Hacker Cinema
The Wind Rises
風立ちぬ
2013 · Film · 126 min
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
A lifelong love of flight inspires Japanese aviation engineer Jiro Horikoshi, whose storied career includes the creation of the A-6M World War II fighter plane.
20 positive6 negative1 mixed15 neutralfrom 42 commenters
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44 comments on Hacker News
This is also the message I got from "the wind rises"! Though from talking with other people that takeaway doesn't seem universal -- which IMO is one of the ways to tell it's a great film :)
What specifically about that scene? Video won't load for many HN readers.
Apparently it's "The Wind Rises: The Looming War", a Japanese anime film.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Rises>
Miyazaki's films are often more similar to the traditional four-part Kishōtenketsu[0] story structure rather than the more common three-act or Hero's Journey style. If you're not used to that structure you can find it boring or difficult to immerse yourself in. I love a lot of Miyazaki films and I think My Neighbour Totoro[1] is one of the finest movies ever created, but I can't just throw them on like I can most movies; if I'm not in the right mood for them I'll just get bored.
For a practical advice, I'd suggest watching either The Wind Rises (if you want strictly Miyazaki) or Only Yesterday (if any Ghibli is fine) next. Neither will have the strict conclusion that you are looking for, but they both are more "adult" films that are similar to Western dramas so you might find your brain is more accepting of that. At the very least you might find them more relatable than his other films and their child protagonists; I think The Wind Rises should speak well to any tech worker these days.
For less useful advice: it wasn't until I had an apartment high enough that I could see the skyline over the trees did I begin to understand why artists painted clouds the colors they did[2]. All art is holding a mirror up to nature, sometimes you gotta touch grass before you can get it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish%C5%8Dtenketsu
[1] Castle in the Sky and Porco Rosso are my favourite Ghibli films, but Totoro I think is the greatest children's movie of all time and one of the few films capable of reminding someone what being a child is really like. I never got into Spirited Away or Howls Moving Castle though.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Levitan_Evening_bells_1892.jpg
As I've gotten older, I have grown to understand that while a lot of these films are popular for good reason (and are extremely good!) some of the best films, objectively to me, are some of the 'quietier' ones.
I'd say that Up On Poppy Hill is probably my partner and I's favorite Ghibli film. It's 'small' and 'quiet' in that the scope is a single town, and there's nothing super fantastical about it. Every time I watch it I see and hear something new. This is definitely Goro's best film as a director at Ghibli.
The film that hit me the hardest though is The Wind Rises. If you are a married man this is a film that will absolutely effect you emotionally. There are some films that are targeted as extremely specific audiences and this is one of those. I think everyone can enjoy it, but there's a handful of scenes that are so specific that I connected with so directly that I could feel every moment that Miyazaki was trying to convey at that exact time.
There's another film that is definitely more biased to adults, that is Only Yesterday. It's probably the slowest paced film that Ghibli has made, however it's one that's stuck with me so thoroughly. Especially the final few scenes, which only when they're over do you realize was something like 15-20 minutes with maybe a handful of dialogue lines. This is also another non-Miyazaki film that is extremely good.
I've logged in after 10 years to express my disagreement with this misguided and shallow post.
1. Taste is trainable, and far more malleable than the author believes. Good examples of this include "unclassifiable" films such as Parasite, which reached immense global success with both critical and popular audiences, and stood out precisely because it was so different, along with a remarkable depth in its craftsmanship (a given).
2. Overconfidence in hermeneutics. For one, little details are critical and are precisely the mark of superior craftsmanship (or shoddy work if they are neglected). You can see this in the dialogue around detecting AI-generated images. A cool example is the 4-second crowd scene in Miyazaki's The Wind Rises (2013), which took an entire year to animate.
