Looking forward

I love the way the light shifts gold in September.  It's not the deep heat of midsummer, and the wind and the rain have started to set in, but the chill of October hasn't quite arrived yet.  Last Saturday morning I woke up to this (click to enlarge):

Of course there are other things coming up I'm looking forward to, such as this offering from Disney/Pixar, due out next year

If you're seeing echoes of Dreamworks' 'How To Train Your Dragon' well I am too, but mainly I'm just pleased to have a kick-ass girl in the lead role.  Admittedly she's still a princess but two out three is pretty original as far as the Disney Franchise is concerned.  The last time they did that well was with 'Mulan'.  And Merida is a red-head too!  So often those of the ginger persuasion are relegated to the best-friend or comic-relief roles (think Ron Weasley, who fulfils both).  Apparently this is Pixar's first lead female too, which would be admirable if not for the fact that Studio Ghibli has had dozens of them since the mid-eighties.  Don't believe me?  Let's recap:

Studio Ghibli
Laputa: Castle in the Sky - Sheeta (joint lead)
My Neighbour Totoro - Satsuki and Mei
Kiki's Delivery Service - Kiki, with side-characters Osono and Ursula also making the grade
Only Yesterday - Taeko
Whisper of the Heart - Shizuku
Princess Mononoke - San/Mononoke (NOT your average female love interest by any standards!)
Spirited Away - Chihiro/Sen
The Cat Returns - Haru
Howl's Moving Castle - Sophie (who is 80 years old for most of the movie)
Ponyo - Ponyo (joint lead)
Arrietty/The Borrower Arrietty - Arrietty

Now, a few of these are technically princesses (Mononoke and Ponyo) but one is a metaphorical title rather than a social status, and the other has given up her princess-hood by the end of the film (plus, she is a goldfish, which I'm pretty sure exempts her from this) but the majority of them don't think too much about getting a guy and being lady-like and girly.  Either they're off questing or they have far better things to think about (Shizuku is working at being a writer, Kiki is setting up a business, Taeko is re-evaluating her life, Mononoke is... trying to assassinate someone) and what few men there are sort of fall into their lives as a bi-product of this.  Half the time they are either rejected or overlooked to boot.  None of these films ends in a wedding.  All in all this really appeals to me since there are surely more important measures of a girl than whether or not there's a fella about.  And damn it, I want to go questing too!  That sounds like so much more fun than sitting about waiting for my true love to drop from the ceiling.

Now let's evaluate the competition.

Pixar
errr...  I think Brave is it.  Don't say Tangled because that wasn't Pixar, that was Disney Animation.  I would add Disney to this list to help bump the numbers but every female lead I can think of is a princess or becomes one by the end of the film even if she is kick-ass.  Except for Lilo and Mulan (and even she wins her man)

Anyhow, somehow The Borrower Arrietty had managed to fly under my radar so I only saw it last week.



As usual it is exquisite work, full of the intricate hand-drawn animation that Ghibli is famous for, and the quiet spaces and gentle silences that are often passed over in Western cartoons in favour of action scenes, background music and montages.  Speaking of music, I'm thoroughly in love with the soundtrack too.  It was written and performed by French singer and celtic harpist Cecile Corbel, and adds an ancient fairy-like dimension to the incidental music in the film in particular, as well as the main theme song.  You can watch it in Japanese or English, and the jury's out on which is better.  I think you keep something nice in hearing the original language, but for those who find it hard to read on screen or pick up spoken intonation better in their own native tongue I have no objections.  The actors for the Ghibli translations are usually well chosen.

This article from the Guardian sums it all up pretty well, including a pretty interesting quote from Hayao Miyazaki himself about why exactly Ghibli enjoys it's female heroines so much.

Harvest home

Well summer is drawing to a close, the leaves are turning, the weather is cooling, even the smell of everything is different.  Harvesters are out in the fields and I'm collecting conkers, but what a summer it's been!  In the interests of trying to get somewhere on as a little money as possible, I adopted a Fuel-Only-Holiday scheme, trying to find ways of visiting new places with as little cost as I could, save that of travelling to reach them.

The reason for all this was that I knew a lot of people going on holidays abroad and suddenly felt that I hadn't seen much of the world.  Of course I can't afford to cross the channel just at the moment, but then it struck me that even though I've lived in England my entire life, there's still so much of it I've not seen.  Thus began my quest!

