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      Ghibli Park Celebrates “Totoro” And Other Miyazaki Movies

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      One of our first infractions at Ghibli Park was hoisting our 1-year-old onto the polyester tummy of a woodland spirit creature. Another was letting him slip under a barricade and shelter inside a furry bus with cat eyes for headlights.“He’s not following the protocol,” I told my wife, as the staff overseeing the cat-bus play zone looked on anxiously.“He’s making a mockery of it,” she said. But we didn’t stop him.Ghibli Park, which opened in November outside Nagoya, Japan, pays homage to the eccentric, enchanting films of Studio Ghibli, a company co-founded in the 1980s by the director Hayao Miyazaki. We took our two toddlers there because their favorite movie is “My Neighbor Totoro,” a beloved 1988 Miyazaki film starring the spirit creature and its cat-bus sidekick.As parents, we thought it would be fun for our boys, 3 and 1, to experience a “Totoro” immersion. And as longtime Ghibli fans, we were keen to see what the place looked like.Ghibli Park has said that a clock tower on the premises was influenced by the “late 19th century sci-fi architecture” that features in some Ghibli movies.Andrew Faulk for The New York TimesThe park includes a recreation of an antiques shop that features in the 1995 Ghibli film “Whisper of the Heart.”Andrew Faulk for The New York TimesAmerican visitors may wonder how Ghibli Park compares with Disney World. It doesn’t really. It feels much lower-key and has no rides, exotic animals, jumbo turkey legs or animatronic American presidents, among other things. The main point is to wander around soaking up Miyazaki vibes.Also, the park is not finished. Grafted onto an existing municipal park, it opened late last year, but as of early July only three of five planned ticketed sites were open. When I booked for a June visit, tickets to only one of those sites — a building called “Ghibli’s Grand Warehouse” — were available to international visitors reserving through the park’s website. (It was possible to book the other two sites through Japanese travel agencies, but I only learned that much later, from a Japanese speaker.)Susan Napier, a biographer of Mr. Miyazaki at Tufts University who visited Ghibli Park in April, told me that it had struck her as a “work in progress.” She also described the ticketing process, which has included lotteries and long online queues, as “byzantine and not fun.”Maybe this is why Studio Ghibli itself seems ambivalent about promoting Ghibli Park. In Japan, it has run advertisements advising fans to “take your time” visiting.A hypothetical theme park celebrating Nintendo or Pokemon, two other iconic Japanese creative brands, would almost certainly feel more Disney World-like, said Matt Alt, the author of the 2021 book “Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World.” But he added that the park’s diffuse layout and low-key marketing were in character for a studio co-founded by Mr. Miyazaki, a director who has never hidden his anticapitalist politics.Ghibli’s Grand Warehouse is the size of a modest mall or sports arena, with replicas of structures from the films, and long lines to get close to them. Andrew Faulk for The New York TimesGhibli Park is not a place to “turn your brain off,” Mr. Alt told me. “It demands a level of intellectual engagement that most parks do not.” When I booked our visit, in March, a bit of mental stimulation sounded nice. I imagined wandering the grounds in dappled sunlight, musing on Mr. Miyazaki’s cinematic oeuvre as our boys paused to collect acorns — just as the two sisters who star in “Totoro” do. (The boys, who are Anglo-American, love the acorn scenes so much that they learned the Japanese word for the nut, donguri, before the English one.)In reality, we arrived just before our three-hour afternoon visiting slot at Ghibli’s Grand Warehouse, and our intellectual capacity was limited. Our parental nerves were fraying from the hourlong journey from Nagoya and the general struggle of moving tiny, diapered humans around an unfamiliar place.Our morning in Nagoya had already been tarnished by a 4 a.m. wake up and some public displays of unchecked toddler emotion. On the grounds of the 17th century Nagoya Castle, for example, our 3-year-old, nicknamed T, burst into tears when he learned that the castle was closed for renovation.To break his mood, we took the emergency measure of buying him and his brother, nicknamed B, ice cream cones as a second breakfast. That stopped the crying, but our mounting fatigue had raised the stakes for our visit to Ghibli Park. Would the trip to meet our favorite magical creatures make all the time, money and energy that it entailed worthwhile?The park lets visitors interact with their favorite characters, including Marnie from “When Marnie Was There.”Andrew Faulk for The New York TimesA visitor catches Sheeta from “Castle in the Sky.”Andrew Faulk for The New York TimesGhibli Park may see a bump in domestic tourism this summer because Mr. Miyazaki released a new film in Japan this month. But, for my family, making a pilgrimage there was all about seeing Totoro and the cat bus.“Totoro” follows the two sisters, Mei, 4, and Satsuki, 10, as they settle into a spooky house in the Japanese countryside with their father, an archaeologist. Their mother is stuck in a nearby sanitarium, suffering from an undisclosed illness.After Mei meets Totoro by stumbling into its lair inside a giant camphor tree (and falls asleep on its tummy), she and her sister encounter the creature a few more times and learn more about its magical powers. Eventually, as their mother’s condition appears to worsen, they call in some very important favors from Totoro and the wild-eyed cat bus.Professor Napier told me that “Totoro” illustrates an aesthetic that runs through the Ghibli catalog, and which tends to be more ambiguous and subtle than Disney’s. She described it as “the immersive, low-key magic of being a human being connected with other things.”