Christmas Album!

A scene from Studio Ghibli's most timeless, underrated masterpiece....

It's worth mentioning that Miyazaki has a personal affinity with pigs. He often draws himself as a pig and even created a whole film starring a man turned pig, "Porco Rosso" (I love it. The end.).

"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." - Albert Einstein

"Conan Man-Ape" by Frank Frazetta.

"The limits of your language are the limits of your world." ― Ludwig Wittgenstein

Turns out there's a Greek myth for everything...

Where did soulmates come from? Why is love a thing?

According to Greek playwright Aristophanes, there were originally three kinds of human beings: the Children of the Moon were male and female in one body. The Sun's Children were two males in one body and the Earth's were two females in one body. With two united minds and eight strong limbs each, they planned to overthrow the gods and live on Mt. Olympus themselves. But Zeus, wanting to end this rebellion before it started, sliced every couple into two, had Apollo smoothen them out and gave them belly buttons as an eternal reminder of their failure and made it possible for them to reproduce as we do now. Having been whole all their lives, they refused to do anything apart and started dying because of it. So Zeus reshaped their bodies again, making becoming physically one temporarily possible.

Now it's the inborn fate of every person to seek wholeness in another. Those who were once a man and woman desire the other gender and those who descended from a combo of the same gender seek to unite with the same gender.

They are soulmates, and this pursuit is love.

Fun Fact:

God of War's Grýla was based on a real giantess from Norse mythology.

In myth, she's not actually related to Angerboda at all, but the game got a lot of other things right. Like how she's enormous, absolutely disgusting and she did still have a cauldron you didn't want to end up in. Sagas from 13th century Iceland describe Grýla as a parasitic beggar woman who wanders around town, asking peasant farmers to give her their disobedient children. The parents could easily turn her away, but if their kid had been a real tachrán lately, they might just give him/her up. When Grýla was given a child, she'd throw them in a sack attached to one of her 15 tails, then take them home, toss them in the cauldron and get a stew going. Legend says that the naughtier the kid, the better the stew tasted and that she never ever had a shortage of food.

In God of War, she's not exactly nice to Angerboda, but she's never so horrible as to try and eat her. Instead, she uses her cauldron to harvest the souls of animals she traps around Jotunheim.

Compared to her mythology, her God of War counterpart is actually kind of nice...

Fun Fact:

The Cheshire Cat was first introduced in Lewis Carroll's novel "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland". The character was inspired by an old phrase "Smiling like a Cheshire cat". The origins of that phrase are still debated to this day, but the most widely accepted theory is that it refers to a cat living in the English county of Cheshire, which is known for producing a lot of milk and dairy, which cats love, hence the smiling. Carroll decided to personify the cat from that phrase, he gave it a physical form, a personality and magic powers. In the book, the cat doesn't play quite as large a role as he does in the Disney movie, but the two have very similar characteristics. They talk in really confusing ways that are sometimes funny but also kind of annoying, they raise philosophical questions to Alice even though she clearly doesn't understand them and while they sometimes appear to be making a situation worse for her, they're actually rooting for Alice to succeed and even are helping her indirectly.

Darkman by Sam Raimi.

Along with Batman (1989) and Spider-Man (2002), this signals the birth of quirky, inventive, modern comic-book movies. This film was very close to the genre, and it wasn't even based on a comic!

Note: I think the explosion that originates Darkman is meant to be an Alec Holland wink to the masterpiece: Swamp Thing.

As much as I'm mixed on Mutant Mayhem, I still give it my most favorable, most sincere wish for success.

May three of the most successful movies in 2023 be animated movies. May artistry be celebrated. May the ratings go higher than PG and beyond if the storytellers need it to be.

Haunted Britain: A Guide to Supernatural Sites frequented by Ghosts, Witches, Poltergeists and other Mysterious Beings by Antony D. Hippisley Coxe.