Bunny-chan makes a boo-boo
Month: March 2012
Lost
Having been born in the year of the piggy, Meimoirs has this special affinity with all things oink-like. She grew up singing along to a nursery rhyme that goes something like this:
To market, to market to buy a fat pig; home again, home again, jiggety jig.
Adele and her son Adieu are French teacup pigs with bunnies for pets. It’s bright and early, and the two already have their day planned out – to the market it is.
Kaonashi-chan and fatherhood
Kaonashi, which means “no-face” in Japanese, is a melancholic soul that appears in Spirited Away.
It is a meat-lover, by choice.
In the Japanese culture, there is a word that perfectly describes the design of the Kaonashi character. “Kimokawaii” refers to something that is grotesque to the point of being endearingly beautiful.
Very Kaonashi indeed.
The travelling soot
Spirited Away is one of Meimoirs’ favourite films. The 2001 Oscar-winning Japanese anime draws its inspiration from an Alice in Wonderland-like world of whimsiness, introducing us to countless multi-faceted characters.
In one of the scenes, the susuwatari returns for a cameo – the tiny, black critters first appeared in My Neighbour Totoro and were known as dust bunnies or soot sprites. The name “susuwatari” literally means “travelling soot”.
They exist on petite rainbow-hued Japanese sweets called kompeito, a type of thank-you-for-coming gift by the Imperial House of Japan.
The big mix up
In the previous post, we touched briefly on the Totoro character.
To be more precise, there are three kinds of Totoro: the large grey Totoro, which is about 1300 years old and seven-feet tall, the medium blue Totoro, which is about 600 years old, and the tiny white Totoro, which is about 100 years old. It seems that as Totoro grows, he sprouts arms and whiskers, and changes colour in the midst of it all.
In amiguruMEI’s world, the big fuzzy Totoro has yet to be sighted in the flesh.
Until now that is, according to Shiro-toro-chan, the white Totoro.
amiguruMEI 