“It’s a world that you like,” Professor Napier, who is writing a book comparing Ghibli with Disney, said of Mr. Miyazaki’s animated universe. “But it’s also full of the unexpected and complex, and sometimes scary.”Totoro and the cat bus can indeed be a little frightening, especially when they flash their teeth. But the movie is much sweeter than it is scary. It’s set in “a time before television,” as Mr. Miyazaki once told an interviewer, and infused with sublime, hand-drawn pastoral imagery — pastel sunsets, a snail crawling up a plant stalk — that makes you want to be a kid growing up in rural idyll.The face of the cat bus, a magical creature that figures in the 1988 Ghibli film “My Neighbor Totoro.”Andrew Faulk for The New York TimesNo Face, a character from the Oscar-winning 2001 Ghibli film “Spirited Away,” sits in a recreation of a train car.Andrew Faulk for The New York TimesThe film also celebrates a child’s sense of wonder. Mr. Miyazaki created “Totoro” with kids in mind — he said he hoped it would make them want to pick acorns — and many critics have seen it as an ode to childhood innocence. It’s no accident that Totoro and the cat bus are visible only to the sisters, not adults.Maybe this is why I still cry every time I watch the final credits roll: “Totoro” reminds me that my boys will never be this young or innocent again.In our Seoul apartment, they play with Totoro and cat-bus dolls, sleep in Totoro pajamas and sit on a Totoro potty. Their fandom is so intense that my mother-in-law bought us tickets to a “Totoro” stage adaptation at the Barbican Theater during our last trip to London.In Nagoya, before we left for Ghibli Park, B demonstrated his enthusiasm by bringing a plastic cat bus to the hotel buffet — and feeding it a breakfast of whipped cream. He also showed the toy to a man in a ninja costume who posed for a selfie with us outside the castle.The ninja cracked a knowing smile, indicating that he, too, was a “Totoro” fan. “Cat bus,” he said in Japanese, as if the phrase were a code word.In Children’s Town, a fuzzy Totoro lies sleeping in its carpeted lair.Andrew Faulk for The New York TimesA robot from the Studio Ghibli movie “Laputa: Castle in the Sky”Andrew Faulk for The New York TimesGhibli Park lies in Nagakute, a small city in the hills outside Nagoya, a few stops down a highway from an Ikea. There’s no Ghibli entrance gate, exactly; you just wander into an unremarkable municipal park and look around for the Ghibli sites for which you have reserved tickets months in advance.The Grand Warehouse is a sleek, multistory building the size of a modest mall or sports arena, with plenty of sunshine streaming in through skylights. It sits near a grassy lawn, an ice rink and some future Ghibli sites that are under construction.Inside, there are replicas of structures from the films, including the towering bathhouse from the Oscar-winning 2001 film “Spirited Away,” and dozens of made-for-Instagram tableaux of Ghibli scenes and props.The attention to detail is striking. In an area devoted to the Ghibli film “Arietty,” I saw a giant drop of plastic dew affixed to a giant fake flower, for example. Nearby was an intricately detailed replica of the castle from “Howl’s Moving Castle,” my older son’s favorite Miyazaki film after “Totoro.”“The castle, daddy!” Three-year-old T said with delight. At last, a Japanese castle that didn’t make him cry.The problem was that most of the tableaux were mobbed with Ghibli fans — and lines that we didn’t have time to stand in with restless toddlers. The building’s only restaurant was similarly oversubscribed. We eventually found a kiosk advertising cake, but the staff said that the cake had run out.Yubaba, a character from “Spirited Away,” sits at a wooden desk.Andrew Faulk for The New York Times After about an hour of canvassing the warehouse, we headed for “Children’s Town,” a play area devoted to scenes from “Totoro” and other Ghibli films.Children’s Town has three rooms. The first is a labyrinth combining scenes from more Ghibli films than I could count: The orange train from “Laputa: Castle in the Sky,” the bakery from “Kiki’s Delivery Service” and so on. The boys loved it, even if daddy thwacked his head following them through a crawl space.The other rooms were devoted to “Totoro” and had mercifully higher ceilings. There was the house where Mei and Satsuki live with their dad. Over there was the camphor tree, where a giant Totoro lay regally beside some oversize donguri. And in the far corner sat the majestic, furry cat bus.It all looked fun, kid-friendly and immersive — almost, in fact, like something you’d find at Disney World. The boys were in heaven.“Toe-toe-row! Toe-toe-row!” B said, standing inside the tree, with the same intonation as the movie’s rousing, marching-band-style theme song.“Hey, Totoro!” said T, who had been carefully inspecting the giant acorns. “Wake up!”But even though Children’s Town seemed designed to nurture the child’s sense of wonder that Mr. Miyazaki celebrates in his movies, the warehouse staff informed us of several rules that dampened the vibe. Notably, it was forbidden to put children on Totoro’s plush tummy, or to allow them to play inside the cat bus zone for longer than three minutes — even if the zone was not crowded, which it wasn’t.The staff members were friendly, but their rules made little sense for kids as small as ours. I wondered if that was another sign that Ghibli Park was still a bit rough around the edges. Take your time visiting, as the studio says.We grudgingly agreed to the no-tummy policy, but B wished to play nowhere else but inside the cat bus. We were with him. We had spent several months — a good chunk of his life! — waiting for this moment.The staff, sensing our resolve, suggested a compromise. A special time extension could be granted under the circumstances, they said. Rather than the usual three minutes, our B could have six.Make that nine. Then 12. Et cetera. At 5 p.m., he was among last, and smallest, Ghibli fans to leave the building.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2023. More

