Kiki's city, except for being coastal, was very reminiscent of the older parts of Nurnberg, and Firth, where we lived, and Rothenburg, where we often visited. It's a bit like Edam and parts of Amsterdam as well, except for the steep hillsides Kiki's city is built on (Holland, while very lovely, is a pool table)

Thanks for placing the European aspects of it. The coastal and the hills remind me of both San Francisco and parts of the British coast. It really is a dream city.

Imaginary Cities I Want to Live in:

Lankhmar
Burton's Gotham
Kiki's City
The Los Angeles in Bladerunner

Interesting. All those cities sound like hell to live in. (Not counting Kiki's which I have not yet seen.) Maybe I'd choose to live in those cities if I had a whole bunch of extra lives so that getting killed was not a big deal.

Imaginary Cities I Want to Live in:

Halloweentown.

The Addams' house. (Not a city, I know. But where I've always wanted to live.)

Not a movie, but Charles de Lint's Newford.

Interesting. All those cities sound like hell to live in.

I noticed that I was leaning a bit towards the dystopic. But they have undeniable appeal to me. Lankhmar never seemed hellish to me, though. It's a lot like San Francisco.

the thing that bugs me about Spirited Away is that I know the Japanese characters mean something, but I can't read them, so I feel like I'm missing part of the story.

Lankmar seemed really dangerous - good food, good shopping, good entertainment, good chance of getting your throat cut.

the thing that bugs me about Spirited Away is that I know the Japanese characters mean something, but I can't read them, so I feel like I'm missing part of the story.

I think they're all aspects of Shinto myth, if that helps.

Shinto (神道, Shintō?) is the native religion of Japan and was once its state religion. It is a polytheistic and animistic faith, and involves the worship of kami (神, kami?), or spirits. Some kami are local and can be regarded as the spiritual being/spirit or genius of a particular place, but others represent major natural objects and processes; for example, Amaterasu (the Sun goddess), or Mount Fuji.

My proudest moment as a foreign film fan was the day I was watching Jamon Jamon and I'd spent enough time working in a Spanish restaurant to know what tocinillo del ciel was so I was able to recognize it in the dialogue and know that the subtitles could never capture what the character was trying to say.

Okay, now this helps explain the river spirit/kami in Spirited Away.

The kami traditionally possessed two souls, one gentle (nigi-mitama) and the other aggressive (ara-mitama). This human but powerful form of kami was also divided into amatsu-kami ("the heavenly deities") and kunitsu-kami ("the gods of the earthly realm"). A deity would behave differently according to which soul was in control at a given time. In many ways, this was representative of nature's sudden changes and would explain why there were kami for every meteorological event: snowfall, rain, typhoons, floods, lightning and volcanoes