It is almost the inverse of the Disney parks where you pay to have a prepared experience offered to you. At Ghibli you are left to make your own experience, playing out your memories of favourite films or scenes. There are no actors dressed up as characters: visitors are the characters, and we experience the world as if from inside the films. At Kiki’s Bakery you can buy real bread and cakes; the Dondoko Forest, home of Totoro, is a real forest which you pass through on an elevated wooden walkway. There are only a few rides: the most striking is an old-fashioned carousel which plays the theme from Howl’s Moving Castle (‘Merry-Go-Round of Life’) and revolves slowly within sight of the Moving Castle itself which is set on a hill and tilted slightly forward as if about to set off.
Under English common law, you have no duty to act. An ordinary person cannot be held liable for something that happened because they chose to do nothing. If you are walking beside a lake on a summer evening, hear cries of ‘help!’ and notice a swimmer flailing their arms, you are under no legal obligation to do anything. You do not have to call for help or throw them a lifebuoy, let alone dive into the water to save them. You could idle on the shore and watch them slip beneath the surface, for all an English court would hold you accountable. This principle applies not only to ordinary citizens, but also to those explicitly charged with the protection of the public. The police and other emergency services are under no special obligation to act. If a police officer stood by and watched the swimmer drown, the courts would come to the same conclusion – so long as the officer didn’t make the situation worse.
‘Now you will see a film,’ says a close-up of a mouth with not much face to go with it.
On the morning of the US presidential election, my twelve-year-old son told me that Trump was going to win: ‘All the influencers back him, and he’s all over social media’ (this although my son has no social media accounts and is not supposed to go on YouTube). ‘Harris is all over social media too,’ I said. ‘Not the same,’ he said. He was right. I should have known better.
Keir Starmer described Badenoch’s election as a ‘proud moment for our country’. He presumably meant that Black British children will see a person like them at the helm of a major political party and believe that they can do it too. Does a poor Black immigrant child look at a wealthy Black person who hates immigrants and feel a dream take shape?
‘We die! You make money!’ was one of the slogans that HIV activists chanted at the New York Stock Exchange in 1997 in protest at pharmaceutical companies whose high drug prices had barred millions of people with the virus from accessing life-saving medicines.
‘Even blindfolded,’ Emanuel Litvinoff wrote of the interwar East End in Journey Through a Small Planet (1972), ‘I’d have known where we were by the smell of the different streets – reek of rotten fruit: Spitalfields; scent of tobacco warehouses: Commercial Street … Hanbury Street and the pungency of beer from Charrington’s brewery. Then Brick Lane, with half the women from our street jostling among the market stalls.’