BYOH - Bring Your Own History

in

I lost my Dad on January the 11th of this year. Derek Wain passed away following a bout of pneumonia in his care home aged 66. Had he lived a few months longer, I suspect in his weakened state he would have been likely to succumb to the covid-19 virus that has ravaged care homes up and down the country, especially in the UK epicentre of the virus (London), where my Dad lived. My Dad suffered from early-onset dementia as a result of alcohol abuse that plagued the majority of his adult life. 

We had a complicated relationship that was not always identifiable as a father-son connection. My parents divorced when I was an infant and I would usually see my Dad two or three times a year for a week at a time or a long weekend. I would travel from Teesside and my Dad would travel from London, meeting somewhat in the middle at my grandparents’ house in Leeds. I can’t pretend I remember a great deal from our time together when I was younger beyond trips to the swimming pool and the cinema. My teenage experiences with my Dad are the first I can remember with clarity, and in retrospect the first warning signs of his addiction to alcohol. We would go out for food frequently, inevitably to a pub that had a menu and when we weren’t eating out, we usually spent time in snooker halls. Anywhere where my Dad could get a pint. I won’t pretend I don’t have fond memories of these times, because I loved (and still love) playing snooker and I loved just spending time with him even if the relationship never felt parental.  

Over the better part of ten years since, I have been in a state of diluted resentment towards my Dad. Despite my misgivings about him, I resented that he wasn’t in my life more. I wanted the relationship that most people got with their Dad growing up. I appreciated that I had experienced a good upbringing that many people would envy, but all the same I resented what I had missed out on. My Dad was not someone who made longstanding connections and relationships with many people. You could argue he didn’t have any real friends. His personality traits made relationships difficult for him. My Dad was quick to snap out, easy to agitate and often savagely criticised or put down other people without fair cause. I should note that my Dad was rarely anything but genial to me personally, but I’ve seen enough of his interactions with others and heard enough stories from other people for that to be fair comment. So it wasn’t his friends or social life that kept him in London. Neither was it his work. At different times, I’ve known my Dad to be a carpenter, joiner, private members’ club concierge, bus driver and a delivery driver. Those are just the jobs I know about. Aside perhaps from his time as a concierge in a Mayfair private members club, a period in which he claims to have known the snooker legend Steve Davis and have beaten in a single frame shoot-out, his various jobs could have been found more or less anywhere else in the country. So perhaps you can see why I had resentment as to why he chose to live 250 miles away. 

My Dad’s addiction to alcohol led first to a significant mental breakdown around 2007 in which he dropped almost entirely off radar for the better part of three years, living from what I can gather between various institutions and hostels. I will never get the full story regardless of how much I dig. His phone had been cut off, his flat repossessed by the bank and he had always been a Luddite when it came to technology, so was untraceable via the internet. I only know what I know thanks to his eventual social worker who got in contact with me following two years of failure on my part to find him. From what I understand, he disassociated for a time period and could barely remember who he was, hence the difficulty in finding him. The breakdown he experienced was probably the result of an untreated personality disorder that he was never officially diagnosed with, or at least this is the opinion of various social workers who have worked patiently with him, and an opinion I’m inclined to agree with. So perhaps my resentment has been unfair. Perhaps my Dad used alcohol as a coping mechanism for a problem he was not getting the right help for, for problems that until relatively recently were not taken seriously enough. As far as I know my Dad never sought help for his mental illness and I suspect this is probably true of many men of his generation. I can relate. There will possibly be people reading this who have known me very well for a long time who know little or next to nothing about my Dad. The fact that my Dad was not entirely at fault for his often selfish decisions and actions is honestly of little comfort. If anything, the revelation feels like an invalidation of my thoughts and feelings.

After a period of stabilisation, my Dad lived out his final years in a care home in London. Were it possible I could have cared for him personally or at least relocated him further North I would have, but I was advised against it on many occasions. His dementia left him with perfect recoil of the past, seemingly up to the point of his breakdown, but left no sponge to make new memories. Every time I visited him he would ask about how I was doing at university and I rarely had the heart to correct him that it had been over a decade since I’d been. This period was probably the longest time he’d been sober in 30 years.

