Hayao Miyazaki is a living legend. Who knows better than Studio Ghibli and Disney? Since 1984 he has showered us heart warming stories and explicit animation. The last film he wrote and directed for Studtio Ghibli is Ponyo. Among all creations of Hayao, Ponyo will always be my favorite character. I think Ponyo is the epitome of the Japanese expression 'kawai' (かわいい) which means cute. One of the most recent Hayao masterpeice is The Secret World of Arrietty although it is sometimes called The Borrower Arrietty. Just to emphasize, this film was writtend and produced but not directed by Hayao. Unlike Ponyo, Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, Kiki's Delivery Service and many others which are both written and directed by him.
The story of this 2010 film directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi revolves around the girl named Arrietty who is living in a not-so-different world together with his mother and father. Their species are in danger of speedy disappearance so extra precaution not to be seen by humans must be taken. However a little boy named Sho sees Arrietty in the lawn for the first time and thus the journey begins. It is also called Borrower Arrietty because these small creatures often borrow tangibles from humans such as sugar, tissue and the like. Arrietty's first borrowed material was a pin which she showed off to her mother. All this time the family thought they were the only ones left, turns out there are others living in some distant land. Perhaps I had expected too much on this film, something as adventurous as magical and adventurous as other Hayao films. I must say the climax of the film was not clearly highlighted. I was neither able to see depth nor the complexity. To top it all, for me Spirited Away remained on the top list among all Hayao animations and Ponyo will and forever will be, the cutest.
I have been soaking myself to lots and lots of Asian series lately. City Hunter, Protect the Boss, Code Blue and the most recent Greatest Love. If ever you're interested, you can always watch these series online at http://otaku-streamers.com/ which has also numerous anime streaming list. However you must sign up for unlimited viewing. I do not usually go online streaming since it's quite time consuming. What I do is I download each video via the very convenient internet download manager. Let me recognize my computer genius Vietnamese friend for introducing this ultra fave dload manager. It is fast and easy compared to torrent, however it may slow down your computer system.
There is also http://www.epdrama.com/ which has fewer anime list compared to that of otaku-streamers. Both otaku-streamer and epdrama gives you high resolution downloads. Only, otaku-streamer downloads faster and groups each series per episode while epdrama divides each episode into either 5 or 6 parts. Based on personal experience, otaku-streamer often encounters more webpage problems compared to epdrama so I often do dloads via epdrama for Japanese and Korean series. All of my anime dloads are from otaku-streamers. The downside for both otaku-streamer and epdrama is that scrolling is slower since they show numerous video list in their homepage. What I do is I go to http://mysoju.com/ for suggestions of what Korean or Japanese series is hot for the month. Mysoju is not ideal for dload because their videos are usually flv in format, has very poor resolution and therefore ideal for online streaming. For anime suggestions, I go to otaku discussions such as those available in otaku-streamer. The users will usually name their best slice of anime for example, and most of them has a common answer so you can never go wrong.
For more drama and anime list, you can also visit www.crunchyroll.com and www.dramacrazy.net respectively.
