Movie: more on Howl's

The NYT's A.O. Scott muses on Miyazaki. Pretty decent short overview.

And here's another article on how Disney animation lost its soul, and what it can learn from the Miyazaki films they're distributing.

Of course, Disney never had much of a soul to lose, unless you're willing to extend a line of metaphysical credit to fascist patriarch Walt.

The current Disney regime reversed Uncle Walt's founding policy of developing their own "product" in-house and went with a more corporate model of letting other people be creative and then buying them out. For example, they snapped up the Muppets before Jim Henson's body was cold.

Their distribution deal with Miyazaki is a similar effort to shore up the public perception of the company, one that's apparently working as a promotional bit on one of those 'news entertainment' shows made clear to me.

The talking head previewing Howl's kept referring to it as "a Disney film"...is our culture so debased that distributing now implies authorship? I suppose it's not much worse than movies promoted as being "from the producer of Big Pile of Shit with Lots of Explosions IV!"

Enough of rambling.

I'm looking forward to Howl's, regardless of whether Joe Sixpack thinks it sprang full-blown from the forehead of Uncle Walt, the ass of Mike Eisner, or was secreted from glands of some repellent cave-dwelling human/lizard hybrid.