movies

The Babadook: Ghost Story or Psychological Thriller?

Media

the-babadook-book

I watched an exceptionally good horror film on Netflix, called The Babadook. One thing I like to do after seeing a good movie is try to reverse engineer the screenplay. What was the spark that inspired the screenwriter?

In this case the spark was likely a familiar domestic scenario in fiction: what tvtropes.org calls “Maternal Death, Blame the Child” — i.e., the mother dies in childbirth, and the father resents the child.

In this breakout Australian film, the genders are reversed. It’s the father who dies in a horrific auto accident while rushing his pregnant wife to the hospital. Fast-forward seven years, and you have single mother Amelia, struggling to raise her stormy, high-strung son, Sam. The lines on Amelia’s face hint at the toll Sam has taken on her with his eccentric hyperactivity. At just seven years old, Sam has developed a spastic repertoire of magician’s tricks, while fashioning homespun mechanical weapons that shatter windows and break dishes.

 

the babadook - sam in car

 

The film makes clear Sam’s motive in demanding all of his mother’s attention. He’s afraid she doesn’t love him. It’s his greatest fear. And in a horror film, your greatest fear can turn murderous.

Amelia begins to fear this about herself, as well. Has she stopped loving her son? Though her affection for Sam is obvious, her sanity is wearing thin. She puts out Sam’s fires left and right: Sam ejected from school for bad behavior, Sam shoving his cousin out of her tree fort and breaking her nose.

Amelia is also horribly sleep deprived. With Sam’s birthday–also the anniversary of her husband’s death–fast approaching, she’s plagued by nightmares of the car crash that decapitated her husband seven years before.

Sam has nightmares, too. Amelia must soothe him long into the night. The best way is to let him sleep in her bed. But she’s robbed of her own sleep, as he clings to her. In two memorable close-ups, Sam’s hand grips her throat or he grinds his teeth right next to her ear.

As the sleep deprivation wears on her, Amelia begins to lose her temper. She snaps at Sam, curses, even. “If you’re so hungry, why don’t you eat shit!” She apologizes, horrified at herself.

But we’re not surprised. We see she’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

 

Tellingly, that’s when the Babadook–a supernatural creature from a super-creepy children’s book–begins to terrorize them in their shadowy house.

 

the babadook gif

Amelia reading the pop-up book “The Babadook” to her son, Sam

(Spoiler alert:  if you haven’t seen the film yet, stop reading here.)
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From that point on, the film plays as a supernatural slasher flick. The Babadook possesses Amelia’s body and targets Sam. It/she stalks him with a butcher knife.
Or, is it the case that Amelia has simply lost her mind? If so, the story shifts from supernatural thriller to psychological thriller and becomes much more disturbing.
But the camera storytelling keeps us on the fence. It’s a classic presentation of Freud’s the uncanny:  we don’t know how to take Amelia’s violence–is she possessed or is she insane?
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Rather than run away, Sam fights back. With his arsenal of homemade weapons, he pelts Amelia/Babadook with darts and bocce balls.
 the-babadook-Sam weapons

He slows her attack long enough to wrest her attention: “I know you don’t love me,” he shouts. “The Babadook won’t let you!”

It’s at that moment the film so movingly reveals the central metaphor: that Amelia’s grief at the loss of her husband poisons her relationship to her child. The Babadook represents her resentment. Resentment kills relationships.

At the risk of revealing too much, let’s just say Sam battles the Babadook to the end.

Corporate Data Breaches: What They Mean for Us

Entrepreneurship, Media

Part III in a series on personal online security. Parts I and II can be found here and here.

sony-hacked-again-1

 

What’s it gonna take?

That’s the question we’re all asking after the countless cyber attacks on the world’s most powerful corporations. The Sony Pictures hack got a lot of attention for the 47,000 embarrassing executive emails and celebrity Social Security numbers dumped onto the Internet. But check out this list of high-profile hacks and how many records were breached:

  • Michaels Stores, Inc. — 2 million
  • JP Morgan — 83 million
  • Home Depot — 109 million
  • Target — 110 million
  • eBay — 145 million
  • Adobe — 152 million
  • Court Ventures (Experian) — 200 million

We’re talking credit card data, home addresses, checking account numbers–everything an identity thief dreams of at night.

