine myself thriving in such a society. I can't imagine myself feeling like my life in such a society is worthwhile. I can't imagine I feel like I would have a reason to continue living, or passions to drive me, or meaningful ways to express myself, or any reason to keep going beyond the fear of death. Believe me, I've tried, but I can't.
What does it mean if I can only properly exist in a society that shouldn't?
Maybe my own life is incompatible with the world as it should be. Maybe the proper world is one without me. Frankly, the thought scares the shit out of me.
And this is why they are wrong. The objective of Communism is the building of man's natural habitat. We don't have that, it was lost under the Eemian ice. Even if we did, we can't go back.
So now we need to build the most flourishing world for everyone. For some that's a Culture Orbital or a Starship lighting out for Tau Ceti, for others Rural Arcadia or the Nomadic Steppes, and for some a Hunter Gatherer Utopia. And that's fine.
Everyone deserves to live in the place they will find the most happy and the most flourishing. We probably will not live to see it but we can make a start.
I'm making some assumptions here, admittedly. Tabletop roleplaying didn't really come about until the mid-20th century, so I figured that the material conditions to support it never really arose before then.
Isn't Miyazaki and absolutely awful fucking father? I saw some video of him watching his son's first movie debut and he walks out in disgust. He only admonishes his son for his efforts. What a dick.
If I recall the documentary in which the whole situation is on display, he gets out to smoke a cigarette and says to the man following him everywhere that's it's not good. Then after, he tells his son he doesn't think it's very good. But then for his second movie he says he has surpassed him. There's also a lot of background story about his son not really wanting to direct, more seizing the opportunity because Miyazaki's longterm producer proposed it to him, and he only really made it wholly starting from his second film. And Miyazaki kind of meddling into his son's movie because he doesn't trust him to make it.
Anyway, I don't know, it's the 4 part documentary on NHK japan or something.
This is where The Wind Rises really disappointed me. It was the most obvious avenue he had to explore how great feats of engineering turn into war machines, but outside of a line or two at the end, its mostly ignored. I can forgive him for it though when he has made so many other great films.
It might be because I had just heard this quote, but I read it as one of the central themes of the movie
It should be a central theme, but for 99% of the movie not a single character offers and opinion on the idea that they are making planes for a fascist regime during world war 2. There is so much lost potential in this film. Mitsubishi during the 30s and 40s was the equivalent of Lockheed Martin; if you are working there you are working to further the efforts of imperialism. Everyone working there knows from the beginning that they are producing weapons of war. Instead of having any focus on that aspect, the movie portrays the creation of these war machines as realising a dream with Caproni saying that Jiro built beautiful aircraft.
The Zero was the reason for Japan's air superiority when they took on China and South East Asia. It is also the reason they were able to pull off the Pearl Harbour bombings. It was also one of the main aircraft, if not the main aircraft used for the kamikaze missions. The real life Jiro had strong opinions on the use of his creations. He also had strong opinions on the war and experienced the consequences of the war first hand. Jiro would also work himself into the ground during the war and almost died from it while neglecting his wife and child. This is what I mean by how I was disappointed by how much was ignored. Miyazaki made choices to try turn the film into a fairy tale like story about the genius of Jiro while ignoring the circumstances that made Jiro who he was and what his creations turned into. Its especially weird because like the quote in this thread and in many interviews Miyazaki has always been adamant in his anti war stance.
Anyway, sorry for the rant
I think the scenes of violence interspersed into the fairytale story did a lot of the legwork. It's also important to remember that Miyazaki's distributor employs censors and a lot of his films are very carefully walking the line to make anti-war films that get past the censors. Sometimes it's well done, like Nausicaa, Mononoke, or Howl, and sometimes it's more ambiguous like in The Wind Rises.
