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Dolly (2026) and the New American Grindhouse

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There’s a new low-budget horror film in theaters right now that’s main mission is to recall the vintage grindhouse grime of 70s horror classics like Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That statement has been more or less constantly true since at least as far back as when Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses hit theaters two decades ago; there’s always a new horror film in theaters that aims to recall the vintage grindhouse grime of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as surely as the Sun rises in the East and sets in the West. Even so, the new film Dolly is grimier than most, torturing its audience with the squirmiest discomforts any Texas Chainsaw knockoff has delivered in a long while. Our Leatherface figure in this instance is the titular Dolly, a childlike behemoth who wears a porcelain babydoll mask and collects victims to play house with her in the woods of Tennessee. Like 1973’s The Baby, it toddles across the fine line between shock-value horror and age-regression fetish content, having its towering killer spank, bottle-feed, burp, and diaper her victims in-between her gory kills. It has its contemporaries in that particular mode of discomfort (most notably Zach Cregger’s Barbarian and the straight-to-Tubi stunner Match), but it decides to frame its fucked up found-family horror story within an older grindhouse tradition by shooting on 16mm film, instantly adding a layer of grime on top of its forced-dollification imagery. That choice elevates Dolly‘s sense of mise-en-scène, especially in sequences set outdoors in a woodland babydoll art-instillation piece reminiscent of Georgia’s Doll’s Head Trail. It’s also a somewhat safe, expected choice, though, since it excuses some of its budgetary shortcomings by hiding them behind a faux-vintage appeal instead of fully embracing the modernity of the ABDL horror story it tells.

Dolly‘s distribution rights were purchased by the online streaming service Shudder, so its accompanying theatrical release has been relatively small. In New Orleans, that means it is exclusively playing at the AMC multiplexes of the suburbs, since those venues tend to have more screens to fill than the smaller, choosier independent theaters in the city proper. Specifically, I saw Dolly at the AMC Palace 20 in Elmwood, which regularly offers the city’s widest selection of new-release titles . . . in the shittiest presentation imaginable. Outside its two “premium” (i.e., price-gouging) Dolby & IMAX screens, the other 18 theaters at the Elmwood Palace have been allowed to steadily decline into disrepair. The projector bulbs are all well past end-of-life, so that every movie is blurred behind a dark, purplish bruise hue that your eyes never fully adjust to. The bathroom floors are eternally gummy with piss, and every time you touch a handle with your bare hands it feels like you’re risking a life-threatening skin infection. I’m used to all of this, and I occasionally put up with it because of the unmatched breadth of the venue’s marquee offerings, ranging from woodland slasher throwbacks to niche-interest anime to Indian action epics to the latest Dinesh D’Souza doc about how Hilary Clinton is the antichrist; they have everything. My trip out there to see Dolly hit a new all-time low, though, in pure technical terms. Not only was the projection as darkly bruised as ever, but now the sound was equally muddled. Either the mixing in my theater was way out of balance or multiple sound channels were fully switched off, so that all dialogue was clearly legible but the accompanying music and foley effects were so muffled it sounded as if they were playing in another room. That’s a big deal for a horror film, since the genre relies heavily on music for tension and loud sound-effect stingers for jump scares. It’s a credit to the novelty of Dolly‘s costume & production design that I found anything to enjoy about the experience, since the theater stripped away everything else it had to offer.

Oddly enough, that abysmal theatrical presentation was historically authentic to the retro grindhouse experience modern horrors like Dolly aim to evoke. Grindhouses were a quantity-over-quality business, running exploitation films with shortened runtimes at a breakneck pace with little regard to the building collapsing around the projector. Anyone who’s ever waxed nostalgic about catching some vintage slasher or porno relic at a grindhouse cinema on 42nd Street always includes some anecdote about how the film was interrupted by rats crawling across their feet, or a public blowjob, or a projectionist who nodded off mid-film and had to be woken up to change the reels. The only thing that’s changed is that these used to be decidedly urban experiences, often adjacent to strip clubs & brothels in the center of a morally & physically decaying city. Now, that geographic dynamic has flipped. I get grindhouse-quality projections out in the decaying AMC Palaces of the suburbs, who could not give less of a shit about what they’re screening or how it looks & sounds, as long as they can grind through as many titles as possible. Meanwhile, the urban cinemas of New Orleans proper have been putting much more thoughtful care into their programming & presentation. The same week I saw Dolly in theaters I also attended a repertory screening of Sam Raimi’s 1987 splatstick classic Evil Dead II at The Broad, programmed by ScreamFest NOLA. In some ways, the original Evil Dead movies are the exact kind of high-style, low-budget woodland horrors Dolly attempts to emulate, with the major exception that Sam Raimi moves his camera like no other horror schlockteur before or since. In Evil Dead II, he escalates the cartoonish violence of his calling-card indie debut to a bigger, slicker production scale—beating Hollywood studios to the punch in effectively remaking his own film—but it’s still the kind of low-brow screen filler that used to be left to the drive-ins and grindhouses of old and is now lovingly presented in crisp, clean quality in urban cultural epicenters like The Broad, restored & reclaimed.