3. A superficial and overreaching view of art. You can see this both in the way they discuss artistic value (external activity and metrics), and also their limited artistic vocabulary (the Louvre as a whole, Elvis, Abba). What about Edo period Japanese painting? What about Abbasid architecture? What about that simulated black hole in Intellerstar (to give a technological example)?
This kind of technological slop drives distrust with other industries (especially creative ones), rather than the productive and empowering dialogue we should be having. I hope we can do better on HN, and that for his own sake, the author gains some faith in art again.
The Wind Rises. I love everything about it. Beautiful soundtrack, fun sound design, and a fascinating treatment of various topics from the ethics of engineering to the miracle of flight. The end scene completely wrecks me every time.
The Downfall is one of the best movies about being on the losing side of a war. It’s impressively accurate, and the acting is outstanding.
When I don’t know who I’m watching the movie with, I recommend Snatch or Amélie.
I'm not sure I agree.
I love how recent movies feature a broader range of characters. I was watching the Super Mario Bros Movie yesterday (not Disney) and it was so refreshing to see a strong, leading princess. Likewise I absolutely love seeing different kinds of people featured in Disney movies. It feels like they finally started putting a bit of everyone into their movies. It does not feel forced at all.
And why is messaging a problem? Wasn't Wall-E great? And what about The Wind Rises (not Disney)? Did Soul suffer from its messaging?
In my opinion, Disney's problem is not messaging, but phoning it on with tried-and-true recipes, and playing it safe instead of exploring what the medium can offer.
I thought Spirited Away (made in 2001) was awful, so much so that I didn't watch anything Miyazaki made after that for years.
I tried The Wind Rises (made in 2013), also found it terrible.
However, before those two films, I had seen several Studio Ghibli's earlier movies and found them pretty good. I thought Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (pre-Ghibli but the same group of people, with director Miyazaki) was absolutely amazing. So my impression is that their earlier films are much better than their newer works.
No better way to do it than release-order. Start with The Castle of Cagliostro and make your way to The Wind Rises. I'd recommend watching the films he wrote but didn't direct as well, which are Whisper of the Heart, The Secret World of Arrietty, and From Up on Poppy Hill.
Other realistic anime/manga:
Summit of the Gods = Most realistic portrayal of mountain climbing in any film I've seen. Everything from the equipment to the knots that they use was accurate, and they show a lot of obscure stuff. They even got how climbers talk.
Wind Rises = Shows real aeronautical engineering calculations and data sources.
Poppy Hill is very good and comparable with Wind Rises. Just because Earthsea was bad, people view him as someone who is not up to the task. It’s for sure fair to say he’s not a good writer like his father, but he has the ability to make great films.
I don't really (honestly) understand this critique.
What's wrong in being honest?
Goro works are inferior to his father's works on many levels.
He's no amateur, that's for sure, but he's no master either.
Among the best Japanese animation artists, he's probably average.
He's no Takahata, Oshii, Otomo, Anno, Watanabe, Hosoda by a long shot.
Hayao worst rated works on Rotten Tomatoes are "The cat returns" and "The wind rises" and I completely agree on that, with a rating of 88%.
Goro worst is "Earwig and the Witch" that I have not watched with a 28%, "Tales From Earthsea" that I've seen and did not like much with 38% and the best is "From Up on Poppy Hill" with 87%, which was good, but not "Spirited Away", "Princess Mononoke" or "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind" good.
And Nausicaa itself is not as good as a movie as the manga, that is an order of magnitude better!
I'd guess many would take issue with the list, even when sharing the devotion for Ghibli. Personally, I'd place The Wind Rises at number 1 and possibly at number 1 in my all time movie list, animation or not. I always liked this review:
Critic David Ehrlich rated the film 9.7/10 and called it "perhaps the greatest animated film ever made." He wrote: "While initially jarring, Miyazaki's unapologetic deviations from fact help The Wind Rises to transcend the linearity of its expected structure, the film eventually revealing itself to be less of a biopic than it is a devastatingly honest lament for the corruption of beauty, and how invariably pathetic the human response to that loss must be. Miyazaki’s films are often preoccupied with absence, the value of things left behind and how the ghosts of beautiful things are traced onto our memories like the shadows of objects outlined by a nuclear flash. The Wind Rises looks back as only a culminating work can."
