Studio Ghibli: Kid-Approved Movies for a Night In

Just before the recent Christmas holiday, Jennifer at Retrevo.com sent out a list of “Epic Nerd-Approved Movies for Kids.” It concluded a longer list of overall Nerd-Approved Movies (scroll to the bottom of their list for the kids movies). It included (in my opinion) some great movies like The Goonies, The Secret of Nimh, The Witches, and The Dark Crystal. It also included some questionable cinematic ventures like Mac and Me and Titan AE.

It left out all of the Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli movies that are my family’s favorites.

I’m the worst when it comes to “kid appropriate.” My rating system involves my guessing at what will and will not give my children nightmares.

I’ve already written about the time I read my eldest Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. But there is also the time my eldest and I watched Toby Maguire’s Spider-man. He might have been three. I didn’t see the harm. I was comfortable with the level of violence and there was no sexually suggestive nudity. The movie quickly became his favorite and he asked to watch it repeatedly.

Then one time, during one of the viewings he screamed for me to turn it off. But it wasn’t the depiction of the Green Goblin or the fighting that suddenly scared him – It was too early in the movie. The scene that frightened him despite his seeing it several times before was the scene where Peter is bitten by the spider! Somewhere between this current viewing and the last time he saw the movie, he became afraid of spider bites.

He can watch the entire Spider-man movie now but the incident has left me fearful. I have become acutely sensitive to every gasp and jerk he and his brother make when they watch a movie.

To be fair, Jennifer did include Princess Mononoke on her overall Nerd-Approved list. She put it in the “A Flair for the Dramatic” along with some of my favorite movies (Gattaca, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and Donnie Darko). I don’t know why Mac and Me beat out Kiki’s Delivery Service or Spirited Away for a spot on her Kids list.

I bought the Studio Ghibli Movie Collection on Ebay several years ago after watching Turner Classic Movies festival of Hayao Miyazaki movies. They showed both dubbed and subtitled versions of my favorite Studio Ghibli films like My Neighbor Tortoro -- my youngest used to refer to this as the “girl gòhgō (big brother)and me” movie -- Princess Mononoke -- my eldest calls this the “Bloody Movie” -- and Laputa: Castle in the Sky – my eldest says this is his favorite movie. The festival also introduced me to Pom Poko and Porco Rosso.

When the kids can’t decide which movie to watch, I tell them, “We’re watching Pom Poko.” They’ll whine about how they didn’t get their choice but 10 minutes into the movie – slack-jawed silence. They are enthralled by the antics and the chanting of the cutely drawn raccoons and are soon spellbound watching the raccoons fight the humans to maintain their land and fight among themselves to determine how to best fight the humans to protect their land. The movie is comic enough to make its message of conservation and environmentalism, mild violence, and raccoon “pouches” (testicles) that some found overbearing or outright offensive, kid appropriate.

Wikipedia provides a detailed summary of the story.

Pom Poko is not in the Studio Ghibli Movie Collection but can be bought separately. The movies included in the Collection are:

1. Laputa: Castle in the Sky
2. My Neighbor Tortoro
3. Grave of the Fireflies
4. Princess Mononoke
5. Spirited Away
6. Kiki’s Delivery Service
7. Porco Rosso

Porco Rosso is about a “cursed” pilot who leaves the Italian Air Force to become a bounty hunter. It’s never explained outright why he is cursed but the curse gives him the face of a pig (which along with pieces of dialogue might help us guess at a cause). In the summary provided at Wikipedia, his guilt from losing his best friend in battle is cited as the cause of his curse.

The kids never ask about this. They never ask why Porco Rosso is a pig among humans. They take it for granted that cartoon animals and cartoon humans coexist on the same plane on screen. The aerial battle scenes and chases are enough to bait them into watching long enough to be engaged by the movie’s emotional themes like the sense of duty in conflict with the truth of the matter.

Another testament to Hayao Miyazaki’s talent and those at Studio Ghibli is of all the DVDs and Blu Rays I’ve bought since  the Studio Ghibli Movie Collection, it continues to have the highest “re-watch value” among my family. Whether its because we’re staying in due illness or short ill-conceived holiday or simple exhaustion, when there is nothing particularly engaging on Netflix and TV, a Studio Ghibli film is a surefire way for my kids and I to pass the time.

What’s your favorite Studio Ghibli movie? What movies have a high re-watch value at your house?

[Originally posted at http://cranialgunk.org]

Christmas, Santa, and Jesus

As a parent, two stories I would like to tell better are the story of 9/11 and the story of Christmas. With the former, I’m still trying to get it “just right.” Both my children were born after 9/11 (my older one just nine months after). They are also still very young and naïve. People are still “linear beings” to them. There is a distinct line between right and wrong, good and bad -- And good things happen to good people, and bad things to bad people.