So why am I writing about this on pop culture website? Don’t I have a personal blog or a diary? The answer is no to both, but bear with me, because the art of cinema provoked this article. 

Shortly before the start of the Covid-19 lockdown I visited the cinema to see the latest Pixar offering Onward, starring the voice cast of Chris Pratt, Tom Holland and Julia-Louis Dreyfus among others. Any readers who also listen to the podcast will know that I gave it a good review, commenting that while it was perhaps not the finest film Pixar had ever made, it was well-directed, with good performances and hit the right emotional notes. This was a cop out. Onward had a huge emotional impact on me and might be one of the most intense cinematic experiences I have ever had. 

The plot of Onward centres on two brothers who live in a world in which the inhabitants are all magical creatures such as elves or centaurs. Their world has been left devoid of much of its former magic thanks to technology. There are spoilers ahead, this is your warning. On the 16th birthday of the younger brother (voiced by Tom Holland), both brothers receive a magical staff from their long-deceased father with the magical power to bring him back for one day only. The older brother (voiced by Chris Pratt) experienced some time with their Dad before he passed away, while the younger brother experienced nearly none. Inevitably the brothers fuck the spell up and accidentally only bring back his lower half, leading to a quest to find another magical stone in time to bring back the rest of him before the spell wears off. The narrative for the most part is formulaic, with ups and downs and an inevitable huge fight between the brothers leaving their quest in apparent tatters. At this stage the younger brother begins to cross things off his list of things he wanted to do with his Dad that now could not happen. One by one he crosses items off before realising that he had experienced most of the very usual father-son experiences through his older brother. The brothers find the magical stone later in the film with minutes to spare, but a dragon attacks (the details as to why aren’t important). The younger brother makes the selfless decision to hold off the dragon with his new-found magical abilities so his older brother can finally say his goodbye to their Dad. For one of only a few occasions at the cinema I was in tears. I have never had a brother and my Dad did not die till I was 32, so my experiences don’t match up with the characters of Onward, putting aside the dragons and wizards, but the emotional core of the film resonated with me. I did not experience the normal experiences most sons experience with their actual father, but I was never without people to guide me and I did have a father-figure that I didn’t appreciate well enough at the time in my Step-Dad Mike. 

Image credit: Disney/Pixar

Image credit: Disney/Pixar

Reading the plot of Onward or actually watching the film may not stir anything emotionally in you personally. I stand by the criticisms of the film being largely formulaic and often unoriginal. It doesn’t match up to the quality of Inside Out. Quoting Mark Kermode quoting Roger Ebert, films are like a machine for creating empathy. That empathy is often empathy towards a narrative you have nothing in common with personally, but perhaps peaks when even an element relates to your personal history. I experienced a release of resentment having watched the film. I didn’t forgive my Dad, because perhaps he wasn’t a well enough person to have been at fault, but I let my resentment towards him go and now I’m left with the better memories. Onward was a profound experience for me because I brought my own personal history to the cinema with me.

Musique Vérité; Why Kanye West’s “All Day” At The 2015 Brit Awards Is One Of The Best Ever Live Performances

in

This article was originally published over on Michael’s blog ‘Roads To The North’, which you can find here.

At the 2015 Brit Awards, Kanye West fully unveiled his anticipated track “All Day”, the latest in a string of Paul McCartney-affiliated cuts after “Only One” and “FourFiveSeconds”. The studio reel places McCartney in its coda, whistling the melody around which Kanye and French Montana’s hammering beat, reminiscent of the industrial influence which characterised the seismic “Yeezus” album and the then-ascendant Chicago drill scene, is based. This portion is excised from the live take, but the way that melodic snapshot is transformed into a sinister, serpentine payload glitching and slicing its way out of the sound system is sheer, intergalactic audio candy. As it is, the (literally) incendiary performance encapsulates such ferocious energy and lightning-in-a-bottle intensity that its later-released studio counterpart is but a pale imitation and strangely forgotten among the living legend’s discography.

