Films

Last week I managed to go the cinema twice in different constellations.

Porco Rosso could have been scripted by Richard Bach in its pæan to the joy and beauty of flying. The delicate drawing style of the Miyasaki studio is perfectly suited for the clean and elegant 1920s seaplanes and the characters' equally light and slim summer clothes, all set against the eternally sunlit blues of the Adriatic Sea and the Mediterranean sky. Yes, in a world like this even pigs have to fly. And I have to build more Macchi seaplanes.

Then WALL·E. Even though the rightful star was robbed of his role it is truly what I call a “holding-hands movie”—in several senses. We even find that by holding hands you can restore from backups you hadn't made. It is also a very Mac-friendly movie, EVE is clearly an iRobot (not the same as I, Robot) and apparently WALL·E runs some latter-day version of MacOS. That there are major plot inconsistencies is less of a problem. And of course the computer graphics are absolutely stunning, in particular when you don't even notice them unless you're knowledgeable enough to realise that every frame is the result of some really complex programming and extremely heavy computation.