The notion always reminds me of this article I read in the UTNE Reader a long time ago. It was called something like “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” It presented interesting thoughts about our perception of good behavior and reward and what happens when the rewards don’t pan out.

I’ve told them about 9/11 but only in vague isolated terms. To them it is just another chapter in a social studies textbook (and in many ways that is OK with me for now). I’ve told them that sometimes people want things so bad that they forget about who gets hurt in the process. And I’ve also told them not to give up so quickly on broken objects, sometimes the pieces can be brought together and put together into something just as great. But getting older, they will need more than my detached philosophizing.

Christmas is the other story I would like to tell better. The recent reaction to a teacher telling her students there is no Santa Claus, got me thinking about the importance people have placed on him as a symbol of What? Giving? Christmas? Innocence? Childhood?

That’s where I hit a snag. When that teacher said there is no Santa Claus, parents rushed to protect the belief they’ve nurtured in their children about Santa Claus – But what does Santa Claus mean? Or what is he supposed to mean to them?

Francis Church’s editorial comes to mind:

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Is this the “Santa” that the parents are protecting?

At the Manataka American Indian Council site there is an essay by Floyd Looks for Buffalo Hand on the history of Christmas among American Indians. It’s an interesting document of how a foreign faith appealed enough to the existing peoples to be adapted into their beliefs and customs.

It’s also a reminder that Christmas is a Christian holiday. It’s the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, who is believed by Christians to be the Son of God. My favorite retelling of the birth of Christ was done by Linus in A Charlie Brown Christmas:

I should probably have more issues than I actually do with the “modern spirit” of Christmas. In fact, part of the meaning of Christmas for me is its commercialization. I like the colored lights, mistletoe, and shopping mall Santas.

As for “Christ the Lord,” I’ve decided liking what the religion stands for (charity and goodwill) does not necessarily mean liking its followers and the harm they’ve caused in its name.

Jesus Christ Superstar is streaming on Netflix. Because it is set at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion, it’s usually referenced during Easter. I’m going to mention it here because it’s a well written story about a man whose celebrity gets the best of him and because it’s his birthday that inspired the holiday regardless of whether you choose to celebrate it as a religious occasion, a commercial event, or simply as a part of Western custom.

*Originally posted at Cranialgunk.org.

Help inoculate our kids against bigotry...

My parents are against same sex marriage. At their advanced age, there's no convincing them otherwise. They are devout Catholics, and so they believe everything in the bible as it is interpreted by the Catholic church.

Most of the people I know who are against same-sex marriage are just like my parents: elderly, religious, set in their ways. Fortunately, their old age means that they'll be dead and gone in a decade or two. In the meantime, the best we can do is to inoculate our children from such bigotry.

Like many other parents our age, we've made it a point to be socially progressive in the upbringing of our kids. When gay marriage became legal in New York, my wife brought home the front page of a newspaper to show our daughter that two girls can marry each other (and one day you'll see two Disney princesses fall in love with each other, we hope).

After reading this post over at 8Asians.com about a gay penguin couple in a Chinese zoo, my wife suggested getting a copy of And Tango Makes Three. This controversial children's book is based upon the real-life gay penguins Roy and Silo at the Central Park Zoo who were allowed to adopt and raise an abandoned baby penguin. Our four year old daughter loves and collects stuffed penguin toys. What better book to get her?

But why stop there? How about other people's children?

At our local Catholic church, there's a Christmas Giving Tree with postcards hanging on its branches. Parishioners are encouraged to take one of the hanging postcards and return it with whatever gift is requested on the card. All gifts are donated to needy children. Here's the card that we got:

Can you guess which "educational book" we'll be donating to the Christmas Giving Tree this year?

The Santa Cause Repost

For the holidays, Netflix is streaming Miracle on 34th Street with Edmund and Natalie.

With the recent brouhaha over kids being told by a teacher that there is no Santa, it felt OK to repost what I wrote last year around this time on my Cranial Gunk blog.

For the record, I believe in Santa Claus. Not the jolly red-suited man who breaks into homes to leave gifts instead of taking, but the spirit of giving that he represents to children and adults like me.

Two of my favorite holiday movies are Miracle on 34th Street and Bass and Rankin’s The Year Without a Santa Claus because they address questions of belief and faith. Not the religious interpretations of the words but the parental version: What we tell our children they are too old to do and believe in anymore.

My mother – Yes, my Tiger Mother -- once said to me with a sigh: “Don’t make the children grow up too fast.” I made a remark about her coddling my children too much. (A post of Tiger GrandMothers is coming).

Her comment reminded me of a chapter from the child development textbook I used at Bank Street. The chapter described how different cultures and societies had different expectations of their children throughout the process to maturity (from activities as fundamental as when children are expected to walk to when they are considered contributing members of society).