It's a synthesis. War is bad because it detracts from the purity of thinking about how cool planes are.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/23/hayao-miyazaki-film-wind-rises
The Gundam meme is an over-simplification; Tomino is moralistic but he's far too weird to just have a normal moral like that. Typical Tomino morals are like "all old people are evil, including myself", "we should have a matriarchy", and whatever Brain Powerd was about.
>Wind Rises, which is mainly about how cool planes are.
if that was your main take-away from that movie, I suggest you re-watch it.
it reminds me of the meme that Gundam fans ignore the fact that the story is about the brutality of endless human conflict for the fact that there are shiny robots and cool technologies.
I asked a frAInd what famous actors dubbed miyzazki movies:
"Spirited Away" (2001) - Daveigh Chase, Jason Marsden, and Susan Egan.
"Princess Mononoke" (1997) - Billy Crudup, Claire Danes, Minnie Driver, and Billy Bob Thornton.
"My Neighbor Totoro" (1988) - Dakota Fanning and Elle Fanning.
"Howl's Moving Castle" (2004) - Christian Bale, Emily Mortimer, Jean Simmons, and Billy Crystal.
"Ponyo" (2008) - Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon, Tina Fey, and Liam Neeson.
"The Wind Rises" (2013) - Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci.
"Porco Rosso" (1992) - Michael Keaton and Cary Elwes.
"Kiki's Delivery Service" (1989) - Kirsten Dunst, Phil Hartman, and Janeane Garofalo.
It'll be interesting to see how the box office does. It's been a while since _The Wind Rises_ and Miyazaki is more beloved than ever and all 3 reviews I've read thus far seem highly positive (and certainly more positive than _The Wind Rises_), but there's also an extraordinarily low level of discussion. I was shocked when I clicked on the first review and realized it was a review - "oh, huh, when did it come out?"
The justification offered about 'people being tired of marketing' sounds absurd, and more like they are finding excuses to skip work because they are old & exhausted, and another step in winding down Ghibli. I expect lower box office than it deserves; even Hayao Miyazaki can't release a movie with zero marketing and expect no effect...
That was featured in one of the dream sequences in the Studio Ghibli film The Wind Rises. Not coincidentally, Studio Ghibli got their name from a different Caproni plane: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caproni_Ca.309
In The Wind Rises Hayao Miyazaki weaves various modes of experience in depicting the somewhat fictionalized life of Jiro Horikoshi, a Japanese aeronautical engineer who designed fighter planes for World War II. Horikoshi finds his vocation through ‘dreamtime’ encounters with Gianni Caproni and courts his wife with paper airplanes. The film opposes the wind and chance with mechanism and design. Horikoshi’s attachment to his wife, on the one hand, and to his vocation on the other, both bind him to Japan while at the same time allowing him to separate himself, at least mentally, from the imperial state.
As an engineer, The Wind Rises really spoke to me. One of my favorite films of all time and one I’d recommend any day of the week.
I personally really disliked the wind rises - it seems apologetic to the role of an engineer in creating a machine used to kill people, just because they were beautiful. Perhaps I missed the point and there was a subtle sadness I did not perceive in the creation of the fighters. Also, a somewhat weird romance compared to even other Ghibli movies
On the Ghibli corpus: I recently watched As the Wind rises and I was completely blown away by the kind of perspective it offered into the japanese society of the time.
It is more mature than Spirited Away and definitly worth a watch if you are an engineer as the story is a free fictionalization of the life of the engineer that designed the japanese fighter airplane nicknamed "Zero". The classic Ghibli motifs of clouds, grassy mountaintops and fantasy of flying play their role as one might have guessed — but coupled with the serious and mature topics of the film it is even more magical when in a quiet scene the wind strokes through the grass.