Even New Orleans’s dive bars are putting more thought & effort into their movie screenings than the AMCs of the suburbs, even though they’re not technically in the theatrical exhibition business. Siberia is primarily a music venue but has recently experimented with screening vintage genre classics with live music accompaniment. Typically, this means projecting the nu-metal relic Queen of the Damned behind unrelated live performances from local metal bands, but last week it meant presenting Mamoru Oshii’s surreal anime classic Angel’s Egg with an all-new, feature-length live score. Angel’s Egg is already the kind of inscrutable arthouse experience that offers gorgeous, evocative images that its audience can’t fully make sense of but continuously pulls emotional reactions out of us anyway. Rewatching it with live accompaniment from spooky, droning synths helped physicalize that emotional response, vibrating the audience’s bodies with crushing waves of sound while confusing our minds with haunting, post-apocalyptic imagery. The projection itself admittedly did not look especially great, to the point where half the audience were craning their necks at painful angles to read the more legible subtitles off the TV hanging over the bar (despite that dialogue doing very little to clear up what’s actually happening on screen). The sound was phenomenal, though, with a lot of care paid to matching each action onscreen to appropriate musical cues. Those communal screenings of Angel’s Egg and Evil Dead II felt extremely passionate & personal for the people who programmed them. In contrast, the AMC theaters just outside the city offer outright hostile moviegoing experiences, punishing their audiences with headache-inducing ad packages and the shittiest projection quality ever suffered by the human eye. When the AMC Palaces opened here in the 1990s, they put local independent cinemas out of business by crushing them under corporate-sponsored grandeur. They’re now a callous quantity-over-quantity business, the new American grindhouse. I can’t say I’m exactly grateful to have seen Dolly in that modern grindhouse context, but it was at least textually appropriate.

-Brandon Ledet

Unfaithful Mutations

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Wuthering Heights is one of my all-time favorite works of art. Emily Brontë’s 19th Century novel is a shockingly horrific read for anyone who’s ever been assigned it in a high school or college-level literature course, expecting it to be a melodramatic romance (matched only in its homework-assignment shock value by her sister’s novel Jane Eyre). Wuthering Heights is not a traditionally tragic love affair; it imagines romantic attraction as a form of life-destroying doom that compels all involved to viciously tear each other apart out of the insatiable hunger of yearning, never to be satisfied through physical touch. It should be no surprise, then, that the latest, loudest adaptation of that novel would receive equally loud criticism for the ways it reduces its source text to a more familiar, better-behaved romance, as if it were a dime store paperback instead of a great work of Gothic lit. Personally, I can’t conjure the energy to care. To my knowledge, no movie version of Wuthering Heights to date has approached anything near faithful adaptation. They tend to leave the business of adapting the novel’s second half—in which a second generation of interfamilial combatants continue the first half’s vicious games of yearning & revenge—to be retold only via BBC miniseries, which are too tonally genteel to convey the full, feral nature of the source text. So far, what we’ve seen is a story dutifully half-told, with no real personal imposition on the text by the filmmakers behind the camera (besides maybe Andrea Arnold’s race-conscious adaptation from the 2010s, which gets specific in conveying the novel’s themes of “otherness,” usually left more vaguely defined). They tend to be more transcriptive than interpretive. So, I find myself in the embarrassing position of being impressed by the crassly unfaithful adaptation of one my favorite novels for at least engaging with the material in a transformative way, even if it’s more deimagined than reimagined. “Death of the author” means allowing our sacred texts to become entirely new beasts in afterlife.

Despite all the prepackaged backlash, “Wuthering Heights” proved to be another erratically entertaining piece of lurid pop art from Emerald Fennell, whose previous works Saltburn & Promising Young Woman were also loudly scrutinized in their own time for their thematic carelessness. Fennell appears eager to get ahead of the criticism in this case, adding the titular scare quotes in an effort to defuse any expectations that she might be sincerely adapting Brontë’s novel. Every image is prefaced with a wink, signaling to the audience that it’s okay to have fun this time instead of getting too hung up on Heathcliff & Cathy’s recursively lethal, semi-incestuous attraction to each other. It’s not so much an adaptation of Wuthering Heights as it is an adaptation of the horned-up dreams a teenager might have while reading Wuthering Heights — often illustrated in fancam-style montages that insert bodice-ripping sex scenes into a story that used to be about the destructive nature of unconsummated lust. Jacob Elordi & Margot Robbie are cast more for their paperback-romance cover art appeal than their appropriateness for the source material. Charli XCX is employed to soundtrack the music video rhythms of the edit to rush the story along before the discomfort of any one cruel moment has time to fully sink in. Even when destroying other women’s lives in order to get Cathy’s attention, Heathcliff seeks enthusiastic consent, turning what used to be domestic abuse into a kind of elaborate BDSM game. It’s all in good fun (give or take the obligatory tragic ending), staged entirely for the purpose of hiring movie stars to play dress-up and dry hump, supplementing the wet sounds of actual sex with bizarrely chosen surrogates like fish heads, snail slime, egg yolks, and raw dough. As goofy & half-considered as it is, it’s also Emerald Fennell’s best work to date. She continues to improve as a populist entertainer with every picture, but she has also suffered the great misfortune of being immediately successful, so everything she does is met with obnoxiously loud scrutiny. Hopefully all of her generational wealth serves as a small comfort in this difficult time.

The same week that Wuthering Heights topped the US box office (proving yet again that online backlash has no tangible effect outside your Twitter feed), I saw another domestic release of an unfaithful literary mutation. The new anime film Scarlet restages Hamlet as a sword-and-sorcery fantasy epic in a Hell-adjacent afterlife, seemingly combining the characters of Hamlet & Ophelia into one newly imagined, feminist action hero. I’m no Shakespeare scholar but, like Wuthering Heights, Hamlet does fall into the category of great literary works I was assigned to read multiple times throughout high school & college, and I don’t remember the bard describing the young Dane being groped by countless hands of the undead under a sky of black ocean waves in his stage directions. By the time Scarlet interjects a title card that drags the story back to 16th Century Denmark, I couldn’t help but treat it as a visual gag. I laughed, but I was the only one laughing in that theater, because I was the only one in the theater at all. Director Mamoru Hosoda is relatively well known among anime nerds for earlier works like Summer Wars, Wolf Children, and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, but recently he’s been on a kick where he reinterprets literary classics as high-fantasy adventure films featuring heroic warrior princesses. With Belle, he relocated characters from Beauty and the Beast to a Virtual Reality other-realm where violence & power is wielded through pop songstress supremacy and it online follower counts. With Scarlet, he reinterprets Hamlet as a warrior princess saga about the value of forgiving yourself instead of seeking revenge, set in a timeless afterlife where the souls of 16th Century nobility can fall in love with 21st Century hunks who have working-class jobs but angelically noble hearts. Unlike with “Wuthering Heights”, no one appears to be especially angry about these far-out reinterpretations of their source texts, likely for two very obvious reasons: 1. Hamlet & La Belle et La Bête have already enjoyed multiple faithful movie adaptations while Brontë’s novel hasn’t and, more importantly, 2. Way fewer people are watching them.

