Miyazuki on Legend, Nature, and Progress - with a Human Touch
Studio Ghibli was created in 1985 by Miyazaki and cofoundering producer Isao Takahata and director Toshio Suzuki. The studio’s films have gained worldwide recognition and are praised by audiences and critics alike. They also have earned a healthy international box office and a slew of international awards, including an Academy Award for best animated picture for Spirited Away.
Nearly all of the films from the studio feature a young female protagonist. Unlike the Disney Princesses, these girls are fun, smart, strong, and brave. But first and foremost, they are little ordinary girls with distinct personalities who rise to the challenge in extraordinary circumstances. They are great role models for young audiences, male and female alike.
Castle in the Sky, released in 1986 and directed by Miyazaki was the studio’s first film, and set the tone both thematically and stylistically for the type of content they would go on to perfect in the future. It also features Sheeta, the first in a long list of female protagonists. The film begins in a futuristic setting on a flying ship which is transporting a little girl and government officials who are suddenly attacked by flying space pirates. The girl falls from the ship, escaping both the government and the pirates, and is saved from falling to her death by a magic stone that she wears around her neck. She then finds herself on the ground in an amazingly detailed industrialized European city and later discovers that she is the lost princess of an extremely advanced society that lived on a flying island in the sky. Flying islands and pirates, a lost princess, a magic stone, sounds like a great kids movie right?! But it's themes make the film more than just a childish adventure. The climax of the film takes place on the island, which has been completely abandoned and is now in ruins. It has become overtaken by nature as it seems the humans that lived there were incapable of living in harmony with the technological power they had developed.
The beautifully designed backdrops in the film show three very different settings in this animated world, the futuristic, dystopian, technological world, the realist urban world, and the natural world. The incredibly designed urban landscapes in films like Castle in the Sky, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Kiki’s Delivery Service, position us in a world that we recognize, and then combine these fantastic elements to comment on human nature and make more profound critical arguments about human nature and society.
My Neighbor Totoro was the first film that really expanded the horizons of the studio, receiving foreign language dubs and being released in countries around the world in the years following its original release in Japan. It is a poignantly simple story about two young girls who move to the countryside with their father while their mother is recovering from an unnamed illness in the hospital. As they discover their new home they befriend Totoro, a wide eyed, yet sleepy, hairy giant rabbit/squirrel/koala like forest being with magical powers.
The creatures that inhabit the world of the story include Totoro, a caretaker like guardian of the forest, two mini versions of him, a giant cat bus, and flying dust bunnies with eyes. These wonderfully imaginative creations really come to life thanks to the artistry of the illustrators and the powerful emotional simplicity of Miyazaki’s script and direction. One of the most poignant scenes occurs when the girls are waiting at the bus stop for the father to come home from visiting their mother in the hospital. The bus arrives and their father is not on it. It is raining, and Mei, the younger sister, begins to fall asleep. Her sister, Yasuko, puts her on her back and props the umbrella on the shoulder to shield them. Suddenly Totoro arrives with a simple leaf on his head to protect him from the rain. Yasuko, surprised, but only slightly, offers him her sister’s umbrella. He opens it and the three of them continue waiting for the bus. The scene is excepcional in how silent it is. On the soundtrack you hear nothing more than the sound of the rain, a few curious notes on the background musical soundtrack, and nothing really happens. It is an otherworldly encounter with a fantastical being shown in the most mundane way possible. It could not be more different from the magical encounters in Spielberg movies. In Jurassic Park or ET fear and awe are inspired by these amazing creatures. In Miyazaki’s films they are simply accepted. The soundtrack does not give off John Williams emotional feeling of making a new impossible discovery. They all just wait in silence for the bus under the rain.
While the words unpredictable and original are often overused when talking about film, they could not be better lent than to describe Miyazaki’s. They move at such a pace that one feels as if they are holding their breath the entire time. Every scene is so carefully composed and each character and creature so detailed and unique that every frame is an overwhelming feast for the eyes. Perhaps Spirited Away is the best example of this. Spirited Away is the first and only foreign film to win the best animated Oscar, and remains the highest grossing film of all time in Japan.