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      Will Children Save Us at the End of the World?

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      A wave of recent and forthcoming TV series, books and movies meditate on how young people might fare during an apocalyptic event — with varying degrees of optimism.The noxious orange smoke that descended over New York this month reminded me of a parlor game I used to play with my husband: Would we have what it takes to survive the apocalypse? We abruptly stopped enjoying this thought experiment in March 2020 and when I had a child the next year, I became even less tolerant of blithely considering the end of the world. But now, suddenly, versions of our game are everywhere, in a new and near-unavoidable genre: stories that revisit our pandemic trauma via even worse — but plausible! — scenarios. Making these works doubly poignant, many of them have children at their center.Mackenzie Davis in the series “Station Eleven” (2021-22).Ian Watson/HBO MaxThere’s “Station Eleven,” the 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel about the aftermath of a swine flu, which was turned into a much-discussed 2021 HBO Max series, in which an 8-year-old girl manages to survive with the help of a stranger turned surrogate parent. “The Last of Us,” HBO’s video game adaptation, which debuted in January, features a zombie-fungus pandemic; a seemingly immune teenage girl is humanity’s one hope. “Leave the World Behind,” Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel — soon to be a movie — about a bourgeois family vacation gone very bad, features a vague but menacing threat of apocalypse. Also loosely belonging to this category are the shows “Yellowjackets” (2021-present) — a girls’ soccer team turns to cannibalism after a plane crash — and “Class of ’07” (2023) — a school reunion coincides with a climate apocalypse — and the new-to-Netflix 2019 Icelandic movie “Woman at War” (a renegade activist tries to stop the destruction of the environment and adopt a child).These stories are, in various ways, about how and whether our children can survive the mess that we’ve left them — and what it will cost them to do so. In “Station Eleven,” post-pans (children who were born after the pandemic) are both beacons of optimism and conscripted killers deployed by a self-styled prophet who hopes to erase anyone who holds on to the trauma of the past. And in “The Last of Us,” Ellie, the young girl with possible immunity (played by the actor Bella Ramsey), is forced to kill to survive, and to grapple with whether it’s worth sacrificing her own life in the search for a cure.The anxieties that these works explore — about planetary destruction and what we did to enable it — are, evidence suggests, affecting the desire of some to have children at all, either because of fear for their future or a belief that not procreating will help stave off the worst. But following the children in these fictions, who didn’t create the conditions of their suffering, isn’t just a devastating guilt trip. Almost all these stories also frame children as our best hope, as we so often do in real life. Children, we need to believe, are resilient and ingenious in ways that adults aren’t. In these stories, when the phones stop working and Amazon stops delivering, it’s children, less set in their ways, who can rebuild and imagine something different. They’re our victims but also our saviors.W. W. Norton & Company, via Associated PressNowhere is this more explicit than in Lydia Millet’s 2020 novel, “A Children’s Bible,” in which a group of middle-aged college friends rent an old mansion for a summer reunion. When a superstorm sets off a chain of events that erodes society, the parents drink and take ecstasy but the kids — teens — remain clearheaded. They care for a baby, grow food and plan for an unrecognizable future. This fantasy of a youth-led solution is both hopeful, Millet implies, and a deplorable shirking of responsibility. (It recalls somewhat Greta Thunberg’s rebuke of grown-ups: “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic.”) Its price, these works suggest, is a childhood robbed of innocence. In the rare moments when kids are allowed to be kids in these narratives, there is always a sense of foreboding; for every romp through an abandoned shopping mall, there’s a zombie lying in wait in a Halloween store. “Is this really all they had to worry about?” Ellie asks Joel, her companion in “The Last of Us” (played by Pedro Pascal), about the teenage girls who lived before the fungus hit. “Boys. Movies. Deciding which shirt goes with which skirt.”Mahershala Ali, Myha’la Herrold, Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke in the forthcoming movie “Leave the World Behind.”JoJo Whilden/NetflixThis current crop of postapocalyptic stories isn’t the first to feature children prominently. Cormac McCarthy’s novel “The Road,” published in 2006, early in the so-called war on terror, followed a father and son after civilization had been leveled by an unnamed flash from the sky. (“Are we still the good guys?” the son asks the father as they ignore others’ pain in their struggle to survive.) The movie “Children of Men,” released the same year, imagines a world so destroyed that most humans have lost the ability to reproduce — and hope lies with the only pregnant woman. Of course, one reason these fictions foreground children is that a world without them is the most doomed world of all. It’s no accident that some of the earliest near-apocalypse stories — the biblical flood, the one in the ancient Mesopotamian poem “The Epic of Gilgamesh” — imagined that the world was saved by bringing the “seed of all living creatures,” as the latter work puts it, onto a boat.But maybe more than any particular fear of a civilization-ending calamity, these fictions are most useful for helping us work through an unavoidable, terrifying truth on an individual level. That the world, in whatever state it descends to or remains in, will go on without us after our death, and unless tragedy strikes, our children will live in it without us. It’s not comforting to imagine, but it can be illuminating. They will navigate things we can’t imagine, but — just maybe — they’ll do better than we did, even without our help. More

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      ‘The Magician’s Elephant’ Review: The Promise of a Pachyderm

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      Adapted from Kate DiCamillo’s beloved children’s book, this animated adventure sands down the somberness of its source material while turning up the silliness.“Anything is possible,” the saucer-eyed characters insist in “The Magician’s Elephant,” a new animated adventure directed by Wendy Rogers. The movie adapts Kate DiCamillo’s 2009 book by the same name, which celebrates the power of serendipity: When a magician accidentally conjures a pachyderm in the war-ruined European city of Baltese, he sets off a chain of unexpected events that gives renewed hope to an orphan boy searching for his long-lost sister.The beauty of DiCamillo’s text is that it is equal parts somber and silly, its undercurrent of grief balanced by fantastical absurdities. In jazzing up the tale for the screen, Rogers sands down the somberness — Baltese is all fuzzy blues and pinks, with nary a trace of postwar grit — while turning up the silliness for gimmicky thrills.In this version, the orphan, Peter (Noah Jupe), has to perform a series of ludicrous tasks to win the elephant — who is crucial to his search — from a ditzy king (Aasif Mandvi). The characters’ motivations are so thinly defined (the king simply wants to be “entertained”) and the challenges so anticlimactic (in one set piece, Peter defeats a fearsome warrior by waving a book in his face) that the refrain “anything is possible” starts to feel as if it’s an excuse for sloppy plotting.The voice performances are lively and evocative — Benedict Wong as the magician and Brian Tyree Henry as a palace guard are standouts — but the film is stuffed with too many characters for even TikTok-fed young viewers to keep straight. And for a tale about the power of belief, the narrator, a fortune teller (Natasia Demetriou), breaks the fourth wall a few too many times, offering commentary like a parent lecturing in the middle of a bedtime story.The Magician’s ElephantRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Tennessee Law Limiting ‘Cabaret’ Shows Raises Uncertainty About Drag Events

