Conde - Spirited Away

Spirited Away, most likely the best decision for us to be able to finish the class with. I watched this movie when i was younger so watching it again for the first time in a long time bring back good memories. This was one of the first anime films i have seen and i have always enjoyed it. Enough to call it my favorite. I think that this film might be one of the most beutifully produced anime films created. Not just because of its very good artistic style, but because of the imagination it had to have taken to come up with a storyline like this.

The story at all times is completely unexpected. The fact that the story was about being in another world, or an alternate universe, gave the creator of this film a lot of room for imagination, which he must have had. There are a lot of things in this film that i have not seen done in others, even considering how long this film has been around. There is a lot of small detail that truly makes the animation amazing. Even down to the smallest creature that was thought of in the film, there was still an effort to give them human qualities, or a certain personality that we can get a strong feeling of.

  Seeing this film again was really cool because I saw it in different ways. I love that i had the opportunity to.

Conde - Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind

Nausicaa, a lot like Princess Mononoke had something to it that made me think. One thing we were talking about in class is the fact that we need nature to be able to live our every day lives, but nature does not need us. If we as humans were to all disappear, yes the planet would be different because it is missing the most intelligent species there is, but it would not need us. The earth is completely functional without human interaction, both directly and indirectly. Some may argue that it would even be better. The point that I truly found interesting is when it was brought up that a natural disaster isn't necessarily a natural disaster unless there are humans involved. It shows how great nature is because something that is so big and powerful to us is just a small piece of the earths way of trying to fix itself, which is why "natural disasters" often cannot be stopped. These films also did a good job showing how powerful nature is in many ways. A good way that the creators of Nausicaa and Princess Mononoke showed that nature was possible was simply how large they made creatures. Insects were huge and animals were huge to emphasize the power of nature.

In this film, and Princess Mononoke as well, there are a lot of different ways that the characters within the film relate to nature and how nature reacts back. The Man vs Nature conflict starts to become a theme throughout both of these films and there is a struggle to be able to live alongside animals. I also like how in these two films animals are a big part of the plots. They are implemented in a way that they are not only creatures that roam around while everything is going on, but the film makers gave the animals a certain personality to them, or maybe some sort of human-like quality even. This makes the animals feel closer to humans and is a good way of showing the connection between humans and nature, which is important as well.