As an Austrian who lives in Germany I also liked the scene where they traveled to Germany to see the Junkers plant (with the goal of spying of course) — I liked it because it offered a unique perspective on Germany of the time.
It was one of those Ghiblis I never watched because of odd reasons, but when I did I was blown away.
As a counterpoint, I thought that was maybe my least favorite movie directed by Miyazaki!
Even a bad Miyazaki movie is pretty good, but for me it didn't have what makes his other movies special. I'd recommend it only if a person absolutely can't, say, tolerate elements of the fantastical in their entertainment. The lead character is an engineer who makes planes, but the movie (understandably) doesn't really go into that part.
Mononoke is probably tied with Wind Rises for "most serious Miyazaki movie." which might make it a perfect starting point for some in the HN crowd.
Spirited Away is probably the closest to a universal crowd-pleaser?
Porco Rosso, The Wind Rises, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service. The Ghibli films keep me coming back.
I know right! It's full of that kind of expression of love. It took me back to being in a club while studying. One guy, and his brother... chat lots about how they were looking forward to doing stuff. His T-Shirt was about chatting HTML, all these amazing helpful different parts, almost looked German to me. It's a part of technology, build that I appreciate from that part. Could be the Japanese film Wind Rises, I don't know
Like most modern journalism, it is just regurgitated PR.
I remember going to The Wind Rises and they said the same thing about it being his last movie. I wish we could skip the PR and just be honest.
The Wind Rises was supposed to be his last feature film.
https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2013-09-01/hayao-miyazaki-to-retire-from-making-feature-films
Talk about burying the lede!
Info about the movie is right at the bottom:
Neither Miyazaki nor Suzuki will share much about the forthcoming film, beyond the fact that it is based on a 1937 novel by Genzaburo Yoshino. The story concerns a 15-year-old boy in Tokyo, small for his age and fond of mischief, whose father has recently died. In the English translation by Bruno Navasky, published in October, the boy gazes out at the city and is overwhelmed: “The watching self, the self being watched, and furthermore the self becoming conscious of all this, the self observing itself by itself, from afar, all those various selves overlapped in his heart, and suddenly he began to feel dizzy.” The actual content of the film could be anything — Suzuki has described it as “fantasy on a grand scale” — since Miyazaki doesn’t so much borrow stories as liberate them from their origins. (In the pseudobiographical “The Wind Rises,” he gives the real-life Jiro Horikoshi a fictional wife dying of tuberculosis.) All Suzuki will share is that he recognizes himself in one of the characters, who is not human.
It is time. Miyazaki rubs the top of his head and lights a cigarette, one of his signature king-size, charcoal-filtered Seven Stars. I am allowed one last question. “The title of your next film is ‘How Do You Live?,’” I say. “Will you give us the answer?”
The smile comes only after he speaks: “I am making this movie because I do not have the answer.”
I try to like it, but I don't. It drags out. I really enjoyed the first two seasons of JoJo, but the others feel like they're stretching a 4 episode story across 40 episodes.
Modern anime feels a little like Clash of Clans. It's highly commercialized. Instead of making you feel good, it gives you just enough of a feel good dose and hides the rest, so you'd face enough withdrawal to consume more.
It works for something to watch during lunch break, when I just want something mindless to clear my brain and not something philosophical like Loki.
Anime movies are good but rare. I really enjoyed Spirited Away and The Wind Rises.
You'd probably really hate "The Wind Rises"
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2013293/
This makes me think of war time vs peace time. During a war, the govt will put engineers and architects into an R&D incubator with all the resources they need. To the engineers, the fact that there is a war is irrelevant, they aren't paying attention to that, they're just focussing on innovation because it's their job.
Couldn't this scenario be simulated, even without war? I think of bell labs.