As of this posting, roughly 9,000 people have logged Hosoda’s unfaithful Hamlet mutation on Letterboxd, compared to the 570,000 who have logged Fennell’s unfaithful mutation of Wuthering Heights. That’s an imperfect metric when measuring these two films’ audience reach (not least of all because “Wuthering Heights” has been review-bombed by angry social media addicts who haven’t yet seen the film themselves), but those two numbers are extremely disparate enough to mean something. Some people are mad at Emerald Fennell for not adhering to one specific interpretation of Brontë’s book as if it is the only objectively correct one (i.e., the Arnold-friendly interpretation in which Heathcliff’s otherness is based more in race than class). Others are mad at her for having no interpretation at all, using a half-remembered impression of what the book is kinda-sorta like as an excuse to stage a series of images that make her horny. I find both criticisms to be misguided. No movie owes fealty to it literary source text; all that matters is the distinctness of the vision that literature inspired. For all of her consistently reckless flippancy, Fennell’s vision gets increasingly distinct every picture. We’re also getting a clearer picture of what she personally finds erotic, which I’d argue is one of the best uses of the cinematic artform any director can pursue. Forget using the art of moviemaking as a machine that generates empathy; it’s much more useful as a window into the unresolved psychosexual issues of artists who don’t know how to effectively express themselves through any other medium. In Fennell’s case, that window appears to be attached to a candy-coated dollhouse with an immature brat trapped inside, which she expresses here by re-working Catherine Earnshaw into an indecisive woman-child who suffers through attempts to have her cake and eat it too. She even employed the official mascot of Brat culture to sing on the soundtrack, continuously underlining the point. While prettier to look at and grander in scale, I don’t know that Hosoda’s films are useful as a window into anything especially personal about his hang-ups or worldview. The images are more pleasant and the ideas are more carefully thought out, but to what end? Maybe the other obvious reason that fewer people are talking about them is because there’s just not as much to say.

-Brandon Ledet

All You Need is Kill (2026)

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The only manga I’ve ever read was an adaptation of the 2004 sci-fi novel All You Need Is Kill, and that’s because it was a gift. A family member who lives his life much deeper in the anime trenches bought it for me as a Christmas present after the novel was also adapted into the 2014 Tom Cruise vehicle Edge of Tomorrow (and famously retitled a second time under its tagline “Live, Die, Repeat” once it hit DVD). When I heard that there’s a new, Japanese adaptation of the same source text, then, my assumption was that someone had set out to illustrate a more faithful version of either the manga or the original semi-illustrated novel, undoing all of Hollywood’s work to center an action hero that Tom Cruise could credibly play instead of the novel’s heroine (sidelined as a supporting role in the live-action version, played by Emily Blunt). That’s not the case at all. The new version of All You Need is Kill doesn’t simply set the comic book illustrations of its source novel in motion; it redesigns them, introduces an overwhelming wealth of color to a world that was once entirely black & white, and once again makes major changes to the two main characters’ personae & dynamics. It’s less of a manga-faithful rebuke of Edge of Tomorrow than it is a fellow attempt at rogue reinterpretation, this time marketed to the cloistered nerds who actually read manga instead of the wider world of people who’ve heard of Tom Cruise.

That’s not to say that the new anime version of All You Need Is Kill is entirely novel in its reinterpretation. Edge of Tomorrow is not the only pre-existing work it evokes. It plays with the oil-slick color palette of Annihilation, echoes the YA mech-suit therapy sessions of Neon Genesis Evangelion, recalls the vintage sketchbook psychedelia of Mind Game, and touches on some parallel thinking with last year’s sci-fi adaptation Mickey 17. What I mean to say is that it pulls from so many varied sources that it eventually becomes its own thing, a stylish genre remix of its own unique flavor — however mild. For every inspired choice it makes (like redesigning its time-looping monster spawn to look like killer houseplants instead of meatballs with teeth), it also defaults to disappointingly basic choices elsewhere. It’s especially disappointing that the film ages down its two leads from near-future adult supersoldiers to near-future awkward teens. I don’t personally watch too much anime, but most of what I do see ends up being about shy teens who don’t know how to express their feelings to each other, which I suppose is a case of modern movie studios knowing their audience. There’s something absurd about shoehorning that shy-teen dynamic into this story about mech-suited futuresoldiers hunting alien beasts, but that choice does at least give it a different perspective than Tom Cruise’s action-hero-in-training role in the Hollywood version.

If I’m avoiding my plot recap duties here, it’s because talking about time-loop movies feels like its own kind of endless loop at this point. All You Need Is Kill‘s addition to the time-loop canon is that it’s set during a future space alien invasion, where the loop is started by infection with monster blood. The two infected soldiers stuck in this endless loop wake up every time they’re killed by the alien beasts, as if they discovered a video game cheat code for unlimited lives. In this version of the story, one of the characters even finds himself waking up to a video game prompt asking him if he wishes to continue playing, presumably having fallen asleep with a controller in hand. So, what you have is a militaristic sci-fi premise borrowed from an older text like Starship Troopers or The Forever War and made bizarrely existential through the recursive plot structure of Groundhog Day. If you regularly watch movies, you’ve seen more than a few variations of this story in recent titles like Palm Springs, Happy Death Day, Timecrimes, Triangle, Looper, Edge of Tomorrow (duh), and so on. So, all that’ll be new to you here is the visual splendor of its psychedelic animation style, which is very much worth the price of admission. And if you haven’t seen any of those movies before, I’m going to assume that you’re a teenager just getting into the medium, in which case the shy, nerdy leads of this version have something to offer you too: a mirror.