For this post I had planned on listing all the household-name companies hacked in recent years. But it would be way easier to list the handful that weren’t hacked. One prominent cyber security analyst claims 97% of all companies have had their servers broken into.

What’s it gonna take for them to do better?

Actually, that’s the wrong question. We now know the biggest, most powerful companies don’t have our backs regarding Internet security. We also know, by the sheer scale of these attacks, that we have all been touched by these crimes, if not directly, then via someone close to us.

So, the real question is, What’s it gonna take for us to take better care on our own initiative?

(Image:  yuhootech.com)

My New favorite TV Writer/Producer: Wendy West (DEXTER)

Media, Writing
Dexter

Dexter showcases the talents of my new favorite writer/producer, Wendy West.

West knows how to push my thematic buttons. My TV tastes favor stories of the human condition. Think of David Milch’s heroes coping with alcoholism as a stand-in for human emptiness and alienation. Think Andy Sipowicz in NYPD Blue, or Calamity Jane in Deadwood.

 

Dexter lends itself a priori to such themes. Serial killers are addicts, after all. Plus, other Dexter writers had worked the addiction angle before West began working for the show in Season Four.

But Wendy West goes for the thematic (ahem) jugular. Her writing strikes the optimal balance between methodical structure and dramatic authenticity. For instance, she returns to a single trope, over and over, giving variations of it in each of her five episodes: in each script, she contrasts Dexter to a second killer, deftly marking out the boundaries of Dexter’s values and aspirations as he kills the other killer.

  • Season 4, Episode 4, “Dex Takes a Holiday
    • the killer:  Zoey Kruger (police officer, killed her husband and daughter)
  • Season 5, Episode 6, “Everything Is Illumenated” [sic]
    •  the victim/killer:  Lumen Pierce
  • Season 6, Episode 7, “Nebraska”
    • the killer:  Brian Moser, “the Ice Truck Killer”
  • Season 7, Episode 4, “Run”
    • the killer:  Ray Speltzer (forces victims to run through his torture maze)
  • Season 8, Episode 8, “Are We There yet?”
    • the killer:  young psychopath-in-training, Zach Hamilton

In the most darkly hilarious episode of Season Six, “Nebraska,” West has Dexter’s addiction talk to him in the form of his dead brother, Brian, a serial killer whom Dexter was forced to kill in Season One.

In this road-story plot, Brian is ravenous for junk food. In each scene he tries to persuade Dexter to kill freely–i.e., to dispense with Dexter’s code of only killing serial killers—all the while scarfing drippy, convenience store nachos and falling-apart, Dairy Queen cheese burgers. The motel side table strewn with the burger’s detritus is not only a sight gag (more than anything, ghosts miss eating), but also a way of reifying the character, and in turn dramatizing the power of Dexter’s addiction.

Later in the episode, rather than rushing to kill Jonah Mitchell, Dexter insists on working to verify Jonah’s guilt. This annoys brother Brian:

“Ugh, your code, again…”

“The code is more than that.  It’s kept me safe.  It’s given me a life–“

 “–A life that’s a big fat lie.”

Remember, this is Dexter’s addiction talking. If Brian can persuade Dexter that his life is “a big fat lie”–that his family relationships are merely a front to hide a serial killer in plain sight–then darkness wins.

But Dexter wants a real life, wants love and to be loved. This is the force of Dexter’s burgeoning humanity struggling against his addiction.  Dexter is a psychopath. Psychopaths are incapable of emotion. For Dexter to be the best serial killer he can be, he needs to be fearless, unattached, uncaring of those individuals he’s manipulating to be his camouflage.

What makes Dexter a tragic figure is he wants the lie to be real. He wants to be honest with his friends and family. He wants to be worthy of the trust he has falsely cultivated.

This is Dexter wanting his own undoing. Were any family or friend to know the truth, they would not only shrink back in fear. They would turn him in to the authorities. Plus, because Dexter truly cares for his friends and family, he is vulnerable to his enemies using them as leverage against him.

In the end Dexter spares Jonah, and Brian vanishes. West gives Dexter a closing monologue. He wonders “if darkness is defined by light. If so, darkness can’t exist on its own. There must, by definition, be light somewhere, waiting to be found.” Translated:  Dexter’s “Dark Passenger” (the nickname he’s given to his addiction) has a companion of its own–the light. Perhaps Dexter is not simply a monster. Perhaps he can nurture the light in him to overtake the darkness.

