Sixty in September: 10/60
There are so many things to be fascinated by in this beautiful, wild movie, but two things really stick out to me. Obayashi talks about them in the interview on the Criterion materials:
One is the war and the atomic bombings. Obayashi is originally from Hiroshima. He says, quietly and candidly, that most his friends didn't survive the bombings, as a child. The second is Obayashi's sense of how children view and experience the world. He talks about their easy attraction to the strange and mysterious. Where, he says, adults see Jaws and might think for the next movie, substituting bears for the monster, his daughter conjured a kaleidoscope of subconscious fears and fantasies that were…