The Snowy Day
As is our morning habit, my eighteen-month-old son Drake and I went out Friday to the coffee shop then the park. We walked in snow that was astonishingly lovely. It fell as dry, discrete flakes. I managed to catch a few perfectly formed, six-pronged crystals on my sleeve. Their descent was slow and steady, dampening the noise of the nearby traffic. I paused often, to stare both at the snow and at Drake, who ran purposefully ahead in his fuzzy snowsuit with its pointed hood. He’d stop occasionally to look back, curious why I wasn’t keeping pace with him.
The quiet snowfall reminded me of a scene from Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki’s animated film “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind”, released in the U.S. this week on DVD. The pronunciation has been Americanized on the television commercials I’ve seen as “NOZ ih kuh”, but I believe it is more correct as “Nah OOSH ih kuh”. The image in my memory is of drifting plant spores, not snow, but they held the same quiet beauty.
I saw my first Miyazaki film, “My Neighbor Totoro,” about ten years ago, and have been a devotee ever since. Miyazaki came to greater American renown in 2002, when “Spririted Away” won the Oscar for best animated film. I am thrilled that his films are now available in English to the American market. His next movie to be released in theaters will be “Howl’s Moving Castle,” based on one of my favorite books by English fantasy author Diana Wynne Jones. All of Miyazaki’s films feature smart, believable, young-girl protagonists, and are filled with wonderful, magical images.
For more on Miyazaki and his wonderful films, see the January 17, 2005 The New Yorker article “The Auteur of Anime: Inside the wonderful world of Miyazaki” by Margaret Talbot, who discusses it online here.