Great piece here. Porco Rosso might just be my favorite Miyazaki film next to Nausicaä. Spirited Away is Miyazaki's masterpiece as a filmmaker. I like Porco Rosso because as a military historian, it's always interesting to see the interwar period in southern Europe depicted, especially with the call backs to the Italian front of WWI, or the Italo-Turkish War, and how that leads the countries into the 1920s and 30s. As the descendant of southern Italian immigrants to the US, it's an interesting look at the home country, as we start learning more and more about our past, and start to question the prevailing narratives surrounding the Risorgimento, and the "unification" of Italy (really, the war of the Savoiard Conquest). If I could change one thing about the film, I would tell Cary Elwes to just use his natural accent, and change the origin of Donald Curtis from Texan to high-class New Englander - Cary's accent reminds me of some of the old money families up there. His "Texas" accent is atrocious.
So, in my view, poetic insight into the metaphysical depths of a creature’s semiotic meaning can be true or false. There can be equivocities. I think the poet has vatic vision because caught up in the ecstasy of the other. The sophist never goes out of him or herself, never really takes in the message of the other. The result is propaganda, an egophanic screed, but not a revelation of created depths, because the mirror of the soul must be humble. An ascesis is needed for the true names to be heard and reflected in art.
Anyway, I too, am fond of Miyazaki, and the point of all this is that whether or not an artist is consciously aware, whether or not a particular meaning is congenial or not to the historical conventions of a particular culture, the deepest meanings do not merely come from a horizontal line of accrued symbolic gestures. They also come from a vertical, formal dimension that transcends those limits.
Those who decry cultural appropriation or dismiss analogies across traditions betray a positivist historicism. Time is not like that, nor is the perduring eternal care that intersects in a manner that makes possible the surmise of common discoveries a coda purely outside of time. Indeed, if the Logos is the ultimate Source of cosmic realities, it is no stretch to discern a connection between Christ and Miyazaki’s avian friends.
Great piece here. Porco Rosso might just be my favorite Miyazaki film next to Nausicaä. Spirited Away is Miyazaki's masterpiece as a filmmaker. I like Porco Rosso because as a military historian, it's always interesting to see the interwar period in southern Europe depicted, especially with the call backs to the Italian front of WWI, or the Italo-Turkish War, and how that leads the countries into the 1920s and 30s. As the descendant of southern Italian immigrants to the US, it's an interesting look at the home country, as we start learning more and more about our past, and start to question the prevailing narratives surrounding the Risorgimento, and the "unification" of Italy (really, the war of the Savoiard Conquest). If I could change one thing about the film, I would tell Cary Elwes to just use his natural accent, and change the origin of Donald Curtis from Texan to high-class New Englander - Cary's accent reminds me of some of the old money families up there. His "Texas" accent is atrocious.
So, in my view, poetic insight into the metaphysical depths of a creature’s semiotic meaning can be true or false. There can be equivocities. I think the poet has vatic vision because caught up in the ecstasy of the other. The sophist never goes out of him or herself, never really takes in the message of the other. The result is propaganda, an egophanic screed, but not a revelation of created depths, because the mirror of the soul must be humble. An ascesis is needed for the true names to be heard and reflected in art.
Anyway, I too, am fond of Miyazaki, and the point of all this is that whether or not an artist is consciously aware, whether or not a particular meaning is congenial or not to the historical conventions of a particular culture, the deepest meanings do not merely come from a horizontal line of accrued symbolic gestures. They also come from a vertical, formal dimension that transcends those limits.
Those who decry cultural appropriation or dismiss analogies across traditions betray a positivist historicism. Time is not like that, nor is the perduring eternal care that intersects in a manner that makes possible the surmise of common discoveries a coda purely outside of time. Indeed, if the Logos is the ultimate Source of cosmic realities, it is no stretch to discern a connection between Christ and Miyazaki’s avian friends.