It strange that innovative environments, filled with hard work, aren't a priority until its a matter of life or death (of a company, nations, etc.)
Related movie by studio Ghibli (engineers innovating during war time): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Rises
For a really interesting, semi-true story about a Japanese warplane engineer in WWII, I highly recommend watching *The Wind Rises&. Probably one of Miyazaki's finest works (although that's just my opinion).
It gives you some sense of the sense of the nationalistic feelings in Japan as they entered WWII, and the tremendous pressures their country faced to prove themselves.
Commenters here gave great recommendations. I'll try mentioning the unmentioned.
- Gifted (2017):
Drama about a single man raising a genius girl. Some small bits of the film explore about the responsibility of extraordinary people vs their right to feel like normal human, but most of the film is about the human aspect of it.
- The Wind Rises (2013):
The Ghibli Studio film dramatizing the story of Jiro Horikoshi, the designer of Mitsubishi A5M fighter aircraft and its successor, the Mitsubishi A6M Zero. This is one of Ghibli film that is more grounded to reality than the others.
- Sorry to Bother You (2018):
Black Comedy Drama about a young black telemarketer who are really good at his jobs, gets involved in a huge corporate conspiracy where he must choose between profit and joining his activist friend.
- Don't fuck with cats (2019):
Documentary about people over the internet brings down the infamous murderer Luka Magnotta.
- The Great Hack (2019):
A great documentary for the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
- Justice League (2017):
Please don't flag, I'm not joking! The film itself didn't change anything. It was a little under my expectation. What happens following the release of the film, though, is the gem. The snydercut movement is a very rare phenomenon where a significant amount of people actually take action against disappointment from a change in a film's direction. Long story short, fans investigate how it could be and uncovered a great deal of what they think a miss-handling of a film production. It opened a window where we can see how moviemakers and everyone involved has their own political agenda and some actually falls for what they do. The movement is actually successful considering it has the power for the film industry to react and the fans seems to get what they wanted.
> I know he's not dead, but his next film will be his last.
First his next film won't be released for something like 4 or 5 years he's only just started working on it, so it's a terrible time to give him a sendoff.
Second The Wind Rises was already supposed to be his last film and see how that turned out.
Miyazaki is the kind of people you send off at their funeral and no sooner.
Porco Rosso, Howl's Moving Castle, My Neighbor Totoro, and Princess Mononoke are good. In fact, they're arguably some of his best.
But my favorites will always be Kiki's Delivery Service, Castle in the Sky, and Whisper of the Heart. They may not be Miyzaki at his best, but they were the films that I loved the most.
The Wind Rises may also join the latter category. Either way, it's a really good film.
Finally, it should be noted that Kaze Ni Naru from The Cat Returns is possibly one of my favorite songs from any anime, ever. And I watch a lot of anime.
Suffice to say it's up on the list with A Cruel Angel's Thesis, and Tank. For you anime fans who know what that means, yes, it's that good, IMHO. YMMV.
I highly recommend 'the wind rises'. It's a beautiful film, with a focus on early aviation, including some great Italian influences.
Might be in the minority, but I strongly disagree with the assessment that Miyazaki-san's final film "The Wind Rises" was not amongst his greatest. I re-view it every few months for inspiration and find it holds up quite powerfully with each repetition. Japanese anime does Italian neo-realism in epic scale. The engineer as the manifestor of dreams. War as a terrible catalyst of progress. Surreally creepy voice acting by Werner Herzog as the mysterious Castorp in an homage to Thomas Mann. What's not to love?
For more on the controversy here's a link to the Chicago Reader review that sums up why some perceived it as being sympathetic to fascism:
http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-wind-rises-hayao-miyazaki-jiro-horikoshi/Content?oid=12535079
That list was incomplete. I added a recent Indian film about Ramanujan and a Soviet film about Sofia Kovalevskaya from the 1980s. FWIW, there's also an upcoming film "Dau" (in post-production) about the Russian mathematical physicist Lev Landau.
