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Old 10-23-2002, 10:55 PM   #2
starwire
Junior Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2001
Location: Chicago
Posts: 7
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If you've got children, especially young'ns, I urge you put down that copy of Monster's Inc. and seek out a beautiful animated movie called My Neighbor Totoro. It was made in Japan in the late 80's, and is one of my favorite films ever, animated or not. Nothing against Disney (who've consistantly produced quality product year in and year out), but their movies have gotten far too sarcastic, ironic, loud, and obnoxious. This is a much slower, much gentler film, and yet it's such a beautiful thing to look at. Even though it was made more than a decade ago, the animation still stands up as some of the best ever drawn in a movie. Don't be turned off by the fact that it's anime (or Japanamation, whatever you prefer to call it). It's not Pokemon, but a movie that kids and adults of all ages will enjoy.

Now that that's out of the way, I urge you to head over to animemusicvideos.org and download a video that someone made using footage from My Neighbor Totoro, and Lightfoot's song, "The Pony Man." Yes, there is an entire website devoted to people whose hobby is making music videos on their computer, and there are hundreds, if not thousands of such videos listed on this site. It's one of my favorite sites, and I've downloaded more than 30 or so videos from it. This is one of the best, and it's surprising how well the images go with the song. I'm not aware of any of Lightfoot's songs getting the MTV-video treatment, so this is really one of the only Gordon Lightfoot music videos that you're going to find anywhere. Unfortunately, he's not actually in it, but so it is with all the videos on this site...the footage is 100% anime-derived.

I should also probably just clarify that I didn't make this, and I don't really know who did. I just thought I'd link it to you so you all could check it out. Obviously, if you're on a dial-up connection (using a 56K modem like me), it's a download that's going to take some considerable time, but regardless, I recommend it to everyone. See the movie too, as this will make a lot more sense after you watch the movie. It's probably in the kids videos section at Blockbuster, or at least that's where I've seen it when I rented it recently.

Here's the link: http://www.animemusicvideos.org/legacy/video.php?v=3252

Just right-click where it says DIRECT 1 (near the bottom of the page) and you can save it as a zip file on your computer, which should probably open in whatever media player you have on your computer. Happy viewing!

[This message has been edited by starwire (edited October 24, 2002).]
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