When aired as live in the United Kingdom on ITV, the performance was censored to laughable effect as a result of its liberal employment of racial expletives; a skittering, otherworldly broadcast, essentially unwatchable. An uncut, high quality shot in its full splendour was mercifully released into the world later, and it is this which I posit is one of the finest and most revealing musical performances I have ever witnessed. The clip lends the lie aggressively to the fallacy that West is no rapper; his performance is impeccable, evidencing masterful breath control and head-spinning dexterity. From a technical perspective, his lyrical contribution is one of his boldest; packing in syllables to maximum capacity and full of playful, hyperactive internal schemes. I have set sights on this vid so many times that each step of West’s off-the-cuff choreography is cauterised into my memory.

The Brit Awards continues to be held each winter and is the theoretical main event of the UK music industry’s awards season. It has struggled to recapture the much-propagandised hell-raising of its 90s heyday, the zenith of Cool Britannia when such gatherings may well have passed for genuine cultural history. The ceremony is much more sterile now, but that isn’t a word ever likely to be associated with Kanye, even in what is a comparatively minimalist effort like this, in staging if not in themes. Crucial to understanding the vitality of this performance is the fact that the Brits had become associated with the use of a Potemkin crowd of paid-off kids in the style of a latter-day Top of the Pops, also seen annually at the Super Bowl halftime show. These typically include(d) undergraduates of the famed Brit School, a policy famously ridiculed by an inebriated Alex Turner in a memorable 2008 acceptance speech (sadly cut short!). By jettisoning this façade from the set-up in 2015, the ceremony exposed itself in full.

West takes to the stage with a considerably sized crew of London MCs and two flamethrowers. The cameras capture the gulf between the spectacle on stage, the drama, white knuckle thrill and furious glee of heavyweight American hip hop, and the dazed, besuited industry figures below, stalled in their skins, barely a single one of them seen moving when confronted with the bomb-strewn bombast and shrapnel-flicked passion of West at his peak. The gap is physically short, but viewers can see that it constitutes a cultural chasm, calling into severe question the ability of British music bureaucracy to handle an ego and ability of these gigantic proportions. The effect mimics in miniature the real-time informational clashes of art and opinion played out, en masse, on social media after the much-hyped release of West albums like 2013’s “Yeezus” and 2016’s “The Life of Pablo”, big bangs of pop critical theory normalised most notably by the surprise release du jour, Beyoncé’s 2013 self-titled record.

To perplexing perfection, we catch Lionel Richie of all people looking like aliens have landed in front of him, which this is tantamount to for the purposes of apparently everyone in those amassed ranks. Tantalisingly and unforgivably, we cut back to the stage just in time to miss Richie’s reaction to the song’s most provocative deployment (“like a light-skinned slave, boy/we in the motherfuckin’ house!”).  Taylor Swift initially appears mesmerised before being seen again later as apparently the only individual in attendance to at least somewhat embrace what they were witnessing. The same cannot be said of Sam Smith, who, in comedic fashion, can be seen partying with a certain restraint later(!). The conclusion is clear; hip hop may have risen to the apex of the pop cultural mountain and West may be one of its most virtuosic purveyors, but the supposed musical elite have little appreciation or feel for it. While this might be cast as a strength for a genre which still thrives upon a burgeoning grassroots pedigree even as it is unfailingly assimilated into the many forms and shapes of capitalism, and which remains typified by the celebration of young black men (and increasingly, though not extensively, women) at their escape from poverty, it also stands as proof that no pyramids have been inverted.