One difficulty is that the Wikipedia list does not include made for TV movies and documentaries, like 'Dangerous Knowledge' (2007) on Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, or the BBC documentary 'Isaac Newton: The Last Magician' (2013), or the PBS documentary 'Newton's Dark Secrets' (2005), or "Breaking the Code" (1996), another biography of Turing, or "Freedom Man" (1989) about the black American mathematician Benjamin Banneker, or the 1973 Italian TV movie "Non ho tempo" about Galois, or Simon Singh's 1996 documentary "Fermat's Last Theorem", focusing on Andrew Wiles but including other mathematicians.
Or the BBC documentary "The Birth Of Calculus" (1986) on Leibniz, the four-part BBC series "The Story of Maths" (2008), the 2008 "Julia Robinson and Hilbert's Tenth Problem", or ... I think you get the picture that there are many TV movies about mathematicians, and most of them are white males. BTW, none of them are "average".
When "Moneyball" was turned into a movie, people asked how a book that dealt with statistics could be turned into a movie, since statistics alone isn't that interesting. What big screen movie is there to make out of Dirichlet's life? Of Riemann's? Of Wiles'?
So, of "regular white guy scientists or mathematicians we've mythologized in the past 20 years", where I'll define "mythologized" to mean "made a movie about them", and I'll limit it to feature length films based on lives of actual scientists:
"Kinsey" (2004) on Kinsey, "Copenhagen" (2002, TV) on a meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg, "Creation" (2009) on Darwin, "Something the Lord Made" (2004) about heart surgeons (one of which was a white male), "Tim's Vermeer" (2013) though that's more an amateur scientist, "The Aviator" (2004) about Howard Hughes (aerospace engineer and inventor), "A Dangerous Method" (2011) concerning Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein (the first two being white males), this fall the film "Experimenter" about Stanley Milgram will be released, "The Insider" (1999) is a drama based on the research scientist Jeffrey Wigand, and "The Strangest Dream" (2008) about the physicist Joseph Rotblat.
Those are movies about 10+ real scientists, all male, straight, and not disabled, plus a couple of others. (There were a few movies with other than white, male, straight characters, but certainly not this many.)
You for some reason switched to fictional scientists with Gravity (2013) and Interstellar (2014). Why is that? For that matter, you restricted me to scientists and mathematicians, while the protagonists of Gravity are engineers and astronauts - it's poor form to change your metric part-way through.
If I expand the list to include engineers, astronauts, and similar occupations, then "Captain Phillips" (2013) concerns the captain of the MV Maersk Alabama, which was hijacked by pirates, "The Wind Rises" (2013) about Jiro Horikoshi, the man who designed Japanese fighter planes during World War II ... oops ! Sory, not a white man, though he would have been an "honorary white" in apartheid South Africa, " Zvorykin-Muromets" (2010) about the Russian inventor of television, "Flash of Genius" (2008) about the Robert Kearns and his invention of the intermittent windshield wiper,
A problem with your list is it's easily interpreted as cherry picking. Jodie Foster was the protagonist of "Contact" (1997), a big budget sci-fi film. How does your choice now of "Gravity" indicate a changed pattern from nearly 20 years ago?
Another problem is that you haven't established what the baseline should be. Given the 12.2% of the US population is "Non-Hispanic Black or African American", what percentage of films with 'hero scientists' should have a "Non-Hispanic Black or African American" in that role? Given that 51% of the adult population in the US are women, how many hero scientist movies should have a women in that role? Perhaps it's more that these roles were previously underrepresented?
Is the pattern you see simply explained by the secular trend that people other than straight white males are becoming more frequent in science?
You ended by picking two items from a different context - postings to HN in the last month and 'male scientists who have been publicly disgraced in the past year', I think to establish a pattern. But you again lack the evidence needed to tell if your observations are really a pattern instead of cherry picking. What is the expected baseline?