-Brandon Ledet

Angel’s Egg (1985)

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Angel’s Egg, a 1985 film from director Mamoru Oshii of Ghost in the Shell fame, is currently screening in limited runs with a 4K remaster, and I was lucky enough to catch it at my local arthouse. It’s stunning. A beautifully rendered monochrome world with only two living beings within it, the film is one that resists most attempts to interpret its metaphors, with Oshii himself admitting that there are parts of it that he does not understand. As such, it feels like a long, strange dream, full of images that feel pregnant with symbolism but too ephemeral to achieve any truly coherent exegesis. 

In a waterlogged and abandoned city, an unnamed girl protects a large egg, while she forages for canned food and collects jugs of water. A giant machine rolls through the town, and an unnamed man bearing a cross-shaped weapon clambers down from it. They resemble one another, both being porcelain pale with platinum hair, but the girl flees from the man initially, and when he asks her for her name, it’s unclear if she fears him, can’t remember her name, or if she perhaps never even had one in the first place. The man briefly steals the egg and then returns it to her, retelling the story of Noah’s Ark but changing the ending so that the dove never returned, and that everyone on the ark simply forgot about their pasts. This leads the girl to take the man to a sort of sanctuary where she has been bringing her collected jugs of water, numbering in the thousands, and placed them all around the fossilized skeleton of an angel. The man, who has said that the only way to know what is inside of an egg is to break it, does so one night while the girl sleeps, and her screams the following morning when she discovers the bits of shell are heartbreaking. She runs and falls into the churning sea, where she drowns. 

That’s a very rough sketch of what barely constitutes the “plot” of the film. This isn’t a story so much as it is a series of surreal images strung together as flimsily as the sluggish narrative of a dream in which you’re exploring a seemingly endless, empty city beneath a gray sky. (These are positive qualities that the film possesses despite “flimsy” and “sluggish” having derogatory connotations.) None of it really seems to mean much of anything. My favorite images from the film are completely tertiary to the above synopsis. The city seems to be filled with statues of fishermen, which the girl is startled by and avoids the presence of. Later, the city suddenly becomes filled with shadows of giant fish, silhouettes cast upon the streets and the sides of buildings, and the fishermen spring into action in an attempt to catch them, firing harpoons into the road and through streetlamps and into windows and empty houses. When I was still trying to understand the film and not simply experience it, I thought of them as automatons from the derelict city’s ancient past, left running in order to catch fish which had been hunted to death. That didn’t at all explain where the shadows came from, and now I see the sequence as two different kinds of ghosts, memories of two extinct parties that are both now long gone, physical husks that hunt long-dead prey, and the shadows of the flesh long since transcended. Is that accurate? Does any of it mean anything? I’m not sure, but it definitely doesn’t really matter. 

Angel’s Egg is filled with Biblical imagery, with occasional glimpses of what appears to be the (or an) actual ark, sitting on a cliff as rain falls. Noah’s Ark is thematically central, and the film’s final image implies that all of what we have seen transpire occurred on the upturned hull of a giant ark-style vessel. The man’s use of a weapon in the shape of a cross is likewise open to many interpretations, but I remain convinced that attempting to puzzle all of that out is utterly the wrong way to engage with the film. There’s a giant mechanical sun that’s also an eyeball, and it’s covered in statues. What does it mean? Who cares? Enjoy the ride.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Batman Ninja: Yakuza League (2025)

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Way back in the ancient pop culture landscape of 2018, there was some excitement & novelty to be found in a one-off experiment like Batman Ninja. Sure, every other major film in production was a superhero picture and, sure, the Caped Crusader was in roughly 30% of them, but it was still a welcome break in format to see the genre reimagined in a unique context – freed from the laborious narrative responsibilities of a “shared cinematic universe.” The first Batman Ninja film was an over-the-top indulgence in redesigning famous Batman villains within an alternate-universe anime aesthetic. Its newly released sequel does the same for members of The Justice League, but all the excitement & novelty has been dulled by a constant flood of multiversal storytelling over the years since. Every superhero picture is an alternate-dimension reimagining of familiar superhero archetypes now, and so Batman Ninja vs Yakuza League serves no real purpose beyond being an easy gateway into appreciating the visual delights of anime artistry for previously uninitiated 12-year-olds. Still, it’s cute.

Yakuza League‘s boldest creative gamble is in its assumption that its audience remembers any plot details or running jokes from the previous Batman Ninja outing. The story picks up at the exact moment when the last movie ended, with Batman & Robin returning to modern Gotham from their time-travel adventure in feudal Japan. It seems there are some lingering space-time anomalies resulting from that adventure, mainly that the island of Japan has disappeared from global maps and relocated to the sky above Gotham. The now sky-bound nation’s alternate history has been ruled by infinite yakuza gangs, leading to a “Yakuzageddon” event that threatens to tear Gotham down if the Bat Family cannot fix the corrupted “multiverse frequency” in time. The anomaly initially manifests in a “yakuza hurricane,” raining countless gangster intruders into Gotham like so many Agents Smith from Matrix sequels past. The situation escalates when Batman & Robin fly to the floating Japan in the sky to restore order in the now crime-ridden country, only to discover that the alternate-universe anime equivalents of fellow Justice League members are the biggest, cruelest gangsters of all. Many loud, silly fights ensue as they struggle to restore Justice League values into the Yakuza League variants, with only Wonder Woman working as their ally on the inside.

