Audio By Carbonatix
For years I’ve told people about the time that I went to a restaurant in San Marcos that only served hobbit food and was staffed by a barefoot waitress. That story has been pretty universally dismissed, and now I’m not sure if it really happened. Maybe it was a dream. It does seem a little unlikely that I paid $7 for a peanut butter sandwich served by a Tolkien-obsessed hippie, but it’s so weird it has to be real. My inability to figure this out creates an unexplainable and surreal fog in my head that I am pretty sure famed Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki lives in on a day to day basis. Seeing his films creates the same kind of blissful ambiguity–a fairy tale fugue where trees spirits wander about, little girls rule enchanted forests and mankind gets spanked by nature when it mistreats a very sensitive Mother Earth. Miyazaki’s most beloved film, Princess Mononoke, is a fantastically visual experience that at once creates its own mythologies and satisfies traditional story telling conventions. And while the experience is a little surreal, at least you’ll have a ticket stub to prove that while Princess Mononoke may have fueled your imagination, it was definitely not a figment of it. A new 35mm print of the anime classic plays Friday and Saturday at the Inwood Theatre, 5458 W Lovers Lane, as part of the Midnight at the Inwood series. Tickets are $10 and may be purchased at landmarktheatres.com.
Fri., Feb. 13; Sat., Feb. 14, 2009