What the chapter didn’t address was imagination. When do other cultures expect their children to “grow up” and tether their imaginations? Is the imagination something other cultures indulge in?

One of my favorite scenes from Miracle on 34th Street is when Edmund Gwenn (Kris Kringle) teaches Natalie Wood (Susan Walker) how to imagine she is a monkey. It’s Susan’s desperate need to interpret the world beyond the realm of the seeable and concrete that is the catalyst for the Miracle story.

Not streaming on Netflix yet, though I wish it would. It’s among my kids and my favorite holiday movies.

In The Year Without a Santa Claus, Santa (Mickey Rooney) is the one who succumbs to the “real world.” After a visit from the doctor, he decides he needs a break from delivering presents panning the decision as: “Nobody really cares anymore.”

There is also a child who is “too grown up” to believe in Santa Claus in this story. His name is Ignatius Thistlewhite and he dismisses Santa as something for the “little kids.” However, he quickly changes his mind when he learns his father still believes. The story continues with Ignatius as Santa’s most enthused advocate.

The imagination is a very powerful resource. Like the song says: “ Imagine all the people sharing all the world.” It is a skill and like any other skill. It requires effort and practice in order to gain proficiency.

The Wright Brothers are a testament to the power of the imagination. They, “working essentially alone and with little formal scientific training,” imagined the possibility of flight and solved a problem that so called experts in their day could not.

This holiday – more so than the past two – it is important to nurture your imagination. The still poor economy has taken its toll on many people’s spirits and fostered among some a self-destructive cynicism. While it is easier said than done, a stab at imagining a solution to current problems must be attempted.

This holiday, Church’s words seem much more meaningful:

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Rad Dad in LA 11/12/11: An Asian-American-Family-Entertainment-Palooza!

Today, Saturday, November 12, I have the honor of reading from the new Rad Dad: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Fatherhood anthology at my old neighborhood bookstore, Los Feliz' venerable indie Skylight Books.

Please join me, editor Tomás Moniz, and two very special guests, YA/middle grade novelist Lisa Yee and kindie musician Mista Cookie Jar at 5:00 p.m. for an awesome, kid-friendly celebration of family and fatherhood.

The "rad" in Rad Dad is "radical" as in "politics," not "hipster," and the pieces explore fatherhood as a political act through a myriad of voices. Race, gender, class, sexuality, all are touched on in these pages, and readers of Rice Daddies will be no strangers to these kinds of conversations about parenting.

We are so happy to have our special guests joining us at this reading. Lisa is the author of a whole slew of books for young readers featuring Asian American and multiracial characters, including the Bobby Ellis-Chan books, which feature the multiracial protagonist's football-star-turned-Stay-At-Home-Dad. Mista Cookie Jar, a.k.a. C.J. Pizarro, has been wowing kids and their grown-ups with his funky family band, the Chocolate Chips, as well as having his single "The Love Bubble" featured on Sirius XM Kids Place Live and performing at Little Tokyo's Tuesday Night Project.

We hope you'll be able to spend your Saturday afternoon/evening with us!

Boot Camp for New Dads (NYC Edition)

My friend Daniel and his daughter Olive on this CBS segment about a Boot Camp for New Dads in NYC!

Fatherhood Lesson #692: STFU and Be a Good Sport

Halloween's creeping up on us, and I'm dreading it.

I've always hated dressing up, and I've never had a sweet tooth. Ok, maybe there were one or two Halloweens when I was a kid when my friends and I would shaving cream rival gangs of pre-teen suburban sugar hounds, or go on midnight missions to t.p. houses, and maybe I really enjoyed those. But I really hate wearing masks because I hate how warm and moist your face gets, and I hate re-breathing my own CO2.

Truth is, I'm kind of a curmudgeon when it comes to holidays in general. I'll resist the temptation to rant and merely say that the tragedy of holidays in America is how commercial interests, public rhetoric, and local cultural practices all conspire to water down their most salient aspects, to the point that they become incoherent without their accompanying imagery.

Anyway. The point I want to make is that as a father of a six month-old who's about to attend his first Halloween party, I realize that I'm going to have to smother the curmudgeon and learn to be a good sport.

A GOOD f-cking SPORT.

I will have to show excitement for pumpkins and ghosts and green corpse fingers. I will have pretend to enjoy listening to the Ghost Busters theme song, Michael Jackson's "Thriller" (fine, I admit it, I hate that track), that creepy piece of organ music apocryphally attributed to Bach, and the "Monster Mash." I'll have to ask other kids what they're supposed to be and then act frightened or enchanted when they roar at me or blow fairy dust in my face. At some point I suppose I'll have to talk to some parents, and since it's the Bay Area they'll undoubtedly mention something about how they won't buy this or that candy, or how they watched that YouTube video by the UCSF professor about how sugar is toxic, and I'll have to grunt and groan and shake my head and look somewhat upset.