1. Lake District
I've blogged about this already so I won't go on, but I always enjoy visiting the Lake District.  The land is so awkward and you're forced to work around it's lofty hills, soggy valleys, and fields of wandering sheep, but it's well worth the effort for somewhere so unchanged,  I find it comforting.

2. Bristol
In August was the first wedding anniversary of my sister Katherine and her husband Tom.  They've been married for an entire year! What a strange thing to think about!  The two of them are beginning to make a life for themselves down in Bristol, somewhere I have never been, and this auspicious date just happened to collide neatly with the annual Balloon Fiesta.  So I did a little research on where I should go, took myself down there, stayed in the beautiful spare room of a kind neighbour, and spent a long weekend on a self-guided walking tour of Bristol.  It took me an entire day just to get from the house to the city centre, as I got distracted by a rather fantastic museum (I love a museum) that I sent the entire morning in.  It had everything a curious girl could want, from a 10ft ancient Red Elk, a fossilised Ichthyosaur foetus and a skeleton from ancient Egypt, all the way through to a large collection of taxidermied animals, including a badger I was allowed to stroke, whom we affectionately named 'Jimmy'.

Jimmy the Taxidermied Badger

10 min sketch of Bristol University,
drawn with felt pen and rain.

I visited art galleries, local history museums (which I highly recommend), the cathedral, harbours and docks, an aquarium (although I didn't actually go inside it) walked down rows of old regency houses and gothic monuments, got very sore feet and had a thoroughly enjoyable time.  And all of this for free!

The Balloon Fiesta itself was fun, if perhaps something you would only see once as there is a limited amount you can do with a balloon - the Night Glow, for example, is really en masse Bristol karaoke with the flame throwers in the balloons keeping time with their flashes.  For about an hour.  Still, it was a fun experience and I'm glad I saw it.  I also got up at six in the morning to walk up the the downs above the city and watch the balloons take their morning flight...  Naturally that was the one morning they didn't go up, but to sit amid green grass and see the sun come up over a new place is no bad thing.






3. Greenbelt Festival
I returned to the west country, a little further north, to the Greenbelt Festival held on Cheltenham Racecourse. I've been to events like Momentum in the past few years, and Stoneleigh Bible week as a child, but this was probably my first 'real' festival.  And how does this fit with my Fuel-Only scheme?  Well, as with some other festivals, if you volunteer to help run an area of the festival they won't charge you entry.  On top of that Greenbelt gives its volunteers food vouchers, enough for at least one meal per day bought from the festival stalls.  The rest of the food I took came straight from my kitchen cupboard.  So I dusted off my First Aid certificate, which was fortunately still in date, borrowed some camping gear from my parents and got stuck in!

Me and my mates, plus a new first-aiding friend.  I'm 2nd from the right, in the hi-vis.

Sunday morning at the Main Stage

In the 'Tiny Tea Tent' with friends

Lost, are we?

On the one hand, yes it was 4-8 hours of work a day, but it was also a great way to see the festival.  As a First-Aider you need to be where the crowds are but also have room to err... aid someone, so I spent a lot of my time sitting in the pits at Main Stage, or sneaking into the late night venues.  My final night was spent round a fire pot with the folks who had been running the food stalls all week, with a hula hoop, guitar and tambourine to keep us company.  Singalongs ensued!  Of course there was the occasionally mad dash across the site when an emergency call came over the radio.

Sculptures of home, made on site

My seat

I enjoyed Greenbelt mainly for the variety of topics covered by it's tagline of 'Combining Faith, Justice and the Arts'.  This meant that there was of course music played for you (lots of it) but also music you could take part in.  I found myself putting on a full performance as part of the very first Greenbelt Scratch Band, which played to an extremely high standard considering that we'd never seen each other or the music or the conductor in our lives before and had perhaps 7 hours practise in total.  There was also comedy, spoken word, storytelling, poetry, food (so much food!), theatre, acrobatics, crafts, dancing (again, for you and by you as well!) film, politics, theology, meditative areas, writing, workshops for national projects, international awareness and social justice, debate, and a lot of hard questions thrown across large crowds by people who wanted to live on the wobbly edge of faith and life rather than settling for the more familiar and reassuring habits of the mainstream, and a huge number of other topics that I could never even begin to cover.

Somehow I get the idea that I\ve only just begun to plumb the depths of Greenbelt, and having met several people who have going for over 20 years and are still returning, I may have to go back.

4. Ely
Updated tomorrow, once I've been.  For the past few months I've had a hankering to head closer home in Norfolk, and to see Ely's cathedral and the Fens.  So on Monday I go!