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      The measure is part of a wave of legislation by conservative lawmakers across the country against drag performances. Many are wondering how it will be applied.NASHVILLE — A bill signed into law this week in Tennessee makes staging “adult cabaret” on public property or anywhere a child could see it a criminal offense. The law forbids performances in those places by topless, go-go or exotic dancers, strippers, or male or female impersonators who, as the law defines it, provides entertainment that is “harmful to minors.” The word “drag” does not appear in the legislation. And to some legal experts, the description provided in the letter of the law would not apply to drag as they know it. But many in the state are still trying to grasp how the measure will ultimately affect drag events, theater performances that involve drag, and even transgender and gender nonconforming people as they go about their lives.The law is part of a cascade of legislation across the country fueled by a conservative backlash to drag events, which has also spurred protests from far-right groups and threats directed at performers. Now that it is one of the first to succeed, with lawmakers in other states pursuing legislation with similarly ambiguous language, the law has prompted concerns about how it will be enforced and the implications it could have.“The murkiness of this law is causing a lot of people to be on edge,” said Micah Winter, a performer and board member of Friends of George’s, a theater company in Memphis whose shows are often centered on drag.Proponents of the legislation have described it as a way to safeguard children, asserting that drag events can have sexualized language and suggestive performances that may be too mature for younger viewers.“This bill gives confidence to parents that they can take their kids to a public or private show and will not be blindsided by a sexualized performance,” Jack Johnson, the Republican state senator who sponsored the legislation, said on Twitter.Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee giving his State of the State address in February. Mark Zaleski/Associated PressStill, the legislation figures into a campaign by conservative lawmakers across the country to curb the rights of people in the L.G.B.T.Q. community. In Tennessee, one proposal would block transgender people from changing the gender listed on their drivers’ licenses, and on Thursday, the same day Gov. Bill Lee signed the adult cabaret bill, he approved legislation that prevents all puberty-delaying treatment, hormone therapies and referrals for transgender children to receive gender-affirming medical care in the state.Drag has become more mainstream in Tennessee, as in much of the country. Performers in vibrant costumes that upend gender assumptions could simply be reading a book, promoting acceptance and literacy. Or they might be “reading” — that is, playfully mocking — tourists piled onto buses rolling through Nashville or lip-syncing in variety shows in boozy brunches in Memphis or Chattanooga.“Not one of our performers on this bus has ever shown more skin than a Titans’ cheerleader on a Sunday afternoon,” David Taylor, an owner of the Big Drag Bus Tour in Nashville and bars that host drag events, said in a hearing on the legislation.Legal experts said the equivocal wording meant that the adult cabaret law was not exactly a ban on drag but could still have consequences.“It’s an anti-drag law,” said Kathy Sinback, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, “because they passed it intentionally to try to chill and prevent people from doing drag, but that’s not really what the law says.”“It should not even touch any drag performances,” she added. But after watching public commentary and a series of legislative hearings debating the merits of the bill, she said, “it’s clear that some people think that drag in and of itself as an art form is obscene and that it should not be viewed by children.”But Ms. Sinback said the parameters set in the legislation should not apply to most drag performances, given that they would have to be considered extremely sexual or violent, lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific values, and be considered broadly offensive and obscene to a child to warrant charging the performer with a crime.Mr. Johnson said that the law was not meant to target drag performances in general or discriminate against the L.G.B.T.Q. community. “It simply puts age restrictions in place to ensure that children are not present at sexually explicit performances,” he said in an interview with CNN.Critics said the legislation reflected what many in the gay and transgender community have described as a bleak and dangerous climate in Tennessee, threatening people who are often marginalized and already uniquely vulnerable. The law over medical care has provoked the most alarm. The Tennessee chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics opposed the law, saying in a statement that it will “significantly limit our ability to practice to the standard of care established by numerous national medical organizations.”Sruti Swaminathan, a staff attorney for Lambda Legal, which is working with other civil liberties groups in mounting a legal challenge to the legislation barring gender-affirming care, said, “This is clearly an effort to villainize us and isolate us because they fear our resilience and our self-love and our collective power.”People protesting against the bill on cabaret restrictions in Knoxville, Tenn., in February. Jamar Coach/News Sentinel, via ReutersTennessee is one of more than a dozen states where conservative lawmakers, focusing on issues of gender and identity, have pursued legislation that explicitly or otherwise seeks to impose restrictions on drag events.Some of the bills would require venues to register as adult entertainment spaces or “sexually oriented businesses,” and others would forbid performances at schools or libraries. A proposal in Arizona would outlaw drag performances within a quarter-mile of public playgrounds and schools.The law in Tennessee has not yet spurred a legal challenge, but activists and lawyers were prepared to start one as they watched to see how it is applied. Those who violate the law will be charged with a misdemeanor or a felony for continued offenses.The drag performer Poly Tics attending a rally in Kentucky on Thursday. Bruce Schreiner/Associated PressIn Kentucky, where the State Legislature has advanced a sprawling bill to curtail health care access for L.G.B.T.Q. children, lawmakers had also considered restrictions that included prohibiting what the state classifies as “adult performances” from operating within 1,000 feet of child care facilities, schools, public parks, homes or places of worship. The legislation was amended on Thursday to limit such performances from taking place in public places or a location where the performance could be viewed by a child — a step that critics of the legislation took as a victory.“This version is much more narrowly tailored to just explicit sexual content,” said Chris Hartman, executive director of the Fairness Campaign, an L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy group in Kentucky, who acknowledged that much of his organization’s limited energy was focused on challenging the legislation on restricting gender-affirming health care.Compared with other proposals on L.G.B.T.Q. issues that advocates contend will have immediate and damaging impact, the ones that are tied to drag stir worries rooted more in uncertainty.For transgender and gender nonconforming people, who face a heightened threat of violence, some fear the law could be wielded as a tool to further discriminate against them.“The language is vague enough that it leaves it in the hands of each individual jurisdiction to define what counts as a ‘male or female impersonator,’” said Dahron Johnson, who works in community outreach with the Tennessee Equality Project. “They could say I, just going about my daily life, am an ‘impersonator.’”In theater, there is a long history of performance featuring cross-dressing and drag — Shakespeare famously employed male actors to play female roles — and many touring shows feature some variation on the practice: “The Lion King” (a male meerkat, Timon, dons a dress to dance the Charleston), “Hairspray” (the protagonist’s mother is often played by a man in drag) and “1776” (now touring with a new production in which all the male characters are played by female, transgender and nonbinary actors).“Hairspray” and many other theater productions feature drag performances.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“We’re absolutely opposed to any legislation that restricts the rights of our producers to present stories we’ve been presenting for 4,000 years,” said Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League, a trade association representing producers and presenters around the country. Ms. Martin said the league is “very concerned” about the legislation under consideration in multiple states.Brett Batterson, the president and chief executive of the Orpheum Theatre Group in Memphis, said that on Friday, he paused conversations about bringing to Memphis a solo show, “Dixie’s Tupperware Party,” a small, long-running and popular touring production that has played all over America and is performed by a man in drag.“We decided we would pause our discussion to see how some of the language is interpreted,” Mr. Batterson said. “I think the law will be challenged, and we want to see how it plays out.”For now, Friends of George’s was not ready to change any of its plans. “We think it’s outrageous, but we’re forging ahead with our next production in spite of everything,” said Ty Phillips, the nonprofit’s vice president.Yet uncertainty remained. Mr. Winter noted that over the years he has played Mother Ginger in “The Nutcracker” and the mother in “Hairspray.”“Can I still do that?” he asked. More