The fact that the ITV broadcast was bludgeoned with the edit button until only identifiable by its dental records did not stop it bearing a magnetic pull for complaints to the UK’s televisual regulator Ofcom. No fewer than 151 armchair dwellers saw fit to complain about the performance, which Ofcom ultimately declined to investigate. Of course, this is by design. West would have known that the fireball he was launching into Britain’s living rooms would deeply unsettle viewers, and this would have been the point. As West appearances at award ceremonies go, this is but another in a lineage of controversial moments defined by rage at the appalling taste of musical societies, their racial bigotry and their whitewashing of musical recognition, but a (albeit barely) more subtle expression of the same sentiment than his previously favoured tactic of stage-storming. The fact that West has the freedom to perform such a neck-jerking track in what has otherwise regressed to a national sonic safe space, to splatter so much blood in this aural operating theatre, is what makes the performance deeply discomfiting for some, and generates the weapons-grade triumphalism enjoyed by West and his disciples when twinned with the revelatory nature of the song’s debut and the scorching showmanship of the flailing furnaces behind him.

Image from The Independent

Image from The Independent

Naturally, the real nature of the complaints attracted does not centre around swearing, though that may be a useful proxy. As reflected by the looks of uncertainty and unease in the eyes of the well-heeled live audience, the real objection was to the accumulation of black bodies, a problem in and of itself, but tenfold when occurring in an unexpected vicinity like that stage. The grievousness of the affront, to a certain cross-section, is amplified considerably once again when you consider that the iconography of the Brit ceremony comes cloaked liberally in Union Jacks and that its symbols function as expressions and actualised prizes of a much-coveted well of patriotism. The key to victory in this sphere is to control the levers and thereby be capable of setting the agenda; the reality of the Brit Awards in a contemporary sense seems to lean liberally but often the final judging panel and the viewing public do not (if electoral evidence is anything to go by), but the procurement of Brit Awards, as seen with Dave in 2020 (more on him later), can be a powerful shot across the bows on matters of identity and culture. As such, there is plenty of pageantry involved, certainly more than enough to antagonise some racists.

These clashes are naturally multifaceted; half of the holders of the four Great Offices of State in the UK at the time of writing are of an ethnic minority, but their party, preceding governments of the same party and the Home Secretary herself are all known for illiberal proclamations on immigration. From similar contrasting and counterbalancing forces, Kanye makes it on to the stage with relatively free rein, even in front of a quietly hostile or maybe even shruggingly dismissive live audience which acts as a hologram for a much more vituperative and apoplectic set of viewers at home. The morning after the show, at work, I witnessed Kanye’s appearance written off as nonsense unworthy of a second thought, a perception chafing painfully against the embodiment of hip hop as a commercial and artistic artform, as one of America’s truest dichotomies, that it really represents. If there wasn’t palpable anger, there was a casual disgust with the idea that this could represent a viable artistic pursuit, let alone a globally popular one. It is against this climate that West’s signalling for his assorted guests to “get low”, a suggestion they follow with vigour and enthusiasm as the song clatters through the air raid chimes of its conclusion, becomes almost comical and will likely draw a laugh from any viewer attuned to the veritable canyon of cultural awareness between the performers on stage and the average viewer, both in attendance and otherwise.

One of the complaints about the piece was superbly interpolated into “Shutdown” by Skepta, one of the towering influences of the UK‘s grime scene and one of the artists on stage with Kanye at this very Brits performance, from his history-making, Mercury Prize-winning 2016 album “Konnichiwa”. A woman of almost exaggeratedly middle class enunciation agonises in Home Counties English:

“A bunch of young men, all dressed in black, dancing extremely aggressively on stage; it made me feel so intimidated and it’s just not what I expect to see on prime time TV”.

Here, “dressed in black” is a substitute, whether knowingly or unknowingly; the item the men on stage are wearing which the complainant objects to being black is not a garment, it is their skin. The experience of being publically harassed and targeted for wearing black skin, whether by authorities or otherwise, is far from anything new to black British people, especially the young.

