favorites – Reviews and Rambles

April 19, 2017August 20, 2017

[Comikist] All about Craig Thompson

Have you read Craig Thompson yet? And I swear I’m not cheating by putting the name of an artist here instead of a list of comics. It’s not like I don’t have a list. Pfft… How could you even think that? It’s just that the list is two specific books by Craig Thompson – Blankets and Habibi. In that particular order.

Blankets by Craig Thompson

Habibi by Craig Thompson

Thompson’s work, I believe, exemplifies comics as an art. I don’t know where to start talking about it – the exotic stories or the art that merges seamlessly into words. The ink splattered goodness is so heavenly, you can literally tear off every page of the comic (if you have the heart to), get them framed and hang them on your walls. I have lost count of the number of seconds (err… minutes) I have spent lost in a single page while reading the book. And not just while reading, but afterwords. Like googling a quote you’re itching to remember, I’m often stuck looking for a particular page from one of the books, or trying to replicate it by drawing it myself when I can’t get enough of it.

Blankets

Habibi

Books are supposed to teleport us into worlds different from our own. Most do it through stories and in novels, the writing style makes all of it happen. Comics, on the other hand, become a double-edged sword. While the images might complement the story, they might even be distracting for the reader, because there is a lot of input to the brain, the flashy images, the stills, the dialog boxes and the words themselves. Craig Thompson executes the style perfectly; so that you feel like the protagonist is holding your hand and leading you through all the confusion that is their story while still have time to swoon over the art.

Then their is the story. Or stories. All of them. The ones I have read till now and the ones I am saving for later, all of them justify the beautiful art they are soaked in. Be it Blankets, where Craig weaves you a story of his first love, each thread spun with nostalgia, or Habibi, a story of slaves and sheikhs as bitter as folklore. If the art is beautiful, the stories enchanting, and tempting you to peak into the future by turning just a few pages.

Even if you don’t read comics, I would urge you to make this one author an exception. If you’re looking for a comfortable spot to edge into the comic world, this is a good way to ease your foot in the door. For starters, I’ll recommend Blankets. And only of you absolutely love Thompson’s style, move to Habibi.

While Blankets is at the end a story – a fond remembrance of Thompson’s first love, Habibi is more of an artistic expression. At many places, it feels like a peak into the author’s mind and his drawing style rather than just a story. I liked the book, but a huge reason behind it is my admiration for Thompson’s art, which made occasional expansions and digressions in the book interesting as it let him expand on how he draws. But for readers who are just interested in the story, these diversions just put them off. In Blankets, the pace of the story is more suited to the readers.

So the verdict is, read Blankets for sure. And if you feel like you start craving more of Thompson’s style, give Habibi a shot.

December 3, 2016April 29, 2017

An evening in the Ghibli Museum

True I had been super excited to visit the Ghibli museum.
True I had expected it to be amazing (unsuccessfully trying not to get my hopes too high).
True I had been waiting for the originality and beauty of all those movies to flood my brain again.
But I was still unprepared. I had still undermined how perfect it could be.

With breathtaking manuscripts of stop motion animation, oil paintings that looked like windows to other worlds that I know all too well, little unexpected animated features and reels and reels of film, they flaunted their skills unabashedly. And I could only stand and watch, trying not to gape.

Getting There

I would suggest taking the JR Chuo line to Kichijoji Station and then walking to the museum through Inokashira Park. It’s not too far and the park is beautiful enough to make you forget about the distance.
Alternatively, take the JR Chuo line to Mitaka Station and the bus to Ghibli Museum

Tips before going

Tickets! Ghibli museum requires tickets to be booked one month in advance, so this needs to be planned. You can get them here.
If you get the 4 pm slot, keep in mind that the museum closes exactly at 6, and you might not be able to see the remaining parts of the museum after that. You might also want to get to the Laputa robot before it gets dark, as there is not much lighting around it, so put that first.
Brace yourself for the feels.

The Experience

First, is the way to the museum itself. I had a 4 pm entry pass, but I left at 2 from Shinjuku station so that I would have a one hour margin. Though I had taken the ticket to Mikata, I got off one station before at Kichijoji, just because I could see a huge park in the maps on the walk from Kichijoji to Ghibli Museum. Retrospectively, this has been one of my best decisions of the trip. The Inokashira pond and the park enclosing it is a feast for the eyes. And as I was going to the Ghibli museum, the park and the autumn splendor really set the mood for it. It was a relatively peaceful place blanketed by shed leaves and dotted with numerous park benches. Here and there, you could spot students trying to capture the beautiful scenes in their drawing pads (I gave it a shot too, but the results weren’t exactly flattering). I spent an hour in the place, sitting and drawing and looking around, and almost got late to the museum. If I had any inkling about how pretty it could have been, I would have went with more time to spare.