This is brilliant thematic writing. We so want Dexter to succeed.

The tragedy is that’s the same as wanting Kryptonite for Superman.

The Walking Dead, Season 5: Death? Uh, yeah.

Media, Writing
screen-shot The Insightful Panda dot com

Rick in the church becoming a god. (Screenshot credit: TheInsightfulPanda.com)

Has ‘The Walking Dead’ Cracked My All-time TV Top 5?

SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT

[If you haven’t watched Season 5, yet, stop reading, right now. Or, enter at your own risk . . .]

Just a few words of praise upon finishing Season 5.

Wow, do I have my hair blown back. And I don’t mean just by the thrills and chills. I mean by the relationship drama, the villains/villainy, the comedy. Perhaps where the show excites me most is the inventiveness — a.k.a., rule-breaking — of its cinematography. That’s especially true of Season 5. Sure, the camera work has always been fresh and ingenious. But now, with all the night shooting and severe-yet-nuanced studio lighting, they’ve really turned the thumbscrews on pure retinal agitation. Plus, shooting on the infinitely more mobile 16mm camera produces some startlingly original looks. Like in Ep. 3, “Four Walls and a Roof,” in the church, when our heroes turn the tables on Gareth and Martin, and the hunters become the hunted. That shot from Gareth’s point of view, looking up at Rick wielding the “machete with the red handle.” Sure, that point of view isn’t new, angled up and making a giant of Rick. But the framing — the shot has the altar and stained glass in the background. You’re not supposed to elevate heroes to the level of God. (Not in America, anyways. It’s not an uncommon trope in Japanese screen culture, especially in anime. See Berserk.)

Though it’s impossible to argue what the show does best, consistency has to be part of that conversation. Not a single episode feels like a dud, not in any of the five seasons. Only the rarest cable drama reaches this astonishing level of reliability, episode to episode. The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and Deadwood keep it at a “10” from bell to bell. But other shows? I can’t think of any. Even some of my favorite shows of all time have their off, phone-it-in days. Dexter, Breaking Bad, The Wire. None of them can match such perfection.

In its mature state the series unsurprisingly has become heavily philosophical. Mostly themes of identity and ego. And, oh yeah, that third theme. Despite having way more characters who die than survive, the show has rarely been about death. Season 5 is about death. Tyrece, Beth, Bob, Martin. (Martin. Yep. Death.) That the nature of existence depends on death — or, rather, IS death — that’s one common thread among the episodes of Season 5.

It’s no coincidence Beth is only a great character when she confronts death.  At the front of her plot arc (Season 2, Ep.10) she tries to kill herself; at the back of her plot arc (Season 5, Ep. 8) she dies bitterly. In both, her cynicism and clear sight ring true. Take for instance her first real scenes (Season 2, Ep. 10). Maggie tries to talk Beth out of suicide.

Maggie: “You could do that to Dad?”

Beth:  “He’s clueless. He had us waitin’ for a cure.”

Maggie: “You could do that to me? I can’t take another funeral.”

Beth: “You can’t avoid it. What are we waiting for? We should both do it. At the same time–”

Maggie:  “What!”

Beth: “–help each other. It’s hard to do–”

Maggie: “Stop talking like that.”

Beth: “–our choice. Then it would be over. Or we’ll be forced to do it when this house and the farm is overrun . . . I don’t want to be gutted.”

In Seasons 3 and 4, the middle span of her plot arc, Beth comes across as flat and contrived and superfluous. But her lustrous scenes in Season 5, Ep’s 6 – 8, anchoring the drama of the mid-season finale, she grows into herself. She survives in that Lost-like, dystopian hospital from hell. She stands up to the depraved corruption, the naked abuse. She helps shield victims of what is essentially a prison. She becomes larger than life, becomes a worthy member of our group of super heroes. In her swan song she says, sneering, seething at Dawn, “I get it now.” She stabs Dawn in the chest and gets shot in the face. Showrunner Scott Gimple could’ve gotten many more great miles out of her. But her death feels just forthright. It is certainly courageous on his part.

Throughout this season Rick feels the need to tell the town folk over and over, “It’s all about survival.” Well, that’s one side of the coin.