Other young UK acts on stage that night run the gamut from the highly-acclaimed and under-the-radar in the form of Novelist, to the seemingly bulletproof chart-devouring swagger of Stormzy, who has taken grime to commercial heights unthinkable only a handful of years ago. These are but a few of the acts who have pushed London to the forefront of the global hip hop community and made the fever dream that UK rap could ever stand toe to toe with its US counterpart a genuine reality in an impossibly small timeframe. It would be ludicrous to credit Kanye too effusively for this, Drake is a much more celebrated supporter of the scene if we need to throw an active icon into the mixture, but there is no doubt that if his audacity to exist and relentless envelope-pushing in the face of adversity were not enough to inspire, everyone stood on that stage with West certainly got a taste for it. As Kendrick Lamar flowered into a performer who spins exuberant, high-end conceptual plates on stage as much as on record at around the same time, the big guns of British hip hop began to draw on American inspiration for the messaging and narratives of their live spectacles, and the fact that this has been seen most readily at the Brit Awards recently seems no coincidence.

It has since become an unspoken tradition for outstanding British rap stars enjoying a victory lap at the Brit Awards to directly challenge the sitting Prime Minister during performances of notable grandiosity. Although Skepta kept things characteristically no-nonsense in 2017, Stormzy targeted Theresa May in 2018 in a much-stylised set famous for raising the awkward, essential questions regarding the Grenfell Tower disaster of 2017. The aforementioned Dave (also now a Mercury victor) followed in a similar vein earlier this year, calling Boris Johnson a racist to receptions both laudatory and enraged. The ubiquity and quality of black British music at this time, one of the greatest points of pride in a post-Brexit Britain, and part of a wider ongoing golden harvest for British music which I refer to as Hot Britannia, suggests that the Brit Awards stage is likely to remain a pivotal battleground in the Culture Wars in the near future. It is this which, in hindsight, alleviates the criticisms of a very different kind levelled at Kanye by some in the immediate aftermath of the 2015 show; that UK hip hop’s inferiority and subservience to the juggernaut of the US scene was exemplified by the fact that these British MCs were effectively drafted in as West’s backing dancers; mere cosmetic marionettes in what is very much Kanye’s vision. One of the individuals to make this claim was Dizzee Rascal, despite having gone from once winning a Mercury gong of his own in 2003 and blazing an astonishingly individual trail for a generation of acts to come later, to being reduced to novelty singles and toe-curling duds like “Bassline Junkie”, now touring as effectively a nostalgia act.

Even if the proportion of artists present that night to have properly broken through in the years since makes the pace appear glacial, things look very different in 2020. The implication of their presence on the stage, both from the point of view of those who praised Kanye for breaking the barrier down for them and those who criticised him for exploitation, was simple; they would not be invited on to that stage otherwise. Two years later, with Skepta, that had all changed.

Novelist put it this way at the time:

“We were just chilling in Skepta’s house and Kanye rang Skepta and said “yo, can you get some of your guys to come down?” So Skepta just brought his music mates. It was very spontaneous. It was only an hour before the show. I liked the fact that I was onstage with people like myself in my tracksuit; that was sick…

…It all stems from respect from the people. Onstage at the Brits, we were the people’s people, the rebels, and that’s why Twitter and everything was going mental. The TV, the blogs, the big magazines; it doesn’t matter if they say it. The country knows about us, and that’s all that matters”.

This identifies some of the alternative channels which exist as options for narrative-setting, in contrast to the mainstream media, as mentioned earlier.

Grime overlord Wiley had this to say:

“Kanye knows the Brits ain’t letting dons in there like that so he kicked off the door for us”.

