Ocean Waves: Ghibli Giblets

I wish I had done a little more research on this film before I decided to send off for the DVD, but I was thinking, “It’s a Studio Ghibli film. I want all the Ghibli films! It must be good!” Sure, it was about Japanese teen life, but so were “From Up on Poppy Hill” and “Whisper of the Heart”, and I had enjoyed them well enough. Look, right there on the box, "From the Creators of Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro"!

I got my copy a few weeks ago and, first of all, was surprised to find that it was exclusively in Japanese but had an option of English subtitles. Fair enough. I gave it a go and got through the first fifteen minutes. I have to say I was not engaged but thought perhaps that my mood was not right. I set it aside.

Today I gave it another shot. Again, I found myself feeling restless at the fifteen-minute mark. Puzzled, I turned it off and decided to do a little research at last, the research, perhaps, that I should have done before my purchase.

What I found on Wikipedia: “Ocean Waves, known in Japan as I Can Hear the Sea, is a 1993 Japanese anime … It was animated by Studio Ghibli for Tokuma Shoten and the Nippon Television Network … Ocean Waves was an attempt by Studio Ghibli to allow their younger staff members to make a film reasonably cheaply. However, it ended up going both over budget and over schedule. The film was released on DVD and Blu-ray by GKIDS on April 18, 2017, with only the Japanese audio with English subtitles… Production of Ocean Waves was controlled by Studio Ghibli, but much of the animation was produced with the assistance of J.C.Staff, Madhouse Studios, and Oh! Production, who had worked with Ghibli on past projects. This film is the first Ghibli anime directed by someone other than Hayao Miyazaki or Isao Takahata. Tomomi Mochizuki, who was 34 years old at the time, was brought in to direct. The film was an attempt to make anime solely by the young staff members, mostly in their 20s and 30s. Their motto was to produce "quickly, cheaply and with quality", but ultimately it went over budget and over schedule.”

Which of course says nothing about the quality of the movie. While it may be fine for what it is (a teen drama, for sure), it seems to lack any of the whimsy or visionary quality I see in other Ghibli films, even those set in similar surroundings and not in expressly ‘mythic’ venues. At some time or other I shall probably dutifully set myself down to watch the whole thing, so I can give a fairer assessment, but at the moment I feel no real compunction to lead me on.

The only other Ghibli movies I lack are “The Red Turtle” and “Earwig and the Witch”. Before and if I order them, I shall definitely look into them more, although even knowing something about a movie beforehand does not guarantee whether one will like it or not. But it couldn’t hurt.

Juveniles Relinquished: The Shadow Library

 

Susan got two of these Random House ‘apocryphal’ adventures of Oz, written by various authors (evidence suggests in the mid-Eighties). She later gave them to me and eventually I sold them. While I know one was “Mr. Tinker in Oz” by James Howe, I can’t place the other. I lean towards "The Seven-Leaf Clover".

I bought “The Rescuers” at a garage sale, not because it was a Disney tie-in, but because it was illustrated by Garth Williams, the artist famous for his work on “Charlotte’s Web”, “Stuart Little”, and “The Cricket in Times Square”. I was reminded of it just the other day because my niece boasted that she never got sick to her stomach, just like the cat therein. And so by diverse ways I recall parts of the Shadow Library.

Roll for Initiative: The Shadow Library

Deities and Demigods … James M. Ward & Robert J. Kuntz

One of the two D&D volumes I bought as a senior in high school. I don’t know if mine was the original 1980 edition or the amended 1980 edition; if it were the first it would have included the Cthulhu and Melnibonean ‘pantheons’ that were later removed for copyright issues, thus making the original rarer and more collectible. I bought it in early 1981 (according to one of my scant diary entries), but I can’t remember at this distance whether it had Lovecraft stuff in it or not. Then again, I guess it doesn’t matter now.

It occurred to me after I first published this post that if I looked at samples of the interior illustrations it might jog my memory, and it has. I particularly remember that arrow pattern behind Arioch, and the terrible design of Hastur rang a few bells as well. So, that’s that mystery solved. As usual, I got rid of the more valuable item and kept the more common.

In No Particular Order: The Shadow Library

 

The High Place: A Comedy of Disenchantment ... James Branch Cabell

The High Kings … Joy Chant

Tales Of Terror and The Unknown ... Algernon Blackwood

Story Poems ... ed. Louis Untermeyer

Certain Women ... Madeleine L'Engle

The Wizard’s Dilemma … Diane Duane

The Dracula Tape; The Holmes/Dracula File … Fred Saberhagen

In My Researches: The Shadow Library

 

Mythology … Edith Hamilton

The Penguin Dictionary of Quotations ... ed. J. M. and M. J. Cohen

Videohound's Dragon Asian Action and Cult Films … by Bryan Thomas

Defining The World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary … by Henry Hitchings

The Encyclopedia of Animated Cartoons ... Jeff Lenburg

Medieval Beasts ... Ann Payne

SciFi High: The Shadow Library

 

A Canticle for Leibowitz...Walter M. Miller, Jr....Bantam

God-Emperor of Dune; Heretics of Dune; Chapterhouse Dune … Frank Herbert

Star Trek Chronology: The History of The Future ... Michael & Denise Okuda

Spaceships of the Visitors: An Illustrated Guide to Alien Spacecraft ... Kevin Randle and Russ Estes

Illustrated: The Shadow Library

 

Leonardo: The Masters Collection ... Text by Elizabeth Elias Kaufman

The Pre-Raphaelites: Romance and Realism ... Laurence Des Cars

King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table ... Anne Berthelot

Works Of Mercy ... Fritz Eichenberg

Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack Illustrated by Norman Rockwell

The Art of Gormenghast … Estelle Daniel, Foreward by Stephen Fry

Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman ... Georgia Riley De Havenon, Karen O'Connell, and Patrick McDonnell

Classical Gas: The Shadow Library

 

                                The Last Days of Socrates ... Plato

    Protagoras and Meno ... Plato

The Symposium ... Plato

The Nature of The Universe ... Lucretius

The Agricola and The Germania ... Tacitus

The Histories ... Tacitus

The Annals of Imperial Rome ... Tacitus

The Conquest of Gaul ... Julius Caesar

The Aeneid ... Virgil, tr. W. F. Jackson Knight

The Histories ... Herodotus

The Voyage of Argo ... Apollonius of Rhodes

        The Theban Plays ... Sophocles

The Oresteian Trilogy ... Aeschylus

Euripides I: Alcestis; The Medea; The Heracleidae; Hippolytus … Euripides

Sophocles II: Ajax; The Women of Trachis; Electra; Philoctetes … Sophocles

The Mystery Deepens

 

The Encyclopedia Sherlockiana; The Ultimate Sherlock Holmes Encyclopedia … by Jack Tracy

The Sherlock Holmes Encyclopedia … by Orlando Park

Sherlock Holmes by Gas-Lamp: Highlights from the First Four Decades of The Baker Street Journal … Ed. Philip A. Shreffler.

Sherlock Holmes & much more … Doris E. Cook

The New Bedside, Bathtub, & Armchair Companion to Agatha Christie … Eds. Dick Riley and Pam McAllister

Yesterday evening I thought to myself, “Why don’t I search my other two blogs? I might be able to scrape up three or four books I’ve forgotten.” After an intense couple of hours, I found FIFTY that had pretty much slipped my mind, some of which in retrospect seem pretty obvious. What annoys me is I’m sure there are many more books that I’ve owned at one time or another that I’m still forgetting. The more I think about it, the more seem to pop up. On the plus side, I have fodder for at least a week of posts. Don’t adventures ever have an end?