Exciting New Anime: Knights of Sidonia

Media

Knights of Sidonia lifeboat pod

No matter how much I like an anime series, I hesitate to make blanket recommendations. I’d hate for my writing to entice someone to watch anime for the first time and have them come away thinking I have terrible taste in TV. See, there’s a learning curve to watching anime. (The giant anime sweat drop? It means he’s embarrassed.) Without “anime literacy” an anime newbie can watch even the best series and think it’s silly, or worse, a product for children. Knights of Sidonia is definitely not for children.

Also, even the best anime suffers from radical swings in quality over the course of a long season. Think of Joss Whedon TV shows—Buffy, Dollhouse, Firefly. We love them for their high highs, despite the admittedly horrid lows.

That said, Knights of Sidonia (KOS), a recent Netflix Original Series, is some of the most thrilling military science fiction I’ve seen in a long time. It’s certainly not without its shortcomings. Its relationship drama doesn’t succeed the way the military aspect does; the several love-triangles and the central rivalry between the hero and his nemesis are so thinly drawn as to feel tacked on. Yet the stunning battle scenes–the eye-popping visions of sci-fi adventure futurism–make the series more than worth one’s while.

Although I don’t have time to review KOS in full, here, I’ll drop a few observations.

1) How to Repopulate the Human Race

The show’s renderings of deep-space survival create an intriguingly realized future. Sidonia is a “seed ship.” It’s a Battlestar Galactica setup. When the earth was overrun by aliens, the last survivors escaped on Sidonia and survived seven centuries drifting about the galaxy. How did the seed ship repopulate the human race? Successful cloning explains all the look-alike characters in the cast. Others form a “third gender,” changing sexes depending on available partners. Apparently there are limits to seeding “success”: Sidonia holds regular mass funerals for compulsory deaths to keep its fragile ecosystem in check. An “organic converter reactor” processes all the bodies and human excrement for fuel that powers Sidonia.

2) Hillarious Site Gags

KOS re-imagines space travel in (ahem) compelling detail, like the skin-suit catheter (see image). Not only is the catheter necessary for spending many hours (or even days) in the tiny cockpit of a giant robot, the skin suit also filters urine for drinking water.

In one quiet scene our hero averts his gaze to leave his co-pilot her privacy while she photosynthesizes. (Yes, in the future we will only eat once a week because, via genetic modification, we will all photosynthesize.) But because they’re in the glass-bubble cockpit, he can’t escape her nude reflection. Hence, he doubles over in discomfort at the emergence of his catheterized erection!

3) Space Opera!

The space opera (i.e., soap opera in space) elements are by turns wonderful and awful. In quieter moments, the romance between the hero and his love interest can be quite affecting, like when the two are stranded in deep space together, trying not to freak out in the face of dwindling food and water rations.

Sadly, the show’s fan service tends towards the sleazy: untold millions were spent to animate the zero-gravity jiggling of curvy female figures in skin-tight space suits.

4) Warning:  It Goes Fast

That the script doesn’t wait for slower viewers can be a bit frustrating at times. Like any good cyberpunk fiction, KOS respects the intelligence of its audience, rarely overexplaining its backstory and future-tech. The show assumes fans will take multiple passes by hitting rewind or will binge-watch the whole season again later, anyway.

For instance, there appears to be a blunder of failed script-supervisor continuity when we watch a pilot eject from her exploding robot in only her space suit. But in the next scene we see her floating in a spherical, escape-pod lifeboat (see image at very top of this post).

Where’d that come from? Turns out the escape pod is stored in each pilot’s backpack, in some futuristic wonder of nanotechnology. Very cool. I definitely missed it the first time around.

KOS escape pod A-0

KOS escape pod A

KOS escape pod B

KOS escape pod C

5) The Good with the Bad

It’s a shame the first half of Episode 5 gives us one of the most exciting battle scenes ever filmed, a thrill negated by the episode’s second half: an overlong, ham-fisted delivery of backstory, all in unnecessary and terribly written dialogue. When Captain Kobayashi argues with Dorm Mother Lala, she reminds her of a factoid neither could have possibly forgotten: “We’re the last two surviving members of the first strike team in human history to have destroyed a gauna, 600 years ago.” Ugh.

I guess it’s no worse than Rick Grimes in The Walking Dead talking out loud to God, the empty chapel amplifying his cartoonish Southern accent.

6) Coincidence or Cosmic Convergence?

