Anime Movie Rewind: Pompo the Cinephile

For some time now I’ve been contemplating spending some of next year, “sixty years since Mighty Atom got on TV,” watching a minuscule sample of anime from each of the years since then. Amid all that thinking ahead and advance selection of TV episodes (and the slightest bit of concern I’m making “too big a deal of it”), my viewing schedule for this year’s concluding quarter happened to fall together in such a way as to leave a day open each week I could watch a movie in, something I’ve all but wished for at certain times before. With that I did start pondering how last year I’d finished up watching bits of animation made in Japan before Mighty Atom with “a movie from each decade of ‘anime on TV,’ too,” and then I decided I could wind back to my project with “a movie a decade” again, this time heading from now to the 1960s. To start off with something recent, I looked through some of my newer Blu-Rays and settled on Pompo the Cinephile.

“A movie about making a movie” did seem a somehow appropriate starting point. As I began watching Pompo, though, I realised I’d been a bit mistaken about just what it was about. That did bring me back to a constant uncertainty about how commenting on my own surprise about a story means denying that surprise to anyone else who might happen on my commentary. The best I can do is to put a “cut” on this journal’s front page and hope that anyone who happens on this post later doesn’t look too far ahead too fast.
( That’s show business )