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      ‘A House Made of Splinters’ Review: Home Is Where the Hope Is

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      This film, an Oscar nominee this year for best documentary feature, has an aching sensitivity for the children in a Ukraine shelter.Filmed at a children’s shelter in eastern Ukraine, “A House Made of Splinters” is made with such aching sensitivity that it’s a marvel a camera was used and not some form of mind-meld. Simon Lereng Wilmont, the director and cinematographer, catches his young subjects in the fullness of their feelings — from joy to sorrow — as they wait for a new home.The children land here because of absent parents, typically casualties of alcoholism or war from previous Russian invasions and incursions (the documentary was filmed in 2019 and 2020). Unless another family member steps up, the young ones move into foster care or to an orphanage. Mercifully, the caregivers’ affectionate morning rounds immediately show that this is an institution rooted in love, hope and common sense.Instead of focusing on the staff, though, Wilmont sticks to the perspective of one child at a time, filming for a year and a half across multiple trips. Eva, for example, yearns for her grandmother to take her in and has no illusions that her mother will recover from her addiction to alcohol. Like the others, she has moments of looking weary beyond her years, but she also turns cartwheels to blow off steam.Wilmont hews closer to relationships than daily routines, and takes in the sky-high stakes of friendships, crushes and acting tough. He susses out life forces rather than spiraling despair; he is tender without being sentimental, cleareyed without being cool. A voice-over by one staff member lends gentle framing, and some welcome moral support, as you’re left a sniffling wreck from this compassionate portrait.A House Made of SplintersNot rated. In Ukrainian and Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Close’ Director Lukas Dhont: Film’s Master Storyteller of Youth

