In March of 2007 I was doing research on Mei and the Kittenbus (めいとこねこバス, Mei to Konekobasu), an animated short “sequel” to My Neighbor Totoro by Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli. It was “released” in 2003 for regular showing at the Ghibli Museum in Japan, and has unfortunately never seen a wide release. I believe the Ghibli museum shows different animated shorts on a random basis for their tours.

While researching, I was only able to find three sites on the whole internet at that time that had any real information on it. I decided to backup their contents for mirroring, which I am finally getting around to putting up :-). This information is directly copied from those sites and I do not claim to be the original source of, or in any way own, any of the below content in this post.

моцартинка (mozartianka) wrote in miyazaki_ru, @ 2007-01-28 21:44:00 Entry tags: Mei to Konekobasu/Мэй и Котобусёнок, Studio Ghibli Shorts/Короткометражки, Tonari no Totoro/Наш сосед Тоторо, картинки Mei to Konekobasu Album Полный альбом про Мей и Котобусёнка! обложка Громадное спасибо nazarovsky!

Mei and the Kittenbus     This is a short film about 20 minutes long, which was shown for a limited time only at the Ghibli Museum. It tells the story of Mei and her friend the kittenbus (the child of the original catbus from My Neighbor Totoro). Mei is just small enough to ride in the kittenbus, which is only big enough to stir up dust devils, rather than making whole fields of rice sway in its breeze. One night they have an adventure in which they fly into the forest with many other cat-based vehicles, including many buses and trains. There they meet Totoro and many similar spirits, all heading for a gigantic catliner. This liner cruises off into the sky and the kittenbus takes Mei home. Small Version Large Version Small Version | Large Version Small Version | Large Version Small Version | Large Version Small Version | Large Version Original story, screenplay and direction: Hayao Miyazaki Music: Joe Hisaishi Animation Directors: Maikiko Futaki, Sachiko Sugino, and Hiromasa Yonebayashi Length: 13 minutes 43 seconds Pictures and synopsis by Chris Kuan

This is definitely one of the things on my must-do list for when I visit Japan one day ^_^.

First, I want to write a little about the Alamo Draft House, which is a local Austin theater chain (though it has expanded). I really enjoy going there for movies for the atmosphere, which includes:

• No children under 6 (unless otherwise noted)
• Food and drinks
• [Sometimes] themed food and pre-movie entertainment relating to the movie (my friends went there for the Indiana Jones opening and there were snake handlers with rattlesnakes and a cobra ^_^)
• Playings of old good and/or cult classic movies

They also often organize shows, parties, and other events, including organizing the recent Austin branch of the largest [worldwide] Thriller dance event. I have been told they are one of the most profitable theater chains in history.

Anywho, I was there yesterday for the first showing (7pm) of the new Star Trek movie. Since I’m not a movie critic, I won’t say more than the fact that I thought it was absolutely spectacular, and Alamo’s pre-movie Star Trek themed clips were hilarious. I do however want to share their themed food menu.

I just now finished watching Disney’s “The Black Cauldron”. While a rather poor example of a Disney animated film, there is one element that really caught my surprise. One of the characters, Gurgi, acted, sounded, and moved just like Golem from Peter Jackson’s rendition of Lord of the Rings. The way Gurgi talked, his inflections, his character’s nature and actions were all pretty much exactly how Golem was portrayed. I’m not necessarily saying Gurgi was stolen from LoTR, or Jackson copied Gurgi alternately, but they are a bit too eerily similar for my speculations.

I’ve been on a bit of a Peter Pan kick lately. It all started with catching Hook a few weeks ago, which I’ve always loved and enjoy watching from time, on the boob tube. After finishing it, I remembered that I was given the original Peter Pan novel for a Christmas when I was around 9 years of age or so, and I decided to pick it up on my next trip to my parents’ house in Dallas. I downloaded all the other official Peter Pan films in the mean time for a watch, as I had never seen them before.

One of the main reasons for this was I was also curious as to how the stories differed in the film versions from the original story, and from each other. I found out they all varied greatly, especially in the tone from the novel, except for Hook, which got it perfect. I’m not going to go into a comparison of the stories here, as that is not really important. All I’d really like to mention about the movies is that the Disney’s 2002 “Return to Neverland” was a rather poor rip off of the Hook plot line, and I didn’t really find it worth it. Disney has really lost it’s flair since The Lion King, IMO. “Walt Disney’s Peter Pan” (February 5, 1953) and “Peter Pan” (2003) however were both well worth it.

