So tonight I watched a Studio Ghibli film called Kiki’s Delivery Service and I couldn’t
help feeling a little disoriented. All the names in the credits were Japanese,
so I was expecting it to be set in Japan. Clearly not: Kiki’s home in
the opening sequence looked like an English country cottage, but it couldn’t
have been set in Britain because
the traffic drove on the right (which also precludes Japan.) And
then the characters began to talk and they all had American accents, and Kiki
called her mother ‘mom.’ So now we’re in America. Are we? Apparently not
because the city where Kiki goes to live has south European/Mediterranean
architecture. I began to wonder whether we might soon see the Taj Mahal in the
distance or a herd of wildebeest sweeping across the savannah.
This isn’t a criticism; I’m sure they had their reasons and
it’s a nice film. But I still felt disoriented.
* * *
And on the subject of architecture, I was looking at the
Christmas cards in Ashbourne yesterday and noticed how many of them featured
Moorish/Middle Eastern architecture (because of the three wise men theme.) Such
architecture is one of the classic icons of the world of Islam, which I thought
amusingly ironic on a Christmas card. And I wondered how I’ve managed to get
this far in life without ever noticing that before. I also wonder how I manage to be this tedious after midnight.
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