The major saving grace of Yakuza League is that DC has once again given Japanese animators free rein to reimagine their most iconic characters in an anime context (with Junpei Mizusaki & Shinji Takagi sharing directorial credit). They have as much fun with that freedom as possible, taking for-their-own-sake detours into 80s Saturday morning cartoon parody, Lady Snowblood-inspired karaoke video art, and pop-up book illustrations that help expand the artistic project beyond its most obvious boundaries. By the time Batman climbs into yet another mech suit to fight the Yakuza League equivalent of Superman, however, the “Batman, except it’s anime” aesthetic can’t help but feel a little rote. If you’ve already seen Batman Ninja, you’ve already seen everything Yakuza League has to offer – give or take scenes of The Flash sharing lightning powers & sartorial choices with Mortal Kombat‘s Raiden. If you’ve seen any superhero movie in the 2020s, you’ve also already seen the genre collapse in on itself with this style of “What if?” alternate-universe reimagining, which is starting to feel like an admission that there’s nothing exciting or novel left to mine from this material. It’s all just different flavor packets added to the same basic gruel.

-Brandon Ledet 

Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

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A.I. tech bros’ latest attack on the basic dignity of everyday life targeted Studio Ghibli of all things, proving that absolutely nothing is sacred to these ghouls. There’s a recent software upgrade to the Plagiarism Generator technology that was advertised in the form of “Ghiblifying” pre-existing images with digital filters that adapt them to the visual style of the legendary animation studio. Nevermind the blatant copyright infringement that amalgamates already underpaid artists’ work into digital-age corporate slop. Nevermind that the studio’s broad cultural association with Hayao Miyazaki—and Hayao Miyazaki only—disregards the work of fellow directors & animators under that brand who have their own distinct style. The most insulting insinuation about the “Ghiblified” A.I. image trend is that it reduces decades of finely crafted animation to a few vague visual signifiers that could be summed up in a single word: “Cute.” Like the A.I.-generated Wes Anderson videos before it, this recent dispatch from Tech Bro Hell makes Studio Ghibli’s work look simpler, safer, and more twee than it is in practice, mining its surface aesthetics without engaging with the substance beneath. It’s just as empty & lazy as it is profane.

What would these “Ghiblified” A.I. images look like, for instance, if they pulled their visual cues from Isao Takahata’s work instead of Miyazaki’s? Would it capture the full span of life’s tenderness, cruelty, warmth, and pain, as gorgeously illustrated in The Tale of Princess Kaguya, or would it reduce the immensity of that film’s beauty to a few strokes of an algorithmic color-pencil? Would it convey the collectivist environmentalism of Pom Poko‘s radical politics, or just automatically equip all figures pictured with comically large scrotums? The real gotcha example, of course, is what an A.I. “Ghiblified” photo implicates about a film as devastating as Takahata’s WWII drama Grave of the Fireflies. I’m not sure how valuable the cutesy surface aesthetics of the studio’s character designs are in the context of a story about children starving to death during the societal disruption of war. In-film, the contrast between the characters’ classic anime cuteness (which Roger Ebert summarized as “enormous eyes, childlike bodies, and features of great plasticity”) and the real-life atrocities those characters suffer makes for horrific emotional impact, perfectly illustrating the inhuman evil of war. Using those visual signifiers out of context to cutesy-up your beach vacation photos is incredibly crass, then, if you take more than a half-second to think about it.

The biggest emotional gut punch of Grave of the Fireflies arrives in the first couple minutes, before you even get to know the children at the center. We’re introduced to our coming-of-age protagonist Seita in his dying minute, actively starving to death in a train station while passersby treat him as an inconvenient obstacle during their daily commute. When he passes, he leaves his body behind to reunite with the spirit of his even younger sister, Setsuko, who has apparently been waiting for him to join her in a firefly-lit afterlife. Both children’s fates are succinctly & poetically spelled out in this one quiet moment, so all the audience can do when the timeline dials back to 1945 is slowly watch it happen with no way to stop it. Seita & Setsuko are orphaned in the final days of WWII by firebombing raids and Naval attacks that leave both their parents dead. They live in a world sandwiched between mass graves below and falling ash from above, but they can at least depend on each other for community. Seita takes on housing & feeding his sister as his sole responsibility, dodging any pressure to join the war effort that would distract from her survival. As the opening warns, he fails, but he does manage to leave her with some joyous memories along the way despite the pain & indignity of starving to death, unhoused. It’s incredibly tough to watch.

Grave of the Fireflies indulges in all the usual youth-nostalgia and hand-drawn natural wonder that typifies Studio Ghibli’s broader approach to 2D animation, but it’s mostly in service of making the emotional tolls of war weigh as heavily on the heart as possible. It turns out that even when gorgeously animated, war is Hell. Worse than Hell, maybe. The most insidious images I saw during last week’s A.I. Ghibli Fest were from the official Twitter account of the Israeli army, cutesifying their real-time, real-world bombing & starvation of Palestinian children en masse as if they regard Grave of the Fireflies as an aspirational roadmap rather than a dire warning of past evils that should not be repeated. Of course, most people using the Ghiblified A.I. generators have much cuter, gentler works from the studio in mind, like My Neighbor Totoro (presuming they have any direct familiarity with the studio at all, beyond walking past advertisements for routine repertory screenings at the local AMC). When Grave of the Fireflies was first released in Japan, it was paired with Totoro on a double bill that confused & traumatized unsuspecting children who weren’t prepared for such a heavy night out. That late-80s programming choice underestimated the full scope of what Studio Ghibli offers as a movie studio that produces daring, emotionally complex art decades before the A.I. C.H.U.D.s repeated the same mistake. They’re not in the game to sell twee digital filters and stuffed commemorative plushies; Grave of the Fireflies is alone proof of that.