If you start explaining the plot and the characters you can easily end up describing what sounds like a confusing inexplicable worm hole of a film, which, a bit like Alice in Wonderland, is what it is. Miyazuki said that his film about a young girl, Chihiro, whose parents turn into pigs after they enter an abandoned amusement park and who then must work in a bathhouse run by a witch to save them (see, no plot description does the film service), would have originally lasted over three hours, and it is totally believable. The world and the spirits, humans, and monsters that inhabit it are so richly created that it felt as if there was enough material to make an entire tv series. In fact, the main flaw of the film is that it ends too abruptly, tying up the loose ends quickly as if to say, we have run out of time and have to stop now. But the things Chihiro encounters such as a stink monster, a spiderman, a giant baby, a dragon boy, more dust bunny creatures, a mysterious masked spirit called No Face, and the evil crow morphing witch Yubaba are each so mysteriously invigorating that the brain does not have enough time to take in and appreciate the magical mastery of their creation before Chihiro is off to overcome her next challenge. Mitazuki’s films are the definition of original and unpredictable. He creates worlds where the characters coexist with magic, and instead of over-explaining things to the audience, these worlds and surreal events and characters are simply accepted.
Princess Mononoke is similarly packed full of amazing creatures and unpredictable action. It is Miyazuki’s epic, with violent action scenes that feel like something Kutosawa would have made had he worked in animation. While Miyazuki’s other films are perfect for adults and children alike, this one is more similar to an animated Lord of the Rings style film, complete with arrows thhat decapitate, and a girl who sucks wolf’s blood. It is also the film that is most directly concerned with Miyazuki’s themes of man versus nature. His forest Gods, the Princess Mononoke, a girl raised by wolves, kodama tree spirits, and especially the Great Forest Spirit, are a wonder to behold, and the symbolic message the film has remains especially relevant in our modern world. Man may not be evil, but his desire to constantly progress without thinking about the consequences of his actions, is told much more maturely and with greater depth and understanding than usual. Miyazuki’s fascination with nature and its spiritual qualities are at the forefront of the film, and though all nature is artifice in animation, Miyazuki shows that with style, talent, heart, and intellect, that animation can defend the real world it represents just as well as a documentary.
In fact, though questions about the level of artifice in animation may seem strange, Miyazuki sees it as a very human process, and much like modern directors such as Paul Thomas Anderson or Quentin Tarantino who refuse to use digital cameras, Miyazuki shut down the computer department of the studio several years ago, and has called animation by artificial intelligence disgusting. His characters may be drawings, but they are drawings made by the human hand, and he values that. In a world where nearly all big studio animation from Dreamworks to Pixar is computer animated, Studio Ghibli stands out.
This ideology about keeping the filmmaking process human is clearly visible in the themes of the studio’s film’s content as well. Many compare Miyazaki to the films of Disney or Pixar, but there are clear differences. Disney and Pixar have made some truly beautiful films that are masterpieces for people of all ages, but, like typical American cinema, are more interested in individual emotional stories and in following popular tropes as seen in the Disney Princess films. Miyazaki’s films are more worldly, the themes more philosophical, and the subject matter more concerned with society and human nature as a whole. Pixar’s films are colorful explorations of incredible computer generated worlds, with films like Coco, Up, Toy Story, and Inside Out seriously dealing with death, old age, the loss of innocence and memory, and the complexity of emotions. They go straight for your heart, flawlessly getting an emotional response, often resulting in tears, from audiences. If Pixar reaches for your heart, Miyazaki reaches for the stars. His worlds are so unreal yet real at the same time, his messages so wrapped in symbology, yet so clear, and his images so imaginative and unforgettable. They may be nothing more than drawings, but our world is somewhere in there, perhaps more present thanks to the errors of the human hand.
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