Today we (crutches and all) are scooting up to Berkeley campus for an early screening of Hayao Miyazaki’s newest movie, Ponyo by the Sea, and tomorrow we’ll go to a live lecture and Q&A session with the director at Berkeley, sponsored by the university’s Center for Japanese studies. Miyazaki makes the most beautiful and meaningful animated movies, much better than Disney, and he manages to be feminist and environmentalist without ever being preachy. His movies, “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind” remain at the top of my top ten best movies of all time list. His animations are all hand-drawn, and so transportingly gorgeous; each scene is like a painting you’d want on your wall.
I know it seems weird to drive eight hours to do something like this – driving multiple hours through 100+ temps in a huge valley that’s mostly dust to get to foggy, 5o’s San Fran for just a couple of days – but for me, I think it will be worth it. Plus, I get to see my friend Natasha who moved to the Bay Area from Seattle when I moved to SD. (We can compare stories and decide which is better: SoCal or NoCal?) I’ve been to San Fran many times, but never to the Berkeley area, so it should be an experience. Every time I visit San Fran, I want to stay. It’s a great town for writers – misty and cosmopolitan and elegant, though so expensive, only poet doctors and poet lawyers can afford to live there!