-Brandon Ledet

The Colors Within (2025)

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The coming-of-age anime drama The Colors Within is about a teenager with extreme synesthesia who forms a synthpop band to express her unusual relationship with color through song. It’s a much gentler picture than that descriptor implies. Naoko Yamada’s color-pencil sketchbook vision is exceptionally quiet for a story about teenage rock ‘n rollers and exceptionally pale for an animated movie about the divine beauty of color. It celebrates the soft smears of color you see when you view the world without eyeglasses. It dwells in the dead air of band practice as the collective idea of a song is just starting to materialize, before it has any foundational structure to cling to. The three members of the band are each fragile recluses who spook easy, to the point where you’re skeptical that they’ll ever have the courage to perform for an audience. When all that restraint melts away during the climactic concert, however, the relief of its release feels good enough to make you cry.

Our protagonist is an adorable, shy teenager who can only relate to the people around her by reading the colors of their auras. Her sweetness and mental abstraction are a kind of social liability, so her only real friend at her Catholic boarding school is a well-meaning nun who encourages her to find “secular ways to honor God” outside the official curriculum. The opportunity to do so presents itself when an older, more rebellious classmate drops out to work at a local bookstore, and a panicked schoolgirl crush inspires her to demand they start a band together to keep in touch. A third lonely, shy musician who hangs around the bookstore brings the project together, but it’s a triumph that mostly manifests as long stretches of downtime between sparse songwriting sessions.

While our protagonist’s synesthesia is presented as a defining character trait, it really doesn’t affect her journey to self and communal discovery except in providing the language to express something she can’t otherwise vocalize. This is mostly a story about youthful, innocent yearning, both in romance and in art. Every member of the band has a secret, both in their unexpressed attraction to each other and in the ways their individual duties to education, work, and religion conflict with their art project. A lot of their yearning is just the desire to spend more time creating that art, finding it difficult to engineer opportunities to all meet in one place, working on one idea. I remember finding time to practice to be an eternal struggle back when I used to write songs for punk bands in high school & college, but I also remember the times when everything aligned just right for us to play songs together satisfying my soul like few other joys of my youth. It’s easy to be nostalgic while returning to that distinctly teenage headspace, so the story can feel like it’s set decades in the past despite all the smartphones and laptops.

The music our trio of sweethearts eventually plays together is catchy, soulful, and well worth the effort of waiting through the stunted progress of its writing. It’s also the music of dissociation, finding immense beauty, joy, and creative expression through the distinctly intangible sounds of synths, theremin, and guitar feedback. Synthpop is a perfect aesthetic choice for a character who sees the world through hazy, swirling aesthetics. It gives her a way to reinterpret her visions of color into the sounds of color, in the process expressing her love for her bandmates in a more direct way than she could previously express anything about anyone. None of the routine prayer nor rigid interpretation of God’s will at her Catholic boarding school ever approaches anything so purely divine. Thankfully, there was one cool nun around to help her see the positive value in those secular pleasures without feeling any unnecessary, residual shame for the indulgence. This is how I remember writing songs with my friends feeling at that age, but that is not at all how I remember my own Catholic schooling.

-Brandon Ledet

Spirited Away (2001)

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Nearly a decade ago, when I was getting ready to move away from Baton Rouge, a friend of mine was likewise preparing to head back west to be with her now-husband. We had a dual garage sale in which we tried to get rid of some various knick-knacks. We didn’t have much that anyone would want, and we weren’t very successful. As a joke, she had priced her DVD of Spirited Away at a million dollars, because she didn’t actually want to part with it, and when she realized that I had never seen it, she gave it to me. I’m ashamed to say that in the interim, half-remembered bits of other Miyazaki films blended together during a rewatch of several of them shortly after my accident in 2018, making me think that I had watched it. When I sat down to do a rewatch in preparation for the culmination of Swampflix’s upcoming ten-year anniversary project, it turned out that I hadn’t, so this was a beautiful first-time watch for me. I have a friend who has only recently come into my life but with whom I’ve grown very close very quickly was looking forward to sharing this one with me at a screening at our local arthouse theater as it was a huge part of his childhood, plans which were dashed when we both tested positive for COVID the day before the screening. Since we both had it, however, we decided to push forward with our plans and watch it together that same night anyway. 

I’ve been digesting it ever since, and I’m still not fully sure what to say about it. It’s not just a movie; it’s a magic spell, a fairy tale journey, an unconventional narrative composed of little condensations of fantasy that moves blithely from storybeat to storybeat without ever stopping to catch its breath. It introduces and resolves so many things so quickly that the pacing reminds one of an episode of golden-age Simpsons, where a bag-boy strike in act one leads to near-death on an African waterfall at the climax. It runs on feverish imagination, unrestrained by the need to adhere to any real act structure at all. 

Chihiro is an elementary-aged girl who, along with her parents, is moving to a new home. Along the way, her father takes a detour down a road that ends at a red pedestrian gate in a wall that extends as far as the eye can see in either direction. The trio enters the area, which her father believes (and perceives) to be an abandoned amusement park; her father and mother unquestioningly eat food which they stumble upon while Chihiro explores further, meeting a boy named Haku, who implores her to take her parents back across the river before sunset. When Chihiro returns to her parents, however, they have been turned into pigs by the spirit food, as the place reveals itself to be the home of innumerable kami spirits. She refuses to leave them behind and becomes trapped there, while various parties attempt to locate her as they can smell a human amongst them. Haku helps her to evade capture and directs her to find and seek employment with a spider-like spirit named Kamaji, who runs the boiler that powers the baths of the bathhouse that serves as the primary location for the film. She proves herself to him and he asks Lin, a more humanoid bathhouse worker, to take Chihiro to Yubaba, the witch who runs the bathhouse (and is responsible for her parents’ transformation). Yubaba attempts to scare Chihiro into running off, but when she is unable to do so, she gives the girl a job, although her contract is Faustian. She takes part of the kanji of Chihiro’s name away, leaving only “Sen,” which becomes the girl’s new name. Chihiro/Sen later learns from Haku that this stripping of one’s name also leads to the loss of one’s memory, and that he is also cursed to work for Yubaba since he cannot remember his own true name. 