This embodies an independent spirit at the heart of the grime scene, one which embraced the chance to go briefly widescreen when it came along. Sometimes revolutions happen quickly, suddenly and without a great amount of planning, even if they do represent the culmination of years or decades of movement. I cannot claim, in an article where I have suggested towards the notion of occurrences and exposures which take place without any party processing their own intentions, that the fact that Novelist and his peers felt that their participation in West’s stunningly theatrical and symbolism-laced jamboree was entirely consensual means that it didn’t have other meanings and reveal other realities; perhaps it simultaneously corporealised a colonial reversal within the Transatlantic rap movement and also represented an insurrectionary moment spearheaded altruistically by a privileged artist with a major statement to make about black opportunity. What Kanye’s performance at the 2015 Brit Awards is, either way, is a super-sized serving of musique vérité; lifting the veil on a preponderance of musical, cultural, racial and societal truths in explosive form, and therefore one of the greatest live performances ever committed to tape.

Clive's Top 5 Albums of Every Year Challenge - An Introduction

in
This is me. Hi. Apparently smiling isn’t cool, but those headphones sure are, ooo just look at them.

This is me. Hi. Apparently smiling isn’t cool, but those headphones sure are, ooo just look at them.

I love music, making it, listening to it, performing it, all of it, and thus, as I sit here in lockdown, I’ve decided to do a bit of a challenge. It goes as follows: I will listen to and review the top 5 rated albums on rateyourmusic.com, a platform where users rate albums (think IMDB for music), for each year from 1960 to the present. I’ll then rank them into my preferred order for each year, because I mean what’s the point in doing anything if you can’t rank things afterwards?

To tell the truth, I started this challenge a while back (although I started in 1965 as 60-64 featured a lot of jazz that I didn’t feel comfortable talking about) and have so far got up to 1973. Thus maybe the years 1965-1973 will be a little quicker to write for me than the rest as I typically have albums which I haven’t heard before in my circulation for a week or two before I review them. I expect this challenge will take me years, I mean there’s 60 years to cover, and I expect each post will take me at least a fortnight to do, likely more. Anyway, that’s the basic premise. I’ll now interview myself to make it a bit clearer:

Why would anyone do this?

I love lists, I love throwing myself in and listening to music in all genres, but most of all, I love discovering music that is new to me. This little challenge seems like the best way to do that in a way that in a few years time will mean I’ve got a super well rounded listening history. I’m also excited about learning a bit about the stories behind albums and their artists, and so those will feature (where interesting) in my reviews too. Just think of all the interesting characters I’ll discover? Oooo.

Will you rigidly stick to the top 5, even if something in it doesn’t appeal and something at, say, number 7 does?

Yes, that’s the whole point of the ‘challenge’, to force myself to listen and review things I maybe wouldn’t normally. However, although I’ll definitely be doing the top 5 of every year at the very least, that doesn’t mean I won’t do any additional ones. If I think ‘oooo that album at number 9 there sure looks appealing’, I’ll throw that in to the mixer too because I’m a renegade and I do what I want. As long as I stick to my own arbitrary top 5 rules, obviously.

What’s your review style?

Well, although I review around 50-100 albums a year, I wouldn’t consider myself an expert by any means. I know very little about the history of genres for example, though I hope this challenge will teach me more. I’ll mainly be reviewing albums the only way I can, which is by considering how enjoyable I find them now. I can’t really put them into the context of when they were released, as I don’t live in that context. Essentially, I’ll be reviewing albums as to how much I enjoy them and how interesting they are, two things which are very much interlinked for me. Reviews will have an informal chatty style, and will hopefully be fun.

On what scale will you rate albums?

Good question. I’ll keep it simple, rate them out of ten. Bare in mind though that I’ve only ever given around ten albums 10/10, so expect lots of 8s and 9s and not many 10s I’d say. We’ll see.

Anything else you want to say?

Errr…. No. Actually, yes, I hope you enjoy reading these, because I’m truly excited about the prospect of writing them.

Gracias,

Clive

This isn’t a letter or e-mail.

Oh, so I don’t have to sign off at the end?

No

Well I’ve already learnt something. Let’s go….

Clive Watches Ghibli: Part 7 (2013-2014)

in

It's finally here, the final part of my Ghibli retrospective (you can find the other parts over on our index page). There's only two films left to cover and not a Miyazaki in sight. Let's crack on.