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      At 31, Lukas Dhont already has two art-house hits to his name. The Belgian director’s latest film, “Close,” shows his skill at eliciting intense performances from young actors.As a child growing up in Dikkelvenne, a quiet, quaint village near the city of Ghent, Belgium, the movie director Lukas Dhont often felt like an outsider. Other boys saw him as too feminine and mocked his interest in dance, except one named Félicien, with whom he shared a close friendship. But as the two approached puberty, Dhont felt social pressures pulling them apart.“In that moment, that tenderness started to become looked at through the lens of sexuality,” Dhont, now 31, said in a recent interview. “People were divided into groups and boxes, and we were confronted with the idea of labels.” As they became fearful of being ostracized, their friendship evaporated, and Dhont, who is gay, was fiercely bullied for the rest of his school days.That experience as a young person struggling with expectations around gender and sexuality has shaped both of Dhont’s acclaimed feature films: “Girl,” his 2018 movie about a transgender ballerina, and “Close,” a devastating portrait of a friendship between two young boys in the Belgian countryside, which won the Grand Prix award, the equivalent to second place, at the Cannes Film Festival last year.From left: Gustav De Waele and Eden Dambrine in a scene from “Close,” and Victor Polster in a scene from “Girl.”A24; Netflix“Close” is being distributed by A24 in the United States and is being released in theaters on Friday. It further establishes Dhont as a phenom of global art house cinema and one of its most observant chroniclers of adolescence. And it cements his reputation as a filmmaker who is exceptionally skilled at eliciting intensely emotional performances from young, often untrained actors.Dhont, who employs loose scripts and encourages his actors to improvise dialogue, said his method resembled that “of a choreographer, introducing movements.” He said his relatively open approach allowed young actors “to bring so much of themselves” to the films. “I create characters for them to hide in,” he said. “They are like co-authors.”That strategy helped him to coax out two astonishing central performances for “Close,” a slow-burn drama about two 13-year-old boys named Léo and Rémi (played by newcomers Eden Dambrine and Gustav De Waele) whose close bond elicits scrutiny when classmates suspect they are a couple. After a skittish Léo begins distancing himself from Rémi, a series of slights build to tragedy.The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Meet the Newer, Bolder Michelle Williams: Why she made the surprising choice to skip the supporting actress category and run for best actress.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies like Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.‘Glass Onion’ and Rian Johnson: The director explains why he sold the “Knives Out” franchise to Netflix, and how he feels about its theatrical test.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.Dambrine, a French student at a dance academy in Belgium, had never acted before Dhont spotted him on a train in 2018 and approached him about auditioning for the lead role in “Close.” Dhont explained that he when he saw the then-11-year-old, he was struck by his “angelic and androgynous” features and “very big eyes.”Eden Dambrine in a scene from “Close.” Dambrine was a student at a dance academy when Dhont approached him on a train and asked him to audition for the movie.A24In a video call, Dambrine, who is now 15, explained that it had been a “boyhood dream” to act in a movie, and that he had gotten the impression that acting could be fun from watching the blooper reels from “Avengers” films. (He added that when he called his mother to tell her that a stranger had approached him about starring in a movie, she had responded: “Get off the train! Get off the train!”)His mother ultimately accompanied him throughout the shoot, which lasted two months, in Belgium and the Netherlands. Among other challenges, the film required Dambrine to act out several intensely emotional moments in long, silent close-up. After he nailed a scene, in the first take, in which his character has a breakdown in a doctor’s office, much of the crew began weeping, Dhont recalled.Dambrine’s mother, whose name is France, said Dhont’s talent for working with young actors was partly a function of his youth. “He is not that far from being a teen,” she said, adding that Dhont’s emphasis on fostering bonds between crew and cast members before shooting, and his openness to improvisation, allowed her son to feel comfortable so he could focus on the emotional elements of his performance.She also noted that Dhont and Dambrine shared the experience of having been raised by single mothers “who had to figure out how to raise their kids.” The director, she said, “has a lot of empathy.”“When you’re young, you want to belong to a group, but there are people for whom that doesn’t work,” Dhont said. Kevin Faingnaert for The New York TimesDhont recalled that he had first become interested in film as a child, amid his parents’ divorce, when his mother returned home one night from seeing “Titanic,” James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster. “My mom had been gloomy, and seeing her come back, telling me how beautiful it was,” he said, “I became obsessed with the film, and the feeling that a film could change someone.”His interest in making movies was bolstered at age 12, when an incident led him to give up his childhood dream of being a dancer. Dhont said that after performing a dance to the song “Fighter,” by Christina Aguilera, at a school talent show, his classmates mocked him even more mercilessly. “I felt so ashamed that I told myself I will not dance publicly anymore,” he recalled.Shortly after graduating from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, in Ghent, where he studied film, he began making his first feature, “Girl,” at age 26. Partly inspired by Dhont’s own youthful experiences and the true story of Nora Monsecour, a transgender ballerina, the film won several awards, including the Caméra d’Or, at Cannes, but also drew a backlash from transgender people.Some were angered by the casting in the lead role of Victor Polster, a male actor who won an acting award at Cannes for his performance, while others argued that a climactic incident of self-inflicted violence in the film was exploitative. Writing in the Hollywood Reporter, the trans critic Oliver Whitney argued that “Girl” invited “the audience to react with disgust” at the main character’s body.“I just create characters for them to hide in,” Dhont said of the actors he works with. “They are like co-authors.”Kevin Faingnaert for The New York TimesThe blowback to the movie, Dhont said, was “emotionally challenging.” He added that “now, if I made a film with a trans character as the lead, I would make it differently,” but declined to get into the specifics of what he would change. “I can’t go back in time,” he said.Dhont said that his films thus far had been about the period in a person’s youth when they are “confronted with society for the first time” and “performing types of identities or stereotypes of identities.”“When you’re young, you want to belong to a group, but there are people for whom that doesn’t work,” Dhont said. “My films are about showing the world from that perspective.” More