And, to top it all off, I'll have to wear some sort of costume, likely accompanied by some mask, and I'll have to put some effort into it -- because I certainly don't want to teach my son to half-ass anything.

"This is just the beginning," I hear you more experienced daddies thinking. Yeah, yeah... I get it.

But the other important issue that holidays bring up for the over-educated parent is the tension between conformity and knowledge. In other words, when he finally achieves full sentience and acquires language, I'll have to figure out a way to teach my son enough about the holidays that he doesn't just think that Thanksgiving is just about turkeys, Christmas just about presents, and Martin Luther King, Jr., just about some dude -- while also being sure to teach him how to enjoy the holidays (even though I clearly don't) enough that he doesn't become a total social outcast and snob.

I'm sure for most holidays I'm just going to have to default to the version in the Old Navy commercials, because it's just too difficult to arrange this kind of pedagogy for everything. But maybe I'll comfort myself knowing that history and social justice in our household won't only be taught on special days of the year, or commended in regard to specific figures; that both will be inextricable from our daily life.

If we can manage that as a family, that'll definitely be something to celebrate.

Transition Day

Tomorrow's Eliot's first day of daycare.

Actually, it's just a "transition" day: we drop him off in the morning, cry, leave for two hours, cry, come back and pick him up (and maybe cry some more). Tuesday, we do the same thing, but at the end of the day. His first full day is Thursday.

Therefore, in both a symbolic and concrete sense, today is the last day of a very special period in our family's history. I'm being a touch melodramatic, but add the fact that Amy's going back to work next week and maybe what I mean becomes a bit clearer.

Eliot's been exclusively under our care for the past six months. That's the amount of time Amy's taken off, and the time I've spent more or less ignoring work on my dissertation, because my mind is constantly with Eliot, Amy and the dogz (the Chen-Fan "Pack," as we like to say). It's been kind of a primal, protected period -- and we're so lucky we've had it. I don't really have any words to describe what, precisely, it's been.

The closest I can get is to say that, for the past six months, we've been existing exclusively for each other, with no other goal in mind other than to be with each other. It's an arrangement that the exigencies of middle-class life conspire against. Even if we have another child, the equivalent period won't -- can't -- be the same.

Daycare is Eliot's first official step in his own direction. Even though tomorrow is, strictly speaking, just a baby step, it's the first movement that'll have been taken away from our protected arrangement. "He's his own person," I tell people, "whether we like it or not."

What's so cutting is that I know full well and don't know at all what I mean by that.

I've Joined the Club

Got an Engaged Father Fistbump (EFF) this morning.

I can typically be found escorting our two Taiwanese Mountain Dogs (Agatha: black; Bao Bao: brown) around the neighborhood at about 8:30 every weekday morning, with Eliot strapped snugly to my chest.

There's a Whole Foods on the walk, and, today, when I rounded the corner leading up to it an unencumbered, faster-moving dude came alongside to pass our slower-moving pack.

"Looks like you've got the whole family there," he said briskly.

I get this a lot, so I shot back my canned response: "Gotta let the wife sleep."

He chuckled then came in a little closer.

"Yeah, I've got two. You know, a lot of guys don't really know what their wives go through."

As he said this, he scanned my face forensically, searching for the stigmata that would reveal my membership in the Brotherhood of Engaged Fathers.

Our eyes met and we knew instantly.

New Rice Daddy

Howdy folks. I'm a new edition to the blog, so I wanted to introduce myself.

My name's Chris Fan, and I'm the proud father of a 5 1/2 month-old boy named Eliot. When I'm not making excuses to stay at home and play with him, I'm working on my dissertation in the English department at UC Berkeley. My wife's a legal aid attorney in Oakland, where we live. We also have two Taiwanese Mountain Dogs. One's named Agatha, and the other is Bao Bao (寶寶). She's shy but dominant; he's still figuring out his place in the world.

I was invited to contribute to the blog because of an article I wrote for the Hyphen Magazine blog called "On Engaged Fatherhood." It was mostly a rambling bit about how engaged fathers aren't the norm, and the double standards for fathers and mothers, but the main point was to send some love in the direction of a Kickstarter project called Oh Oh, Baby Boy! -- a children's book by Oakland artist Janine Macbeth that celebrates "engaged" fatherhood. (There's still about 48 hours left in her campaign! Please donate and get your copy of the book!)

Anyway, that's probably enough of an intro. I've been following this blog since Eliot was born, so I'm totally stoked to be a contributor now, along with all these other amazing dads!

Ok, now for a shameless photo of Eliot.