The_Tale_of_Princess_Kaguya_princess_Kaguya_animated_movies-152403.jpg!d.jpg

The Tale of Princess Kaguya (2013)

Isao Takahata's 2013 swansong before his death earlier this year is undoubtedly one of his, and Studio Ghibli's, best films. Based on the 10th century Japanese story The Bamboo Cutter it follows a bamboo cutter who finds a mysterious baby that appears inside a bamboo shoot. Discovering quickly that she grows more rapidly than normal humans, he believes her to be divine royalty and sees to it that she lives as such. He is aided in this quest by the lavish gifts that also magically appear in the bamboo he cuts.

The Tale of Princess Kaguya is a soaring coming of age tale that's themes are remarkably down to earth behind its mystical exterior. Growing up, going your own way, how life becomes more complicated as we get older, the corruptive influence of money and how it hurts to let go of our children when they grow up are all central themes to the film and are delivered in a way that feels universal despite the very Japanese feel to the film. The animation is more experimental (it's Takahata after all) and I probably like it less than the more traditional Ghibli style although I can't deny it's beautiful and I do feel it suits this older, more classic story. I think the film drags a little in the middle (I feel like closer to two hours would have been the sweet spot) but it's so ripe with beauty and observations about life that I consider it in the upper echelons of Ghibli's catalogue. The final scenes are absolutely stunning too. 

8/10

Marnie

When Marnie Was There (2014)

Hiromasa Yonebayashi's second Studio Ghibli film (his first was Whispers of the Heart) is based on Juan G. Robinson's novel of the same name. Anna suffers an asthma attack at school and worried by her declining health and anxiety her foster parents send her to live with the foster-mother's relatives, who live in a seaside town where the air is clearer. Anna soon meets Marnie in an abandoned seaside mansion nearby, and it becomes clear pretty quickly that Marnie is not from the present. To me, it had similarities to something like Tom's Midnight Garden where the protagonist can meet people who live in the same place but in other time periods. As things go on Marnie and Anna's relationship deepens and secrets begin to unfold.

I thoroughly enjoyed this film to begin with and found Anna's highly anxious character very interesting, relatable, and full of depth. However I didn't find the reveal as rewarding as a lot of people seem to as I predicted it fairly early on, to say any more would be to spoil it. Nevertheless, this is a well put together film about family, anxiety, the past, and belonging. It's gorgeously animated and perhaps one of the more emotional Ghibli films, thanks partly to a very pretty soundtrack. I didn't connect with it as deeply as some have, but I can certainly appreciate it's beauty.

7/10

And so that's it. Two more films to throw into the Ghibli mixer and see how the final rankings pop out. I suspect these will change over time (some already have since the last post), especially when I rewatch the more meaty, harder to digest ones. But for now, here's how I'd rank them with the final two additions in bold italics:

1. Princess Mononoke

2. My Neighbour Totoro

3. Grave of the Fireflies

4. Kiki's Delivery Service

5. Spirited Away

6. The Tale of Princess Kaguya

7. Howl's Moving Castle

8. Laputa: Castle in the Sky

9. The Wind Rises

10. Arrietty

11. Whisper of the Heart

12. Only Yesterday

13. From Up on Poppy Hill

14. When Marnie Was There

15. Porco Rosso

16. The Cat Returns

17. Ponyo

18. My Neighbours the Yamadas

19. Pom Poko

20. Tales from Earthsea

Wow. What an amazing set of films, it is perhaps only the last two or three that I didn't enjoy all that much (although they were still very much serviceable). The top three are masterpieces in my eyes. I've been continually blown away, surprised and believe this little adventure is the birth of a love of anime. Next, I shall be watching all the top 100 ranked anime films at random (over many years no doubt) and posting reviews over on the YouTube channel. At least that's the current plan. Should any of these crop up I shall watch them again, and my rankings will no doubt change, though I seriously doubt Princess Mononoke will be taken from the top spot.

Thanks for reading this little series and stay classy y'all!

Clive :)