Simon Says Interview

Here’s an interview with me over at Check Your Pulse, part of the Simon & Schuster site.

It will be up for a few more days, and its permanent home is here on this site.

Also, Justine and I saw Howl’s Moving Castle today and it rocked! We were in the third row, and just behind us were these totally anime-obsessed teenage girls. During a big pullback-to-reveal-a-glorious-vista sequence one gasped and said, “Oh, Miyazaki, you are such an attention whore.”

Now that’s just funny.

9 thoughts on “Simon Says Interview

  1. And some of them berated one of their number for not knowing the Japanese word for “cool.” Tragically, I don’t know what it is either. I’m such a loser.

    The movie was fabulous. Now I have to go see the subtitled version (which I hear will be out soon) and reread the Wynne Jones book.

  2. “Kakkoii” is “cool”. For which any anime cult type person *should* be berated for not knowing.

    I continue to watch the movie in Japanese just for listening practice and to pick up different layers of meaning and understanding as I get more of the language under my belt. I can’t wait to see an English translation, subtitle or revoiced, just to compare with how I’ve understood it.

  3. I can’t wait to see an English translation, subtitle or revoiced, just to compare with how I’ve understood it.

    Also for the re-casting. Lauren Bacall is the Witch of the Waste, and Billy Crystal is the fire demon (which works surprisingly well).

  4. Though some of the voice talent is, um, lame. Very generic Disney-voice sounding. Fortunately not most of the main voices. I really liked Emily Mortimer as young Sophie, but I loved Jean Simmons as old Sophie.

    I envy you, Chris, being able to watch it in the original!

  5. The fire demon’s voice in Japanese is wonderful, too! Good to know Billy Crystal works out in English for it. There’s actually a little Japanese man I work with who sounds exactly like the fire demon and I always want to crack up when I hear him talking on the phone to people at work in that silly voice.

    I’m probably going to sit down as an exercise one day and write my own interpretation of the Japanese for myself, so that when I watch it in English I can compare effectively and see how I fared (though I’ve seen some Japanese movies here with English subtitles and have often thought, that’s not really what she said. They totally missed a nuance or something in that phrase. Or added something to it that felt overly explanatory to English viewer’s maybe.

    In any case, it’s a good movie. I think maybe my favorite of his, though most likely until the next comes out.

  6. This has nothing to do with the article but i was wondering. how do authors get to there web sites. Do they go to the site of the people who created there site and log on and it transfers them to there site?

  7. Um, if you have a site, you go in through the administrative part of your own site. (Of course, I’m posting this the regular way.) It’s not very complicated.

  8. I once watched an anime movie where Billy Bob Thornton was the voice of one of the characters. He was a crazy monk who wanted to kill the spirit of the forest. (See if anyone knows what movie I’m talking about.)

  9. That would be Princess Mononoke, trumpeter. Also a Miyazaki movie and therefore also fantastic.

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