Kyoto, 2019: my family and I sat at a vegan cafe and each of my children ordered a different flavored cream soda for dessert. In Japan, cream sodas come as a brightly colored fruit flavored fizzy syrup drink rather than the vanilla/caramel kind found in the US. Each one is a bubbly, over the top celebration. A tiny bit sophisticated but also playful.

The food in Hayao Miyazaki movies is a cult obsession. Why does it always look so delicious? Apparently the director bases the food in his films on comfort food he’s tasted and loved. In this series, I prompted the Midjourney AI to make me some immersive cream sodas, larger than life, as if you dove into the flavor: melon, berry, vanilla, cherry…

I chose the final images from about a hundred that I generated and made variations of, using words that included: sparkly, cream soda, clouds, sky, sunshine, Hayao Miyazaki, and Studio Ghibli.