Category: Cartooning

Eric says that Mushi-Shi is a relatively obscure title. Indeed, it took a week for a copy to arrive in Massachusetts from a Netflix distribution center in California.

Like Kino’s Journey, Mushi-Shi is about a wanderer, with a series of mostly self-contained stories. But unlike Kino, the character Ginko isn’t exploring for its own sake, but rather he’s a healer-for-hire who exorcises parasitic creatures called Mushi.

Caution: This video depicts what is known to comic book fans as an “injury to eye motif,” and it’s yucky and gunky!
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The granddaddy of anime is Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy, a TV show that held much fascination for me in childhood. Partially a mixture of Frankenstein and Pinocchio, Astro Boy was often whimsical to the point of being surreal. Here’s Astro wishing he had a mother, in a scene seemingly inspired by Salvador Dali.

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Dali himself did dally in film, as seen in this scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound.

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That eerie sound is a Theremin, also heard prominently in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend. A staple of horror and science fiction films, the Theremin was famously used by Brian Wilson in “Good Vibrations.”