If the ratio of men to women in science is 4:1, then we would expect a female scientist to be publicly disgraced with about the same ratio. (It's hard to give a good ratio since I think it's more likely that a senior researcher will be found out and reported in the international news. I believe there are more males in higher level positions than females. Also, "Japanese women account for only 10% of the researchers in Japan" and "only 12 percent of the science and engineering workforce in India was female in 2010", so the international ratio is probably more like 8:1.
Checking now, I searched "Retraction Watch" for all people described by the writers as being "disgraced". The complete list of male scientists in the last few years are: Naoki Mori, James H. Hunton, Dipak Das, Don Poldermans, Yoshitaka Fujii, Joachim Boldt, Diederik Stapel, and Woo-Suk Hwang.
The only disgraced female scientist mentioned is Bengu Sezen.
This 8:1 ratio is about what I expect from the percentage of women doing science in the world stage, and within the error bars for something with so few numbers.
What method did you use to count disgraced male and female scientists? I see you missed Haruko Obokata as another disgraced female scientist, so it doesn't seem like you've done a systematic search.
(A double-check search against sciencemag.org finds Jens Förster and Marc Hauser as additional 'disgraced' male researchers and no additional female researchers. Note that Science does not use the term 'disgraced' in articles about Haruko Obokata.)
Also, what do you use as the ratio for males in science vs. females in science? If it's 4:1 or higher then with 3 male disgraces you would expect less than a 50% chance of hearing about a female in the same situation, no?
Otherwise, if you're just making connections based on the latest hot gossip, then you'll be suffering from some serious bias error. You're not going to hear about Naoki Mori on HN.
Regarding postings to HN, what is your criteria? For example, "Alain Badiou Is Making a Movie About Plato with Brad Pitt and Sean Connery" from 7 days ago is a movie about a guy. Is it mythologizing a male? What about "Deep Web (2015 Documentary) – The Story of the Silk Road" from a month ago - does it mythologize Ross William Ulbricht? How do you define 'mythologizing' in such a way that it's at least roughly repeatable?
If you can't do that, then you don't really have a good metric.
Worth watching the documentary Kingdom of Dreams and Madness.
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_kingdom_of_dreams_and_madness/
The documentary is an amazing peek at Studio Ghibli (primarily of the group working on Miyazaki's last film "The Wind Rises"), even though the atmosphere is not what I'd call delightful, it doesn't lessen but increases my admiration of their work, to be able to create something beautiful in spite of the amazing pressures of animated feature film production is an incredible achievement in itself.
Interestingly, the director of End of Evangelion, Hideaki Anno was mentored by Miyazaki and was an animator on Nausicaa. He did the protagonist's voice work for Miyazaki's last film "The Wind Rises" and Miyazaki has said that he would entrust a Nausicaa sequel to Hideaki Anno.
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2013-08-22/hayao-miyazaki-open-to-nausicaa-film-sequel-by-evangelion-anno
For an Economist article I was expecting more covering the Studios economic troubles, periodic retirement of Miyazaki, and more contentious films [1].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Rises#Controversy
If you haven't seen any Studio Ghibli/Miyazaki films, I highly recommend them. The animation is unique and gorgeous. The stories involve conflict with nature or mistaken antagonists, not evil caricatures. While many of the films contain violence, it rarely resolves things. Also, most Studio Ghibli films have strong female leads. I think Grave of the Fireflies and The Wind Rises are the only ones with male protagonists.
In all, Studio Ghibli's works are a refreshing contrast to the romance-obsessed princesses and 3D talking animals so often put-out by Disney and Dreamworks. Even if you're an adult, they're enjoyable to watch.
There’s already plenty of great practical advice about the how and where to meet new people, so I’d like to offer a different point of view.
