Movie Madness

There aren't a lot of movies that we will watch with A-chan yet, especially since we don't approve very much of Disney films. The amount of Studio Ghibli movies that we watch is rather obvious, though we still don't watch the newer ones because while they are excellent they are a little too scary for our 2.5 year old. We also watch a surprising amount of anime and again we are careful to limit it to that which isn't overtly scary. What might be surprising is that we can watch old Samurai-type movies with her. Now, that being said, we haven't exactly seen a whole lot of those either and what we have seen are films by the indomitable Akira Kurosawa.

While there is a bit of violence to them, none of it is bloody, gory, atrociously vulgar stuff. And though for her it's all in another language (she has yet to see the wonderfulness of subtitles that we do) it's still somewhat understandable to her. In particular it is the amazing facial expressions that seem to carry across the bits of story for her. And we have been impressed that she will sit still and watch the movies with us, though not all the way through as yet. There is a point at about half an hour's worth where she will get down and go play a little bit, but she will occassionally come back to check on the movie and see what is going on.

We just finished watching "Hidden Fortress" a couple of nights ago. I think the only truly bad part was at the very beginning where a soldier was killed and actually had blood on him, the only time we saw any blood during the entire movie. The two peasants were riveting, their facial expressions carrying across the story over the impediment of language. I think that A-chan liked them :) She kept calling General Makabe (Yay, Mifune!! I am such a Mifune fangirl now.) the bad guy, lol. Anyway, she watched the whole thing with us and while I would not say she was riveted, she at least didn't get bored and go to turn off the tv either. It is interesting that "Hidden Fortress" influenced her other absolute favorite (non-ghibli) film of all time: Star Wars. I love knowing things like that, it's just too neat!

So the point of this post is that Akira Kurosawa films are not altogether bad things for toddlers to watch perhaps. And they are absolutely excellent things for adults to watch.