a resurrection

In Madama Butterfly the titular Ciocio-san spends years waiting for the father of her child to return home to them.

Now it is highly unlikely that anyone has been waiting for the return of this blog, which lived but a brief life in the spring of 2018.

Yet here I am indulging my own narcissism and announcing the return of… Requires Reading.

Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as ‘It’s Rebekah Vardy’s account’.

I doubt anyone remembers this blog or particularly missed it when it was gone – after all movie blogs are a dime a dozen.

But like the endless stream of reboots and unending seasons of The Walking Dead, Requires Reading is stumbling from the grave freshly resurrected.

So why conjure up a resurrection now?

I initially launched the blog while I was out of work as a hobby to pass the time – I like watching movies, I thought, so why not pretend I have anything to say about them.

Plus the name Requires Reading for a blog about foreign language films just made me chuckle.

But then came a new job offer, a move to a new city and a few days went by, then a few weeks and I realised I wasn’t going to go back to the blog.

A few times over the last two years the thought crossed my mind about returning to Requires Reading but I never found the motivation to start it up.

Then Netflix announced that it was bringing 21 Studio Ghibli films to the streaming service and thus came the spark, the start of an idea.

Why not bring back my old blog and chronicle my journey through the movies of one of the world’s best animation studios.

I’ve seen Spirited Away of course, and vaguely remember renting Howl’s Moving Castle from the library and recently got round to watching My Neighbour Totoro.

But I hadn’t seriously tackled the filmography of Miyazaki and co, since the DVDs have always been so damn expensive.

So that’s why I’ve resurrected this little known blog, two years after it died.

I figured if I was going to be watching the movies anyways, why not attempt to sound profound on the internet and write about them.