One of my father's close friends from college moved to Tokyo after he graduated, and he and his family became frequent visitors to our family in subsequent years. Robbie and Yoko always brought beautiful, generous gifts, and one year, they brought me and my sisters matching kimonos with gorgeous red silk obis, and a VHS tape of a children's movie. I loved mine so much I insisted on dressing up as a geisha for Halloween that year (oh, the innocence of youth). But it was the movie that made the longer-lasting impression.
It was My Neighbor Totoro, and the Times' story about Hayao Miyazaki's visit to Comic-Con brought back the strange, wonderful sensation of watching a Miyazaki movie for the first time. I love the langourous, skittery glide of the small forest spirits, the langorous stretch of the bigger one, the centipeding bounces of the Catbus. I love the spirit who edges up to the girls at the bus stop, falling in the half-light--travel, for Miyazaki, has always seemed to be about the borders between magic and reality, whether it's the encounter at the bus stop, or Chihiro's train trip to Zeniba's house in Spirited Away. Miyazaki has never seemed constrained by physical space, and that fluidity with motion, with the operations of normal means of transportation, has always been the astonishing thing behind his work for me, no matter how strange or ordinary his characters.