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You could imagine my excitement as I rushed to the museum. This could be the highlight of my trip to Japan. It was the first thing I had marked on the map when it was finally decided that I was going to Japan. Ghibli, and specially Miyazaki’s, movies have meant so much to me through all these years. They have been my inspiration, my solace, my musical haven and my friends during the shittiest moments of my life.

Inside the museum, I rushed to the Laputa robot at the rooftop as it was getting dark. The only way to access the rooftop is a spiral staircase which was a nice touch. Inside the museum, there are many rooms dedicated to the creation of Ghibli movies. The animation studio has wonderful live stop motion features that look magical even in real life. Then there is a catbus room where you can look through different models and sit in a life sized model of the bus from My Neighbour Totoro. My personal favourite was a room where original paintings and drafts by ghibli artists were pasted all over the walls. I was mesmerized by the level of detail that goes into each panel. The watercolors looked beautiful but the oil paintings were on another level completely. At first, I was sure they were photos and not real paintings. I could not imagine the skills, devotion, love and respect that went into each of them. And for the first time I felt as if the movies did not do enough justice to the quality of the artwork of Ghibli.

The Laputa robot

The command cube embedded in the ground with engravings on it

The Command Cube from Laputa

Laputa robot from a distance

In addition, there is a shop, a cafe and many other rooms in the museum. They also showed a cute little motion picture about a dog, Koro, in the museum which was around a 15 minute short story. There were no Engllish subtitles when I saw it, but there was not much being said in the movie and the story was pretty simple to follow. I could not get any pictures in the museum as it was not allowed >.< But take my word for it, it feels like an escapade into the Ghibli world, the most beautiful there can be.

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The museum closes exactly at 6, so I did not have much time. Leaving was much harder than I had expected, and I felt a little jealous of the people working there (though I guess dealing with ghibli crazed fans who did not want to understand that 6 is the closing time no matter what could be a pain). Even if I had not been a fan of ghibli movies before coming to the museum (in some impossible parallel world), I would become one yet again after a visit here. I believe that it is a must for all those who’ve been grateful to studio ghibli ever in their lives.

PS – While I loved the experience completely, I do wish there was something about ghibli music too at the museum. They covered just the animation part. For me the music, especially by Joe Hisaishi, is as wonderful as the animation and story in the movies.

More on travelling in Japan

November 8, 2013August 20, 2017

The Giver (Lois Lowry)

“Nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy.”

And if you take people to a world far far away from sadness, you’re inevitably separating them their happiness. What will the people in such a world come to, how will they begin to behave, understand, comprehend things? What else will they loose?

Summary: Jonas’ world is perfect. Everything is under control. There is no war or fear or pain. There are no choices. Every person is assigned a role in the Community. When Jonas turns twelve, he is singled out to receive special training from The Giver. The Giver alone holds the memories of the true pain and pleasure of life. Now, it is time for Jonas to receive the truth. There is no turning back.[Source: Goodreads]

From the get go, the Giver puts us in a ‘perfect’ world. A world where there is absolute equality, where no one is left to die of hunger, where there is no pain, no fear, no violence no fights. But still, it has a weird feeling about it, and Jonas feels it too. There is the absurd system of all parents being ‘assigned’ children, the place called ‘Elsewhere’, mysterious ‘releases’ of old people and people who break the stringent rules of the community, the rules that in themselves make us uncomfortable, a number of rules, both strict and minor, the rule about apologizing, the rule of dream-tellling, the rule to not lie, the rule against coming out of your houses in night-time, against speaking the name of those released, against locked doors, against bragging. These rules are the ones that begin to dispel my illusion of this society being a Utopian one at first, for a world with so many rules to be called perfect doesn’t really seem right. It shows a community built on equality brought about these rules, an equality so absolute that it does not even permit the existence of colors.

Our apprehensions are slowly given a firmer base. As our protagonist, Jonas, on spending more time with his mentor, slowly learns about the workings of the community, and as we spend more time with the book ourselves, the horrors of the community are slowly revealed to us. Even the word ‘horror’ barely covers the nothingness, hollowness of the community. Slowly, we are shown, matter-of-factly, those things that are foreign to the society, those things that are so much everyday to us that we don’t even acknowledge their existence. The Giver gives to us Dystopia through a Utopia all the while making us treasure and love more than ever all the little things that surround us: by completely ignoring them at first and then conjuring them up, one after the other, defining them and experiencing them.

The Giver is not just an average book, it is a masterpiece, and like any wonderful piece of art there is nothing that can be said about it that will do it justice and yet there is so much that demands to be said as it slowly leads one into the vault of thoughts and imagination. It is not a book to be read halfheartedly as it breaks boundaries in making us think and it gives a voice to all those things that we have always taken for granted. And as all other great stories, it is labelled as a ‘Children’s book’.

And, of course, it reminded me a lot of 1984 by George Orwell which had a Dystopian setting with similar features.