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      in Television

      Lloyd Morrisett, a Founder of ‘Sesame Street,’ Dies at 93

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      His observations about his 3-year-old daughter’s viewing habits led him to join Joan Ganz Cooney in creating a program that revolutionized children’s television.Lloyd Morrisett, a psychologist whose young daughter’s viewing habits inspired the creation of the revolutionary children’s educational television program “Sesame Street,” and whose fund-raising helped get it off the ground, died on Jan. 15 at his home in San Diego. He was 93.His daughter Julie Morrisett confirmed the death.Mr. Morrisett was a vice president of the nonprofit Carnegie Corporation in 1966 when he attended a dinner party in Manhattan hosted by his friends Joan Ganz Cooney and her husband, Tim. During the evening, Mr. Morrisett told the guests that his daughter Sarah was so mesmerized by TV that she would watch the test pattern on weekend mornings until cartoons began.Sarah had also memorized advertising jingles, which suggested to Mr. Morrisett that youngsters might more easily learn reading, writing and arithmetic if they were delivered in an entertaining way.“I said at one point in the conversation, ‘Joan, do you think television can be used to teach young children?’” he said in an interview on “BackStory,” a podcast about history, in 2019, “and her answer was, “I don’t know, but I’d like to talk about it.’”The idea was intriguing enough for Mr. Morrisett, along with Ms. Ganz Cooney, then a producer of public affairs television programming, and others to begin brainstorming about creating a program for preschoolers, particularly poor children who were likely to fall behind in the early grades, that would educate and amuse them.“‘What if?’ became their operative phrase,” Michael Davis wrote in “Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street” (2008). “What if you could create content for television that was both entertaining and instructive? What if it went down more like ice cream than spinach?”At Mr. Morrisett’s request, and with money from the Carnegie Corporation, Ms. Ganz Cooney traveled the country interviewing educators, animators, puppeteers, psychologists, filmmakers and television producers to produce a study, “The Potential Uses of Television for Pre-School Education.” That study became the blueprint for “Sesame Street.”Mr. Morrisett focused on raising $8 million to start “Sesame Street,” with about half coming from the United States Office of Education and the rest in the form of grants from Carnegie, the Ford Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.Mr. Morrisett had “magnificent political skills” that helped him raise money, Mr. Davis said in a phone interview. “He lived in that rarefied world and had connections. He was so believable and so clear and made so much damn sense.”In a statement, Ms. Ganz Cooney said, “Without Lloyd Morrisett, there is no ‘Sesame Street.’”The series made its debut on public television on Nov. 10, 1969, introducing children to a fantasy world where they could learn numbers and letters with help from a multiracial cast and a corps of Jim Henson’s Muppets that would include Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Bert and Ernie, Kermit the Frog, Cookie Monster and Elmo.Mr. Morrisett recalled that “Sesame Street” had a curriculum based on continuing research, designed to help children who watched the show succeed in school.“We were spending maybe a third of our budget on that research,” he told WBUR Radio in 2019, “and that was something that commercial television just couldn’t do.”Mr. Morrisett in 2009 with Joan Ganz Cooney at a benefit in New York for Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit company that produces “Sesame Street.”Bryan Bedder/Getty ImagesMr. Morrisett was born on Nov. 2, 1929, in Oklahoma City, and grew up in Yonkers, N.Y., and Los Angeles. His father, also named Lloyd, was an assistant schools superintendent in Yonkers, N.Y., and later a professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles. His mother, Jessie (Watson) Morrisett, was a homemaker.After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Oberlin College in Ohio in 1951, Mr. Morrisett studied for two years at U.C.L.A, then earned a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Yale in 1956. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley, but left after two years to work at the Social Science Research Council. He then joined the Carnegie Corporation as the executive assistant to its president, John Gardner. He later became a vice president.Mr. Morrisett never took an operational role at the Children’s Television Workshop, now Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization that produces “Sesame Street” and other programs, but he was an active chairman of its board until 2000. During that time he was instrumental in the creation and funding of “The Electric Company,” a series that taught language skills to children ages 6 to 10, which was broadcast in the 1970s and rebooted from 2009 to 2011.“He had this wonderful combination of being a child psychologist who was also a champion of media and technology and was research-based, which is the DNA of the company,” Sherrie Westin, the president of Sesame Workshop, said in a phone interview. She added, “He was a pioneer who believed that television could be an educational force.”When “Sesame Street” received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2019, a gaggle of Muppets onstage shouted “We love you” to Mr. Morrisett and Ms. Ganz Cooney, who were seated in the balcony.In addition to his daughters, Julie Morrisett and Sarah Morrisett Otley, Mr. Morrisett is survived by his wife, Mary (Pierre) Morrisett, and two grandchildren.Julie Morrisett said that, unlike her sister, she didn’t like television. “There’d be no ‘Sesame Street,’” she joked, “if I were the older daughter.”While chairman of Sesame Workshop, Mr. Morrisett was also president from 1969 to 1998 of the Markle Foundation and shifted its focus from medical research and education to supporting the study of mass communication and information technology.In an essay published in Markle’s annual report in 1981, Mr. Morrisett looked at the state of children’s television and advocated for a cable TV network devoted to younger viewers. (He did not mention Nickelodeon, which had started in 1979.)He argued that such a channel had to compete effectively for viewers’ attention, but that “the key for a new children’s television service will be to provide cultural and educational values widely believed necessary for leading a productive and satisfying life in our society.” More

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      in Music

      ‘Jam Van’ Dares to Ask: What if Family Road Trips Were Actually Fun?