Two implied beliefs jump out at me as I’m reading your post:
1. A richer social life and/or a girlfriend will fill my unbearable void
2. I lack the skill or power to enrich my social life or impress a potential romantic partner.
These two points lead me to believe that your pain is a matter of perspective as much as anything else. Let me explain.
You mentioned that on weekends, you’ve done all sorts of activities alone. So have I! Last week, I watched the Miyazaki’s last movie (The Wind Rises) at the Castro Theater by myself, I have breakfast and dinner by myself almost everyday and I take a solo hour-long stroll to the park a couple times a week after work. My point is, being alone is only unbearable if you imagine the grass on the other side to be so vibrantly green that it blinds you to your present reality. I’m not trying to say ‘hey bud, your life is awesome and you’re a fool for not seeing how great it is’. Instead, I want you to consider whether or not having a richer social life is really all that.
Putting an imagined future girlfriend on a pedestal is not only unrealistic, but it can make the present seem like a real drag. And I’m getting the sense that that’s what you’re experiencing. This may not be entirely appropriate here, but there’s a saying (not sure where it’s from) that bluntly gets to the point: “Behind every beautiful woman, there’s a guy who’s tired of fucking her.” Now, finding a beautiful lady to spend your evenings with may not be your big struggle, but the lesson I get out of it is that no singular attainment will complete your life. There are human beings with thousands of friends ands fans who are stricken by loneliness at night.
The unfortunate repercussion of having such a vivid imagination is that the whole situation has been turned into a high-stakes game of poker. Imagine! Your happiness is hanging off the perceived success of your social life. Surely, it’s heart-wrenching to strike up a conversation with a stranger who could potentially grant you happiness in the form of their friendship and acceptance or condemn you to the pain of rejection. Putting such high expectations on having a social life is debilitating. Try seeing it in the same light as opening a jar of pickles. Apply gentle force in the right spots, but if the jar is stubborn, get another jar of pickles. Whatever you do, don’t attach your self-worth to your ability to open that pickle jar!
Making friends is hard, but probably no harder than engineering. It doesn’t take a car, great conversational skills, or even suave. It just takes a tendency to try and a resistance to overthinking it. Many people gravitate towards awkward personalities because beyond it, they see innocence and sensitivity. Some women appreciate men who aren’t helplessly dependent on cars, and I know plenty of explorers who would be eager to hear about your travels upon noticing your accent. It’s short-sighted to see your accent or lack of a car as a problem. There are people who go out of their way to fake an accent because they think it’s cool! Perspective is everything.
I’ll stop here in case I’m making this more about myself than anyone else, but I’ll leave a few practical ideas that could potentially make a big difference at your current junction:
1. Live with strangers. This gives you the opportunity to bond with people on a more intimate level. It’s much easier to get past the chit-chat small-talk phase when you’re living with someone.
Added benefit: save money.
2. Love doing something. It can be intimidating going to meetups thinking you’re doing it to meet other people. Solution: Go because you love the activity. Could be coding, gardening, basketball or lock-picking. If you love the activity more than you dread the feeling of intimidation, then it becomes a no-brainer!
Added benefit: less time to overthink when you’re engaged in a thrilling activity.
3. Stop using Facebook. I have scientifically proven, through self-observation, that I am happier without Facebook than I was with it. Okay fine, there was no science involved, but I remember vividly the feeling of envy as I scrolled through everyone else’s vacation photos. No Longer.
Added benefit: strangers are sometimes interested in hearing about why I don’t use Facebook.
Background: Asian, 25 years old. Freelance software engineer. Introvert. Been living in SF for 3 months and previously in Texas.
If any of this resonates with you, I’m happy to meet up sometime. You can find me on Twitter @hangsu or GitHub (hangsu)
Best Wishes.
> A SOMBRE exploration of love, responsibility and death, “Kaze Tachinu” (“The Wind Rises”) is being described as Hayao Miyazaki’s first animated film for adults.
I have been a fan of Miyazaki since childhood and am looking forward to what he can do with more adult themes.