It’s hard to describe Spirited Away other than to outline the plot like I have above, but it goes in so many interesting directions with such vivid and luscious imagery that simply recapitulating the narrative diminishes it. Chihiro is the kind of kid everyone wishes they could have been: stalwart in the face of overwhelming odds, unrelenting in her devotion to saving her parents and returning to the real world, and compelled by an abundance of compassion that seeks no reward but nonetheless is granted them. She’s Dorothy Gale, and she’s Alice, and she’s also completely her own character, brave and fierce but always kind and thoughtful. She’s unwilling to trade her freedom for anyone else’s, and although this morality seems alien to the spirits who inhabit the world around her, it also gives her fresh eyes that grant her the ability to resolve issues the spirits can’t, like finding the source of a polluted river spirit’s pain and removing it like the thorn from the paw of Aesop’s lion, healing it. When she fails, it’s never because of her lack of ingenuity, it’s merely because she fails to grasp all of the social rules of a culture that she’s only recently found herself within. 

Visually, the film is stunning. After nearly two decades, it’s still as vibrant and gorgeous as it was the first time audiences saw it. Each sequence is beautiful, and every frame is filled to the brim with baroque details of the spirit world, but it’s almost impossible to try and explain it, because this is a movie that one has to see in order to really understand. It’s like trying to explain a painting to someone who’s never seen it; it has to be experienced, has to be felt, has to wash over you and make you a part of its world. It’s magic.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Mind Game (2004)

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I’ve been incredibly lucky to see multiple movies by Japanese animator Masaaki Yuasa in a proper theater, where his vibrant free-for-all imagery shines in all its psychedelic glory.  While he mostly works as a showrunner for televised anime, Yuasa’s feature films Inu-Oh and Night is Short, Walk on Girl both played at local multiplexes in their initial run, and both made it clear why his expressive, imaginative visual style often gets him cited as a successor to the late Satoshi Kon.  It’s a shame I was either too young or too out of the loop to catch his debut feature Mind Game that way in 2004, but thankfully local repertory series WW Cinema recently filled in that gap.  I was instantly on board for the layered multimedia animation style of Mind Game, which quickly establishes Yuasa as a visual genius, even if only in flashes.  It took me much longer to warm up to the film’s immature nerd-boy sexuality, but I eventually got there once that got psychedelic too.  Mind Game likely would’ve been my favorite movie as a teenager had I caught it fresh, but now I can only see it as a crude prototype for Yuasa’s more recent masterworks like Inu-Oh.  Regardless, any time one of his films plays on a nearby screen is a cultural event, especially since I don’t watch nearly enough television to keep up with the bulk of his work.

Nishi is a young 20-somethings loser who’s still hung up on his childhood crush and his childhood dreams of becoming a famous manga artist but is too shy & cowardly to do anything about either.  When his crush is threatened with rape by two yakuza in her family’s diner, he fails to come to her defense, speaking up just forcefully enough to get himself shot instead of saving the day.  In the afterlife, his soul is confronted with video footage of his cowardice, then defies the orders of a shapeshifting God to fade into oblivion by instead returning to his body to fight off the rapist gangsters who killed him.  The gamble works, sending the yakuza’s victims on a wild car chase that lands them in the belly of a whale for the majority of the remaining runtime.  Then things get weird.  Inside the whale, Nishi gradually learns emotional maturity and how to genuinely connect with people instead of ogling them as a pervy outsider.  It’s character growth that somewhat helps soften the grotesque sexual assault depicted in the first half and the constant commentary on the cartoonish proportions of his love interest’s breasts – just not entirely.  The main point of the story is about learning to fully embrace life instead of cowering from it, but there is some tangible subtext in a young Yuasa beating himself up about his own social immaturity as an illustrator who’s used to living & thinking alone instead of healthily interacting with others.  The good news is that two decades later he’s demonstrated that personal maturity in Inu-Oh, which has all of the visual inventiveness of Mind Game (including gorgeous animation of mythical whales) without all the teen-boy sexual hangups souring the vibe.

As much as I’m downplaying Mind Game as one of Yuasa’s finest works, it is oddly the one I’d most readily return to for rewatch.  That’s mostly because it’s bookended by gorgeous, rapid-fire montages of isolated images that piece together a birth-to-death lifespan for its four central characters (the whale-belly captives) that I’m not sure I fully absorbed on first watch.  Yuasa gives you just enough visual information for your brain’s pattern-recognition software to piece everything together, but I’m not sure I fully trust the conclusions I reached in the theater.  For a movie that spends most of its time sitting around the belly of a whale, waiting for something to happen in existential angst, it really does throw a lot at you.  The representation of God as a kaleidoscopic collection of impossible bodies that changes shape every time you look directly at it is a major highlight, recalling Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D. from The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine.  There’s a funhouse mirror warping to most of the imagery that stretches through the screen to literally bend your mind, but there’s also a Tom Goes to the Mayor-esque use of crude photocopy printouts that grounds the whole thing in the rudimentary tools of its era.  All of Yuasa’s magic tricks are already proudly on display in Mind Game; it’s just a shame that his immaturity was just as loudly vibrant in this instance. Or maybe it’s just a shame that I had personally aged out of its grody nerd-boy charms before I caught up with it.

