Critics at Large | The New Yorker

Margaret Talbot, writing in The New Yorker in 2005, recounted that when animators at Pixar got stuck on a project they’d file into a screening room to watch a film by Hayao Miyazaki. Best known for works like “My Neighbor Totoro,” “Princess Mononoke,” and “Spirited Away,” which received the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, in 2002, he is considered by some to be the first true auteur of children’s entertainment. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the themes that have emerged across Miyazaki’s œuvre, from bittersweet depictions of late childhood to meditations on the attractions and dangers of technology. Miyazaki’s latest, “The Boy and the Heron,” is a semi-autobiographical story in which a young boy grieving his mother embarks on a quest through a magical realm as the Second World War rages in reality. The Japanese title, “How Do You Live?,” reveals the philosophical underpinnings of what may well be the filmmaker’s final work. “Wherever you are—whether it seems to be peaceful, whether things are scary—there’s something happening somewhere,” Cunningham says. “And you have to learn this as a child. There’s pain somewhere. And you have to learn how to live your life along multiple tracks.”Read, watch, and listen with the critics:“Kiki’s Delivery Service” (1989)“My Neighbor Totoro” (1988)“Old Enough!” (1991-present)“Princess Mononoke” (1997)“Spirited Away” (2001)“The Boy and the Heron” (2023)“The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” by C. S. Lewis (1950)“The Moomins series” by Tove Jansson (1945-70)“The Wind Rises” (2013)New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.This episode originally aired on December 7, 2023. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This year, high-profile failures abounded. Take, for example, Francis Ford Coppola’s passion project “Megalopolis,” which cost a hundred and forty million dollars to make—and brought in less than ten per cent of that at the box office. And what was Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump but a fiasco of the highest order? On this episode of Critics at Large, recorded live at Condé Nast’s offices at One World Trade Center, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz pronounce 2024 “the year of the flop,” and draw on a range of recent examples—from the Yankees’ disappointing performance at the World Series to Katy Perry’s near-universally mocked music video for “Woman’s World”—to anatomize the phenomenon. What are the constituent parts of a flop, and what might these missteps reveal about the relationship between audiences and public figures today? The hosts also consider the surprising upsides to such categorical failures. “In some ways, always succeeding for an artist is a problem . . . because I think you retain fear,” Schwartz says. “If you can get through it, there really can be something on the other side.”Read, watch, and listen with the critics:HBO’s “Industry” (2020–) The 2024 World SeriesThe 2024 Election“Megalopolis” (2024)“Woman’s World,” by Katy Perry“ ‘Woman’s World’ Track Review,” by Shaad D’Souza (Pitchfork)“Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, and the Unstable Hierarchy of Pop” (The New Yorker)“Tarot, Tech, and Our Age of Magical Thinking” (The New Yorker)“Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and the Benefits of Beef” (The New Yorker)“Am I Racist?” (2024)“Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 1” (2024)“Apocalypse Now” (1979)“Madame Web” (2024)“The Great Gatsby,” by F. Scott FitzgeraldFugees“Moby-Dick,” by Herman Melville“NYC Prep” (2009)“Princesses: Long Island” (2013)New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The American musical is in a state of flux. Today’s Broadway offerings are mostly jukebox musicals and blatant I.P. grabs; original ideas are few and far between. Meanwhile, one of the biggest films of the season is Jon M. Chu’s earnest (and lengthy) adaptation of “Wicked,” the origin story of the Wicked Witch of the West that first premièred on the Great White Way nearly twenty years ago—and has been a smash hit ever since. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss why “Wicked” is resonating with audiences in 2024. They consider it alongside other recent movie musicals, such as “Emilia Pérez,” which centers on the transgender leader of a Mexican cartel, and Todd Phillips’s follow-up to “Joker,” the confounding “Joker: Folie à Deux.” Then they step back to trace the evolution of the musical, from the first shows to marry song and story in the nineteen-twenties to the seventies-era innovations of figures like Stephen Sondheim. Amid the massive commercial, technological, and aesthetic shifts of the last century, how has the form changed, and why has it endured? “People who don’t like musicals will often criticize their artificiality,” Schwartz says. “Some things in life are so heightened . . . yet they’re part of the real. Why not put them to music and have singing be part of it?”Read, watch, and listen with the critics:“Wicked” (2024)“The Animals That Made It All Worth It,” by Naomi Fry (The New Yorker)“Ben Shapiro Reviews ‘Wicked’ ”“Frozen” (2013)“Emilia Pérez” (2024)“Joker: Folie à Deux” (2024)“ ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ Review: Make ’Em Laugh (and Yawn),” by Manohla Dargis (the New York Times)“Hair” (1979)“The Sound of Music” (1965)“Anything Goes” (1934)“Show Boat” (1927)“Oklahoma” (1943)“Mean Girls” (2017)“Hamilton” (2015)“Wicked” (2003)“A Strange Loop” (2019)“Teeth” (2024)“Kimberly Akimbo” (2021)New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Artists owe a great debt to ancient Rome. Over the years, it’s provided a backdrop for countless films and novels, each of which has put forward its own vision of the Empire and what it stood for. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the latest entry in that canon, Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator II,” which has drawn massive audiences and made hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office. The hosts also consider other texts that use the same setting, from the religious epic “Ben-Hur” to Sondheim’s farcical sword-and-sandal parody, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” Recently, figures from across the political spectrum have leapt to lay claim to antiquity, even as new translations of Homer have underscored how little we really understand about these civilizations. “Make ancient Rome strange again. Take away the analogies,” Schwartz says. “Maybe that’s the appeal of the classics: to try to keep returning and understanding, even as we can’t help holding them up as a mirror.”Read, watch, and listen with the critics:“Gladiator II” (2024)“I, Claudius” (1976)“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (1966) “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988)“Monty Python’s Life of Brian” (1979)“Cleopatra” (1963)“Spartacus” (1960)“Ben-Hur” (1959)“Gladiator” (2000)“The End of History and the Last Man,” by Francis Fukuyama“I, Claudius,” by Robert Graves“I Hate to Say This, But Men Deserve Better Than Gladiator II,” by Alison Wilmore (Vulture)“On Creating a Usable Past,” by Van Wyck Brook (The Dial)Emily Wilson’s translations of the Odyssey and the IliadNew episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices