Review of “Nostalgia for a Lost World” (1979)
Miyazaki Hayao (writer).
Read in Starting Point.
Miyazaki discusses nostalgia as a force observable even in three-year-olds and connects it to unattainable and undesirable situations in fiction, the “narcissistic” enjoyment of which is a “surrogate emotion for something they [the audience] have lost”. He concludes that animators must study hard to produce visions that are not derived from entertainment, but from life.
References here: Starting Point: 1979–1996 (1996/2009), “Memories of Lost Landscapes: On Genzaburō Yoshino’s Kimitachi wa Dō Ikiruka” (2006), The Secret World of Arrietty (2010).