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      A new travel series featuring a diverse array of beloved musical artists uses original tunes to help children navigate the world.Few family expeditions are more fraught than long-distance road trips. What parent hasn’t longed to take the kids on a highway journey that is free of bored whines, back-seat battles and the terrifying possibility of having to put “Baby Shark” on endless repeat?Now a new series aims to fulfill that dream: “Jam Van,” on the YouTube Originals for Kids & Family channel and the YouTube Kids app, stakes out novel territory as a tune-filled travel show for children. In each of the season’s eight episodes — the first two will be released at noon Eastern time on Thursday, and a new one each Thursday thereafter — young viewers become the touring companions of Lamb, a detail-obsessed sheep, and Anne, a free-spirited alligator. Together, they explore a distinctive American city (and, in one case, a wide swath of a state) in their sky blue S.U.V.“I felt like this was the best way to sort of make something funny and interesting, both visually and sonically,” said Bill Sherman, one of the series’s creators and a Tony Award-winning music orchestrator and composer whose credits range from “Hamilton” (he won a Grammy as a producer of the original Broadway cast recording) to “Sesame Street” (he is that show’s Emmy-winning music director).Anne and Lamb’s 10- to-12-minute adventures in locations like Seattle, Nashville, Los Angeles and New Orleans involve landmarks, culture, food and, most important, music. On these road trips, however, moms and dads need not cover their ears: Musical artists including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Brandi Carlile, Sheryl Crow, Fitz and the Tantrums and Trombone Shorty portray themselves in live action, serenading the cartoon heroes with an original song created for each destination.The series’s animation is a pastiche of real-world footage, live-action performances, stop-motion animation and computer animation.YouTube Originals Kids & FamilyIn some episodes, like the one set in Virginia, featuring the band Old Crow Medicine Show, the artists have written the central tune’s music or lyrics (or both) themselves; in others, they perform the work of an eminent composer like Butch Walker, who wrote the song for Sheryl Crow, or Sherman himself.The result, Sherman said, is “music that you don’t often hear in kids’ shows,” including hip-hop, ’70s funk, bluegrass and country indie tunes.In a joint video interview, Sherman and Brian Hunt, the series’s other creator, explained how they made their show look different, too. Working with the Vancouver animation studio Global Mechanic, they invented a freewheeling collage of styles. Anne, Lamb and the animals’ Grumpy GPS — the series’s own Oscar the Grouch — are computer-animated, while the Big Book of Travel, a talking tome, is stop-motion. In addition to the live-action footage of music stars, the production team included pop-up cameos of children, who offer intriguing details about the destinations.To create the regional backdrops, Hunt said, “we took thousands of photographs in the actual cities” that were treated to give them a “heightened look.” The images include vivid views of the Hollywood sign, the Guggenheim Museum and the Liberty Bell.But the two men, who are fathers and close friends, intend “Jam Van” to be more than sightseeing — a resolve that was heightened by their early brainstorms at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. “No one could travel anywhere,” recalled Hunt, the president of Believe Entertainment Group, a producer of “Jam Van.” “And everybody was mad at each other.”The best buddies Anne and Lamb get mad at each other sometimes, too. (Grumpy GPS, voiced by the comedian Marc Maron, is almost always mad.) The series’s creators hope that through these characters’ interactions, children 4 and older can learn life skills and how to get along, both on and off the road.Anne is “really the one driving the ideas and the adventures,” said the comedian Nicole Byer, who voices the character. Lamb, voiced by the comic Pete Lee, “sometimes is like, ‘I don’t like that, that’s not a good idea,’” Byer added. Ultimately, she said, their friendship “is push-and-pull.”In each episode, the two travel companions face a problem, interpersonal or otherwise, that the segment’s song addresses. During the pilot, set in New York City, Anne grows frustrated when she can’t find her Uncle Salligator (who, naturally, turns out to live in the sewer). She and Lamb bump into Miranda, who sings and raps an encouraging strategy.“Building up a frustration tolerance in children so they can see their goals through to the end is such an important thing to do (as a parent, anyway),” Miranda wrote in an email.The Nashville episode also counsels persistence. Here, a mischievous armadillo keeps running away with the steel for Lamb’s steel guitar, and Crow’s vocal performance urges Lamb not to give up.In an episode set in his hometown, Oakland, Calif., Daveed Diggs advises Anne and Lamb on the importance of following directions.YouTube Originals Kids & Family“The power of song is that it sticks in your head,” said Daveed Diggs, who stars in an episode devoted to his hometown, Oakland, Calif. That segment’s vocal number, written by the rapper Phonte Coleman, with an additional verse by Diggs, focuses on the importance of following directions, using a catchy refrain.In choosing the artists who would perform the songs, “it wasn’t just about who was the biggest name,” Sherman said. “It was who worked well enough for our show, who could really fit in and make it work, because it wasn’t just about singing.”For the Seattle episode, the series’s second, the men sought out Carlile, not only because she’s from the area but also because of the plot they envisioned: Lamb and Anne, who is suffering an uncharacteristic bout of homesickness, meet an octopus whose “family” is a variety of species. Anne, realizing that friends can be as supportive as her own relatives, shakes off her melancholy.“I was just really inspired by the subject matter,” said Carlile, because, she added, “I’m part of a nontraditional family.” (She and her wife, Catherine Shepherd, have two daughters.) The song “One Sacred Thing,” a ballad about love that Carlile wrote and performs in the episode, emphasizes “that family comes in all different shapes and sizes,” she said.Brandi Carlile wrote and performs the “Jam Van” song “One Sacred Thing,” a ballad emphasizing “that family comes in all different shapes and sizes,” she said. YouTube Originals Kids & FamilyAs they put the episodes together, Sherman and Hunt also discovered an unexpected synergy. Frequently, Hunt said, the main characters’ “social-emotional challenge actually served as a great vehicle to help us explore the cities.”The conflict, for instance, that arises in Philadelphia, where Lamb is determined to stick to a schedule and Anne is desperate to eat, allowed the show’s creators to highlight that city’s quintessential dish (the cheese steak). The Philadelphia R&B vocal group Boyz II Men also introduced several Philly references to “The City of Brotherly Love,” the episode’s song about compromise.“We added Ishkabibble’s, which is a Philadelphia cheese steak spot in down south Philly,” said Wanyá Morris, a member of Boyz II Men. They also worked a signature local greeting into the start of the song, a hoot that sounds roughly like “Heer-yoh.”In addition to revising the musical number, the group’s members worked on being “relatable,” Morris said.The Philadelphia R&B group Boyz II Men helped write Philly-specific references into the song they sing for Anne and Lamb, including one for a beloved cheese steak restaurant.YouTube Originals Kids & FamilyThey wanted to act as if they were talking to their own children, he added, “so that the kids cannot look at us like, ‘Who are these old dudes singing to these cartoon characters?’”Including long-established artists, however, was part of a strategy to make “Jam Van” multigenerational viewing. The show also offers historical humor: At one point, Grumpy GPS even evokes the computer Hal in the film “2001: A Space Odyssey.”Craig Hunter, global head of kids and family for YouTube Originals, who acquired the series, praised it for offering insights into “various things that the everyday kid wasn’t necessarily aware of.” Although it is far too early to know if the show will have a second season, he acknowledged that the concept “has legs.”As for the creators of “Jam Van,” they’re already dreaming of places, artists and musical genres that haven’t yet been tapped.“K-pop?” Sherman said. “We’re ready to go.” More