Kiki Lost in Translation

 Not this.

 

 I feel I'm only just beginning to get Miyazaki. Some context: Kiki – for this is a scene from Miyazaki's 1989 Kiki's Delivery Service – has left her family to start a life as all witches have to do when they turn twelve, found a job at a friendly baker's, and made a friend who's trying to invent an aeroplane. The two spend a lovely day together, dangerously testing a prototype, but when more friends of his turn up, Kiki recognises among them a particularly entitled prick of a kid from a delivery job, and races home for this confession to her cat. Actually I'm underselling the subtlety of the encounter. The kid isn't particularly entitled, or even a prick, she's just embarassed by her grandmother's cake – one of those tiny, almost meaningless interactions which can nevertheless make you abandon all hope in humanity. (One of the great strengths of this film is showing the difficulty Kiki has not just responding to an independent life, but having to respond to those responses.) I saw the film for the first time a couple of weeks ago, with subtitles, and the speech above stood out to me so much that when I got home, I immediately fastforwarded the Engish dub on Netflix to see it played in English.

 Which is how I found out just how different a dub can be. 

 Because the words above are not what I saw in the cinema. Those are the captions to that English dub (as posted to instagram by the Prince Charles Cinema, which is what prompted me to this proselytism). What I saw Kiki say in the cinema was...

 

This.

 

 I mean, I know one has to pick one's fights, but I don't understand how anyone could change a word of that.

Arsing Lupin (includes subliminal hazelnuts)

 

So, what's the show called again? 

 

 Conicidentally, I'd just watched The Castle of Cagliostro on Netflix the Thursday before my Crown binge – or not that coincidentally maybe, you be the judge – but Hayao Miyazaki's feature debut definitely reminded me how much I enjoy a good castle break-in. Checking IMDB to confirm this was indeed his first film, I discovered it was a spin-off from a TV show Miyazaki had directed in 1972 called "Lupin the 3rd", and I had a look for some of that, and this compilation of the openings credits is as far as I got. What do you think? I think the second season may feature one of the coolest sequences ever to appear at the beginning of a cartoon: a samurai on the roof a plane in flight, briefly unsheathing his sword, before showing he's sliced another plane deftly in half. It also features Lupin kicking a window in to get to a naked woman in bed, and literally jumping out of his own clothes before being fended off by a boxing glove on a spring, so it also features one of the not-coolest sequences. 

 Subsequent, possibly Miyazaji-less series would clearly encounter problems trying to top all this: having your samurai slice a whole skyscraper in half,  from the roof,  doesn't ring quite as true, but it's preferable to how cluttered and bloody and brooding and boring the series would later look. The very first series – whose opening lyrics are not great, be warned – employs subliminal imagery of which I've taken screen shots so we can better enjoy the taste of that 1970's' high life being flashed behind the heroine/nameless dancing girl/no idea, at our leisure...

 

 and also maybe identify who the hell those two guys are.

Climbing the Walls 2: Faganism

Thanks to David Cairns' blog for this "Castle of Cagliostro" still.

 I had forgotten how much I was hoping to one day see the story of "Michael Fagan (intruder)" dramatised, until I found out in the opening minutes of The Crown that a whole episode would be dedicated to it, and my excitement only built as I watched. Fagan was everything I'd forgotten I wanted. As a Time Traveling Professor from the year 2121 on the old Time Tours, I used to claim that this was the most famous story we twenty-second-century folk had about the current monarch, and happily Peter Morgan's adaptation might yet prove me right. It goes like this: Turning south at Hyde Park Corner after a circuit of the Wellington Arch, and looking left from the top deck to see over the garden wall of Buckingham Palace the Queen's Own Compost Heap, punters would hear how, in 1982, a man called Michael Fagan had made it over this wall more than once, how he'd managed to find his way into the Palace and neck a bottle of wine, how the Queen had woken up to find him sitting on her bed, and how he meant her no harm, and how used she was to meeting strangers, how they'd engaged in coversation for a quarter of an hour, how he'd asked her if she had anything to smoke, and how she'd rung for a maid to bring some ciggies, and finally how Fagan was taken away, and tried for the theft of the wine. (Ken Campbell went to his trial, but I can't remember in which show he talks about it). Fagan was sentenced to three months in a psychiatric institute. And in all that time he only ever had one visitor. It was Prince Philip. He wanted to know where the Queen's bedroom was. I think that joke was nicked from a Duck Tours but the point is that although it's the Royal Wedding episode that bears the title "Fairy Tale", albeit ironically, Michael Fagan's meeting with the Queen really was a fairy tale. Anyone who's grown up with Ben Kenobi nipping behind a space pillar while the Stormtroopers pass probably carries with them a similar dream of sneaking into the echoing places of power and pulling a few levers. I walk at night myself of course, sometimes past the Palace, and fantasise about climbing the walls of this city, and even yell "fuck off" at the radio occassionally. I love that this was the episode of Thatcher's Falklands Victory as well, and hadn't realised, again until I saw it, how much I needed to see the first British Prime Minister ever to suggest that a government has no responsibility to look after its people appear in at least one story that wasn't entirely about her.