Though spelled differently, the series shares its title with the Muse album “Knights of Cydonia.” Coincidence or cosmic convergence? Judge for yourself by watching the hilarious, sci-fi/kung-fu/spaghetti Western mashup video of Muse’s song on YouTube:

The Moment Buffy Hits Her Stride

Media, Writing

Buffy with stake 2

I’m a huge Joss Whedon fan.  But as much as I admire the series, re-watching Season 1 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I’m struck by the wildly disparate quality from episode to episode.  As a whole, the twelve installments are certainly lovable, yet marred by spans of such forgettable mediocrity, I feel lucky I started with the series during its syndication run, watching Seasons 5, 6 and 7 first.  Otherwise, I might never have survived Season 1.

That said, what’s neat is to witness the series molting from erratic, adolescent amateur to self-assured and cultured pro.  That transformation takes place during Season 1, ep. 12, the season finale.  Specifically, the intro segment of the episode contains the moment when the series hits it’s stride.  Buffy is attacked in the cemetery by the latest vampire.  The camera point of view is traditional monster-horror pic, with a closeup of the vampire’s sadistic grin:  he enjoys Buffy’s fear as he moves in for the kill.  But the rhythm of the editing is all camp.  As the camera pans behind her, Buffy produces a sharp wooden stake she had concealed beneath her jacket.  It’s an iconic image of table-turning reversal, a la the poster art for I Spit on Your Grave (compare screen cap of Buffy, above).

Thusly, Buffy flips the helpless-bimbo trope on its ear.  The narrative mood shifts radically from comedic-camp to slasher-horror, a la Friday the 13th.  Only it’s Buffy in the role of Jason.  Next image, a closeup of the vampire’s sadistic glee replaced by the frowning fear of mortality.  As Buffy sets upon the vampire, the action is filmed in a thrilling, Bourne-identity style, close-in combat realism.  Buffy charges, overwhelming the vampire’s strength with three massively powerful strokes.  She dusts the vamp in a rhythmic, athletic grace.  And one feels the series has turned the corner.

Even this show’s biggest fans would have to admit that, up to this point, Season 1 comes off as uneven at best.  Whedon’s biggest and most legitimate excuse?  He signed on to the WB lineup with Buffy as a mid-season replacement series; this meant he had to produce Season 1 in its entirety, without the benefit of audience feedback.  In other words, Whedon and company had to work in the dark, as it were, not airing episodes as they were completed, not knowing what worked and what didn’t, unable to recalibrate between episodes.

Episode 12 pulls the season together on the strength of Whedon’s story-telling chops.  He writes and directs this one, getting the narrative engine firing on all cylinders.  He amps up the driving force of the drama, centering it on an infallible prophecy:  that if Buffy fights The Master, she will die; if she doesn’t, human civilization will end.  Whedon stiffens the clout of the prophecy via the show’s two authorities on the dark arts–Giles and Angel.  Giles so recognizes the certainty of the prophecy, he determines to face The Master himself, in Buffy’s place, a mission of certain suicide, thwarted only by Buffy knocking Giles unconscious.  Angel, never one to shun a fight, steers clear of this one, knowing there’s no way to help the girl he loves and wanting not to witness her slaughter.  News of the prophecy reduces Buffy herself to a state of denial.  She begs her mother to take her on a weekend trip out of town.  Denial gives way to despair, and Buffy hands herself over to die.

The episode works beautifully as a season finale, with long-running plot pots brought to a boil.  Xander finally works up the courage to ask Buffy out on a date.  When she turns him down, he invites Willow, instead, who turns him down, too, fed up with being his second choice.  Miss Calendar emerges from the casting cocoon as an adult associate and potential love interest to Giles, defusing what potential creepy awkwardness there had gone before as Giles survived alone in a universe of teen hotties.  Cordelia gets in on the season finale action, saving Willow’s life in a suspenseful sequence by wielding an anti-vampire weapon available even to a newbie:  her car.  In all of these, the acting feels noticeably more human, the editing more on-task.  And the resulting air-tight thematics push the notion of being “the chosen one” to the realms of inexorable tragedy.

