Worldbuilding (in the real world)

I book-ended this summer with two re-releases. I started the summer by seeing the 4K release of Whisper of the Heart at the Revue, and I capped it off by catching La La Land in the theater, on its 10 year release anniversary.

Both movies are really in my wheelhouse, and thanks to seeing them both in a few months, I started to think about the similarities between them. Both feature a romance between two people who are struggling to find their place in the world of art and with each other, and both make the real world feel larger than life, romantic and fantastical, if you only care to see it.

The palette even matches up! Weird.

Whisper of the Heart takes a mundane suburb in Western Tokyo and turns it into a tapestry - where every person and home has a history. So much can be gleaned from the environment itself - what does an apartment crowded with shared rooms and wall-to-wall books say about the family that inhabits it? The opening scene, all glittering city and trains and people going about their lives, makes me cry every single time. It's a hundred people and a city, animated with so much care.

As for La La Land, I feel like it became popular to hate at some point? I didn't see it until 2023, and was surprised because I think that it's amazing. I was utterly baffled at first, and it might be one of my favourites now.

I revisited LA not too long after seeing it - it was my first time back with 'adult money and time' (the first time was an incredibly stressful work trip when I was freshly graduated). It had rained for a month straight before we arrived, and the Hollywood Dell was beautifully green and lush. We wandered the streets after dark, looking into the mid-century modern homes nestled in the hills and wondering what kind of people lived there, or had once lived there. (Being LA, there was also a police helicopter overhead half the time.)

I think there's an intense magic to these movies - to take a place from the real world that has an existing history, geography and culture, and to weave a tale into it which makes you rethink and view your own world with brand new eyes.

Life is tough for a magnitude of reasons, but sometimes you come out of a movie going, "hey, isn't there a lot of beauty in this world?"