The main difference I was referring to between most of the movies and the novel is the heavy presence of a dark and sinister theme in the original book. The Lost Boys were just as cut throat as the pirates, as it mentioned the often battles and killing each other in cold bold, and it even mentioned something to the extent of Peter Pan “thinning out the ranks” of the Lost Boys when their numbers got too large, IIRC. The mermaids were silent killers when they got the chance, and there was also talk of “fairy orgies”. I thought this was all great for a children’s book, as it didn’t concentrate on these aspects, but they were there to give a proper setting. It was a very interesting and fun read, but a far cry from the brilliant status it has been given, IMO. Makes me wonder what all the people out there that complain about Harry Potter would say if they gave this one a read. Oh, the only thing Tinkerbelle pretty much ever says throughout the book is “You ass” :-).

Speaking of Harry Potter, it came as a bit of a shock to me seeing Maggie Smith, who plays Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter movies, playing as Granny Wendy in Hook. She did an amazing job at looking decrepit.

One final non-related note… the very briefly overhead Neverland island view shown on Hook really reminded me of my Eternal Realms map.

I made the mistake of trying to watch “Kill Bill”, one of my favorite series of movies, on cable tonight. After suffering through commercials and some horrible edits, I decided it I’d acquire a normal movie copy later on. The edits that werre made to the movie so it could air on TV had me cracking up though. One example was in the long term care hospital the protagonist was staying at with the character “Buck” who “liked to fuck”. He had the word “FUCK” tattooed across one of his hand’s knuckles and his car was named and branded as the “Pussy Wagon”. Since this kind of thing was obviously too much for TV audiences, anytime the word “fuck” was said, it was dubbed over with the word “party”, and his branded car and keychain that said “Pussy Wagon” were overlaid on the screen as “Party Wagon”. It was terribly obtrusive and silly, but it had me laughing at least.

I read through Eragon and Eldest, the first two books of the Inheritance Cycle, by Christopher Paolini, a while back, and was very happy with the novels, mainly for the relationship between the two protagonists, Eragon and his dragon Saphira.  The fantasy novels brought in a bunch of new possibilities of fun with dragon lore and their abilities, a topic which has, to my knowledge, never really been elaborated or expanded on in the past to this kind of extent, though I have heard the lores in these books bears a large resemblance to a novel called Dragonriders of Pern.  I would recommend the Inheritance Cycle to anyone looking for a fun, though not necessarily quick, fantasy read.  The series was originally supposed to be three novels, but as of a few months ago it was announced that it would be four.  The third book should be coming out in September of next year, which I am waiting in anticipation for, though nowhere near the level of excitement as any of the Harry Potter books brought me.

The reason for this post though is to actually rant about the movie adaptation.  One pet peeve of mine is people that say movies or TV shows are horrible without ever having given them a viewing, let alone a chance.  I am the kind of person that will usually sit through anything, no matter how bad I feel it is, just so I can talk to people about it afterwards and be able to validly say why I did or did not enjoy it.  This, however, did not apply to the Eragon movie.  I was retching after about three minutes and think I got through five to ten minutes before I was so thoroughly disgusted I had to stop and just fast forward through the rest to see different parts I was curious about.  Which was a mistake as the rest was even worse than the beginning.  It was that bad.  The movie was very obviously a ploy by the studios to milk in some money by throwing out a half baked fantasy movie trying to parallel Lord of the Rings in style.  I honestly don’t know how it got as far as it did.

I went to do some research and found out the director, Stefen Fangmeier, who had mainly been a visual effects guy in the industry, had no prior experience as a primary director, and only one as a secondary director, and was about as suited to the job as Bush Jr. would be to playing Jeopardy.  What’s even worse is who wrote the screenplay, Peter Buchman, who’s only previous screenplay work had been... get this... Jurassic Park 3.  I’m not even going to go there.

I really have to wonder how the hell those 2 got ahold of the license to make the movie.  The book was, after all, a New York Times #1 seller.  The publishers must have really dropped the ball on this one, or maybe Paolini, being pretty much still a kid by the time he finished the first novel (19), somehow got taken advantage of.  I just find the situation to be horribly sad.

It probably didn’t help that I didn’t expect much at all from the movie as I had heard about its huge flop after opening, with many dedicated fans of the novels walking out of the theater in tears of disappointment.

On another slightly-related note, it has been rumored as of today that it is now official that Peter Jackson will be producing 2 Hobbit movies.  We shall see, but I would be very happy if it was true.  I thought Jackson did the best possible job that could have been done on the movies.  I only had one major complaint, in that Gimli was really given a short end of the stick throughout them, though at least they picked John-Rhys who was perfect for the part.  Gimli was one of my favorite characters in the novels, and they substituted any of his glory to his pretty-boy counterpart elf, Legolas.  I also had a few minor quibbles with it, including some scenes I had wished to have seen (ie Bombadil), but were left out for obvious reasons, and that they changed around bits of the story so some actors would get more screen time and they wouldn’t have to introduce others, like Arwen stealing roles of multiple other elves.  Alas.  The thing I liked most about them was how well the CG was integrated with the live action shooting.  I still consider it the best job done integrating CG into a movie I’ve seen; so well that you can no longer tell that it’s clearly computer generated.