In Defense of Miyazaki: Thoughts on WHISPER OF THE HEART

Media, Writing

Image

I used to pooh-pooh the films of Hayao Miyazaki.  Back then I’d acknowledge them as technically brilliant, or that they were true achievements of cinematic vision.  But I used to feel they were soft, over-optimistic, naive, or lacking the grit and edge of realism.  By contrast, my touchstone for anime has always been Mamoru Oshii, of Ghost in the Shell fame.  Oshii says of Miyazaki, “His worlds have become just too nostalgic”, and, “[I]t is joyful, it’s eye candy and it is a pleasure to watch his movies, of course.  But . . . people don’t die [in his scenes of military battle, for example], so they are nice to watch but there is no realism”.

I’m usually right there chiming in with the naysayers about Miyazaki films (Howl’s Moving Castle, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Nausicaa…), that Miyazaki is the Disney of anime (or at least the Steven Spielberg, with all the predictably happy endings).  To begin with, I’m much more partial to anime stories of psychoanalytic self-loathing.  Filling out my Top 10 list are the self-hating anti-heroes of Neon Genesis Evangalion, Trigun, Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in the Shell II:  Innocence, and Barefoot Gen.

But all the while there have been exceptions to my rule.  I’ve fallen in love with anime that most Oshii fans would call sappy or sentimental, mushy or maudlin:  Fruits Basket, FLCL, Castle of Cagliostro, Please Save My Earth, Macross (Super Dimensional Fortress Macross),  Escaflowne, and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.  Some of these can be explained as “not inconsistent” by way of them being mad-cap, slapstick comedy, like Castle of Cagliostro, FLCL, and perhaps Macross.   But how do I explain all the dew-eyed idealism?

Am I going soft?  No, that can’t be it, not with apocalypse and earth-under-attack plots figuring so largely in all of them.  And it’s absolutely not the case that I’m merely lowering my standards of intellectual and conceptual challenge; I value these works so highly that I no longer talk about my “Top 10”, I now always name my Top 15 when discussing my favorites of all time.  So how does an otherwise orthodox Oshii fan like myself remain consistent and still keep The Girl Who Leapt Through Time on his Top List?

Although the film Whisper of the Heart does not make my Top 15, briefly discussing it here could go far in answering these questions.  Written by Miyazaki and produced at his Studio Ghibli, Whisper of the Heart (WOTH) features all the schmaltz of a Miyazaki film:  child protagonists and first love, idealism and nostalgia.  (The film recasts the musical juggernaut of nostalgia “Country Roads” into Japanese, changing the title phrase to “Concrete Roads” for the setting of suburban Tokyo.)  But unlike Miyazaki’s more famous films, WOTH is not a romanticized coming-of-age fantasy in which the protagonist must save the world.  Its hero is merely an adolescent suburban girl trying to find herself, while reacting to the attentions of her first suitor.

What might seem fantastic is the uber-traditional nature of her search for identity–especially in a time (1995) of white-hot digital media and ever more sophisticated sci-fi visions coming out of Tokyo near the end of the millennium.  Our girl hero is seemingly transported back to a more traditional time not by a time machine, but by her love of reading fiction (in actual books!) and by falling in love with a boy rooted in tradition by his folk music family and his craftsman aspirations.  (He’s apprenticing to be a violin maker.)  In other words, our hero’s search for identity takes place in the realm of the arts.

Sure, the film ends with the boy declaring his love for the girl.  But what really matters–the more important conflict–is the girl’s decision to become a writer.  It’s true that, in the closing sequence, our hero’s love interest takes her to see his secret Tokyo sunrise and not only declares his love for her from the proverbial mountaintop, but he also proposes marriage.

Sappy enough?  Yes, but only for a moment.  In the next instant you realize two critical things:  a) that these kids are only fourteen years old, and, b) that the boy is shipping off to Italy for ten years that very afternoon.  The marriage proposal in the final sequence has a stuck-on feel.  It seems to come from out of the blue.  And one realizes this is pointedly artificial.  While romantic stories commonly end in marriage, this one ends with a marriage proposal, only.  It’s sweet and optimistic.  But it’s not marriage.  What’s next (off-stage) is that the boy will immediately leave for Italy, to stay for ten years.  So one has to wonder about this premature engagement;  a lot will happen in ten years.  And this is the point:  while love and marriage may still be fantasies for this particular hero, what her heart is whispering to her is a realism common to all the anime in my Top 15.  This is not the story of the birth of young love, but, rather, another story entirely:  the birth of the artist.