-Brandon Ledet

The Boy and the Heron (2023)

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Full disclosure: I’ve been struggling with what to write about The Boy and the Heron for over a week now. It’s obviously a beautiful movie, made with loving care, attention to detail, and bizarre imagination that one has come to expect from Hayao Miyazaki, and has all of his hallmarks of adorable and anti-adorable creatures, but also has a narrative that feels more incomplete than normal. I should also disclose that, although I am a forever proponent of watching these films with subtitles rather than with dubbing, my viewing experience was of the dubbed version of the film, and I’m not certain if there are differences between the two versions that could explain some of what I’m missing. 

Mahito Maki is a twelve-year-old boy who awakens one night to learn that there is a fire raging through Tokyo, and that the hospital where his mother is located is in the center of the conflagration. He runs toward the fire’s destruction, but his mother is lost. Some time later, his father, a manufacturer of air munitions, evacuates his family to his wife’s ancestral estate, currently occupied by his late wife’s sister, whom he has married in the interim since the opening scene. Mahito has trouble bonding with Natsuko, whom everyone remarks upon as being nearly identical to his late mother, and he further isolates himself by intentionally gouging a nasty wound in his head that is then presumed to have been the result of violence from bullies, and he is allowed to remain at the estate rather than having to go to school. Exploring the area, he finds a run-down structure and enters it through a doorway that is not completely sealed; later, he learns from one of his stepmother’s seven attendants, Kiriko, that this was the library of his great-granduncle, who was obsessed with magic and who disappeared in his youth, prompting the tower to be sealed. Mahito also finds himself the subject of the attention of a large grey heron, which speaks to him in a language he understands and tempts the boy to follow him into the tower. Fashioning himself a bow and an accompanying arrow (fletched with a recovered feather from the heron), Mahito enters the tower with Kiriko when searching for Natsuko, who has disappeared; deep within a hall, they encounter the heron again, who tempts Mahito with an image of this mother. Mahito manages to injure the heron in its beak because of the transitive magical properties of the heron’s feather, turning him into a grotesque bird man, who is ordered by a wizard to assist Mahito in his journey, and the heron, Kiriko, and Mahito find themselves transported to another world.

This isn’t a new story, not really. Children going to fantasy worlds is one of the oldest tropes of children’s literature, whether that world be Narnia or Oz or Neverland or Wonderland or Fantasia or the Labyrinth (etc.), and, from what I can tell, the novel from which The Boy and the Heron takes most of its narrative inspiration, 2006’s The Book of Lost Things, is also one of these narratives. In that novel, the main character’s stepmother has already given birth to his half-sibling (rather than being pregnant still, as in the film), and so there are even more parallels to fantasy media of this kind; I haven’t read the book, but a review of several summaries implies that the presence of a new baby is part of the incitement of the protagonist’s journey, as in Labyrinth. The tropes here are from all over. Just like the Pevensies in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Mahito has been evacuated from a city center during WWII (although we’re not supposed to think too hard about the fact that Majito’s father is making military equipment for the Axis); the recent death of the boy’s mother is even more strongly felt here than in The NeverEnding Story; and this film manages to ride the line that divides the Oz books from their most famous adaptation with The Wizard of Oz, as Mahito’s journey is clearly real, as Dorothy (et al)’s travels into Oz were in L. Frank Baum’s novels, but said world contains images that are derived from things that he has seen in the real world, as in the 1939 picture. 

What is new here also seems to have come largely from Miyazaki. There’s nothing in any of the summaries of The Book of Lost Things that indicate recurring bird images and motifs as part of that novel’s narrative (the book seems to largely feature canines and lycanthropes), but we all know that this man loves flight; it’s all over his work. Here, this is seen in the “real” world via Mahito’s father’s work as an air munitions manufacturer but which translates into several different species of birds in the “fantasy” world, all of whom have different natures that present to Mahito as things which at first seem cruel or wicked to him but which ultimately prove that the apparent violence of nature exists not because of malice in the world, but simply because existence does not conform to us as individuals. There is the heron first, whose motivations are unclear and who exists more as a trickster, whose behavior is inscrutable. Second are the pelicans, who first attack Mahito and are later seen descending upon and devouring this film’s cutesy sprite creatures, the Warawara. Although they seem to be malicious in this attack at first, a dying gull tells Mahito that their people are starving as a result of having been brought to this place, where they have no other natural food source. Finally, we meet the parakeets, who are largely anthropomorphic and willing to eat human flesh. The last of these do have some malicious intent, just as Mahito’s emotional climax of the film requires that he recognize that he has malice within himself as well, which saves him from the same fate as his great-granduncle. It’s this same realization that he has come to an age where he has to force himself to grow and mature as a person by recognizing that he can feel negative emotions and not act upon them that leads him to finally accept Natsuko and go home. After he has a fun adventure with the time-traveling child version of his mother, of course. 

I’m not sure that this one is destined to become an indisputable classic like some of Miyazaki’s other work, but that’s what we always say about late additions to the canon of an auteur with a career that has already proven that it will have a lasting legacy. It’s clearly a deeply personal film, and when making something that is created with an intentionally idiosyncratic worldview (rather than aiming for something more like universal appeal), there’s always the danger of making it insular and inscrutable. I certainly expect this one to have a smaller audience of devotees than something like Princess Mononoke or even Howl’s Moving Castle (which was greeted with a similarly lukewarm/confused audience reception as The Boy and the Heron upon initial release, to my recollection), but if there’s one thing that I’ve learned over the years, it’s that there’s no Miyazaki film that isn’t someone’s favorite, and that will apply here, too. It could even happen to you. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond