Starting off your Saturday on a bit of a down note, Ectomo presents Isao Takahata’s Hotaru no Haka, Grave of the Fireflies, based on the book by Akiyuki Nosaka of the same name. Released in 1988, with animation production by Studio Ghibli, Grave of the Fireflies tells the story of Seita and his younger sister Setsuko, orphaned after the loss of their parents in World War II; their mother in the fiire-bombing of Kobe, and their father who served in the Imperial Japanese Navy. Forced to live with a relative, who treats them as little more than a burden while selling their mother’s kimono’s to buy rice for herself, they eventually leave and take up residence in an abandoned bomb shelter.
Grave of the Fireflies is a tough film to watch, and a movie which begins with the death of the young, main character was probably not what many audiences were expecting to see when it was released in Japan as a double feature with Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro. It is also the only Studio Ghibli movie the Disney does not have the rights to distribute in the U.S., meaning that it has not seen the same, widespread release here. It is a film that should be seen at least once, whether one is a fan of animated features or not, remaining just as powerful now as it was 20 years ago.
In 1951 Souvaine Selective Pictures was set to release Alice in Wonderland featuring a combination of live action and stop-motion animation by pioneering animator Lou Bunin. Bunin had worked for Diego Rivera in Mexico and was behind the earliest known stop-motion production in the U.S.
Alas, there was only one problem, RKO Radio Pictures was set to release Walt Disney’s three million dollar version of Alice in Wonderland and they weren’t comfortable with competition. Claiming that a second Alice film would confuse moviegoers, Disney and RKO successfully sued to have Bunin’s film released eighteen months later in the U.S. with a severely limited distribution, despite the fact that Bunin had already premiered the film in Paris in 1949.
The above is a clip from that film. Unfortunately the negatives have been damaged, leaving us with a poor quality print. However, this does not take away from the fact that, while the white rabbit may be the stuff of nightmares, Bunin’s film is much more faithful to its source material.
It is hard to imagine anyone accepting the veracity of Disney’s claim that this movie, whose budget was half of his feature, would so confuse customers as to cause “irreparable damage” to him and RKO. In the end their victory did nothing to help when the movie was released. Critically panned, despite being a masterpiece of animation, Disney’s Alice in Wonderland achieved little success at the box office, though one can imagine that it fared better than Souvaine Selective Pictures’s. In the end, it only served to make the loss of Bunin’s film that much more unfortunate.
Every year since 1999, the pallid, mope-faced moppets parade into Disneyland in their stinking black lace for the annual Bats Day in the Fun Park, “the premier event on the West Coast, if not the world, for the Gothic and Industrial subculture of all ages.”
The world’s saddest people in the world’s happiest place is not as ironic a scenario as anyone would have you believe–after all, both are devoted to a heightened reality, to fantasy, to creativity, to dress up, to women with menacing names and unnaturally colored hair. The event is in August because that month holds one of the few summer weekend days when none of the annual passes are blacked out. (There are annual Disneyland passes hidden inside those corsets and Emily the Strange lunchboxes, people!) That fact has probably helped Disney discover what so many of the day’s participants stressed to me: they have jobs, they have children, they have purchasing power. Disneyland even unofficially offers bat-themed merchandise during the day, showing that it is a small world, after all–especially when you are trying to part people from their last discretionary dollar.
Check out the photogallery: these people are more nightmarish and surreal than Walt Disney’s frozen head could envision if a tab of LSD were dropped to dissolve in the tank like Alka-Seltzer.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
