Reviews, thoughts and frozen silence

Hayao Miyazaki is the grandfather of anime to me. There are no films by him I do not enjoy. Most of them I hold in very high regard. But in addition to films, he has also produced one of the best comics (or manga if you will) ever.

Nausicaä is devastatingly beautiful and heartbreaking story of love, purity, innocence and humanity. It is a story of hope and loss, past and future. It reminds me of Lone Wolf and the Cub in the sense that it manages to transcend the form of comic. It feels like a book, but offers experience that is almost like you are there - like you would have shared the story of Nausicaä by being there with her, all the way.

Miyazaki has this somber, some could say a bit pessimistical view towards humanity. He often touches the concept of destruction in his works and the harm we manage to cause to our own environment and our own future. The world of Nausicaä is not a happy one. There’s war and burden of the past world on everyone’s shoulders and things are not getting better. And who would believe that a single girl could make the world a better place?

It is one of the only pieces of art that have managed to make me burst into cry. I’d say it has offered me the purest form of katharsis I’ve ever thought possible, and that is very much said.

Go and read it dear people

I’ve been a bit of a martial arts and oriental freak ever since I saw my first Jet Lie movie. Since then I’ve been interested in zen, bushido, kung-fu and the whole package. At first it was young man’s fumbling in the dark, but as years passed it became not so young man’s awe driven travel through the garden of secrets.

Lone Wolf and the Cub and Samurai Executioner form a single entity in my books. They both are excellent comics. Actually they are more than comics. They are a collection of stories that define what is bushido. They have more in common with Hagakure than comic books. Except that they read like a comic. They are comics for old people. They are comics about fleeting moments and mortality. About choices, responsibility and duty of the lost world. They offer a view to the old Japan, a place where things are not what we modern westerners would think that they are.

The most devastating thing about them is that they manage to transcend their form. The intense experiences that they have offered me are not experiences that could be delivered by pictures or written words. They are something utterly extreme and alien. When you turn the page and suddenly you absolutely realize what happened, you end up sweating and listening to your heart pounding away the empty seconds.

Get them, read them and get ready for something intense.

For some reason I’m a sucker for fantasy literature. Not all of it, dear god, but there are quite a few writers I really do enjoy reading. I think it has got something to do with the fact that I enjoy soundtrack music, playing roleplaying games and I tend to daydream quite a lot. There’s just some part of me that yearns for mythical, unrealistic and unreal vistas and experiences and ‘lo behold, fantasy literature comes and delivers!

Enter George R.R. Martin. Wonderful writer with distinct and intense style that is definitely suited for the more grown up people. His massive series Song of Ice and Fire (still continuing) is truly a story of epic scale. There is the king, the dead king and the throne. There are families, bloodlines and wars. People are born, people die, people weep and people smile. There’s sex and violence, betrayal and trust. It’s like Rome but in a mythical land of medieval fantasy. And it’s not beautiful. It’s gritty, grim and fatal.

I guess I enjoy Martin’s style so much because it is not easy to read (hmm, isn’t that a contradiction, oh well…). There are lots of names and the storylines are vast and slow. But eventually, when the wheels turn, they turn with power and mass. This is not lightweight stuff.