Great Filmmakers: Miyazaki Hayao

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This entry was posted at
02:15 GMT on 19 April 2003

You sit down with a four-year-old to watch a cartoon. Twenty minutes in you consider that, were you alone, you would have switched over to something else. Sure, the animation is nice, though not spectacular, but the story of two young girls moving into a new house is just... well, nothing much seems to be happening.

Yet every time you glance over at the four-year-old, you see that she is sitting in rapt silence, enthralled. So you keep watching...

What is it about Japanese culture that permits — nay, encourages — singular talents and unique voices working in traditionally non-serious fields? How does a culture come by a reputation for aggressive conformity when it produces such diverse works of art, when its (relatively) small population supports an utterly independent cinema, countless animation studios, and so many comic artists and writers?

I haven't a clue, but I'm damn glad that it does.

The obvious way to open this essay would be to tell you what a tremendous influence he has had, the names of the animators who consider him a god, or that one of his films was the highest grossing film in Japanese history except for Titanic, and his latest film is the highest grossing film in Japanese history, period. Yet all of this is incidental.

Miyazaki Hayao makes films that could never be mistaken for anyone else's. Each one takes place in a distinct universe, which is purely Miyazaki and is a lovely and wondrous place to visit.

He began work as an animator for TV Anime, perhaps most famously on the Lupin III series, and graduated to feature film directing with the Lupin III film The Castle of Cagliostro. Soon thereafter struck out on his own and began turning out an amazing body of work, beginning with Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, and shortly thereafter founded his own studio, Studio Ghibli.

A half hour into the film, one of the little girls follows a cute little creature into the woods behind the house. Eventually, she finds an enormous relative of that creature, sleeping on the forest floor. The girl is unafraid of this elephantine fuzzball, and instead crawls onto its belly, talks to it, and falls asleep.

Your four-year-old never blinks, and leans into the TV screen. You begin to suspect that you are watching something rather special.

Nearly all of Miyazaki's films can be viewed as adventures, or even action-adventures, and yet not a single one could ever be mistaken for a video game. His integration of theme into plot is seamless, natural.

Miyazaki's main, overarching theme, evident in every film of his that I've viewed, is the transition from the world of childhood into that of adulthood:

Other recurring themes: man's effect on the environment (Nausicaa and Mononoke both deal with this explicitly, but there are implications of this theme in most of his other films; Miyazaki's is not a man-hating environmentalism, though); flight as a means to freedom and escape; and the inherent goodness of all but the most corrupted individuals.

The two young girls go to meet their father at the bus stop. After a time, the bus appears, but father is not on it. The younger girl gets tired, and falls asleep, but the older girl becomes worried. The four year old sitting next to you edges closer, and seems tense.

Then a forest spirit appears, and waits for a bus as well. While waiting, standing next to the girls, he inadvertantly learns what an umbrella is used for.

Miyazaki, through most of his career, has drawn the majority of his films. Thousands upon thousands of frames in each film are by the director himself. He has cut back on this recently, due to age and strain, but there has been no fall-off in quality.

His drawing style is elegant and spare, dismissed by some as simplistic. Anyone with the remotest knowledge of animation will tell you, upon seeing the way water runs through a creek in Totoro, that the animator is a master. Running water is nearly impossible to do believably; Miyazaki accomplishes it with ease.

The backgrounds he creates are so spectacularly, obviously, uniquely his, that in a review of The Castle of Cagliostro at StompTokyo, Scott Hamilton and Chris Holland write:

Cagliostro turns out to be nestled in Miyazaki country, with huge fluffy white clouds casting beautiful shadows over greener-than-green fields and clear blue lakes. If you've seen a couple of Miyazaki films you know what we mean.

"Miyazaki country." Now that's a place I'd love to live.

The two sisters try to run home from school before a thunderstorm starts, but fail. The clouds open up, and they take shelter in a small roadside Buddhist shrine.

A ten year old boy, who likes the older girl but steadfastly refuses to acknowledge it, walks up the road under his beat-up and tattered old umbrella. He sees the girls, walks past. Walks back. Wordlessly pushes the handle of the umbrella toward the older one. She doesn't quite get it. He holds it closer to her, with a grunt and a scowl. Finally he drops it at her feet and runs away.

You grin at the honesty of this observation. The four year old next to you giggles. Even four year old girls can tell when boys like someone.

Miyazaki's influence is, as mentioned before, enormous. Disney animators worship him, and steal his work with regularity (the sincerest form of flattery, I suppose). The most obvious example being the design of Atlantis in Atlantis: if that's not taken from Miyazaki's Laputa, then I'm a quaker. They might've at least filed off the serial numbers and given it a fresh coat of paint.

John Lasseter, the genius behind most of Pixar's successes (both Toy Storys, Monsters, Inc.), fought hard to get Spirited Away handled with the respect it deserved, shepherding it through Disney's internal political jungle to the big screen. He very nearly succeeded, and the Oscar win gave it the final push necessary.

Kurosawa Akira, one of the world's greatest filmmakers ever, devised a list of what he judged to be the 100 Greatest Movies, spanning the entire world cinema and the full history of film. My Neighbor Totoro was on that list, and he said of it:

It's anime, but I was so moved. I really loved Nekobus [CatBus]. You wouldn't come up with such an idea. I cried when I watched Kiki's Delivery Service.

Spirited Away has garnered international acclaim like no other animation before it. It won the Oscar, it won the Golden Bear a year before that, and has set box office records just about everywhere on earth except the United States. Kind of hard to break box office records when your distributor refuses to give you a wide release, or to advertise the fact that you are in release.

Mother, who has been in the hospital the whole movie with an unspecified disease, cannot visit home as promised. The younger sister refuses to accept this, and marches off to the hospital on foot. The four year old next to you moves right up against you, never looking away from the screen. Without this youthful guide, you might not have realized that the undercurrent to the entire movie, lurking in every scene, is a Fear of Losing Mother, of being forced to grow up too soon.

Heavy, serious stuff to a four year old. You reassure her that everything will be all right. As, indeed, it will.

One other crucial element of Miyazaki's films are the soundtracks. He and Joe Hisaishi have had a long and fruitful collaboration, with Hisaishi's compositions nearly always complementing the on-screen mood perfectly (the only possible exception is Nausicaa, their first film together).

The most memorable single tune is the "Neko Basu" theme from Totoro, which translates to Cat Bus. It is the theme for the Cat Bus, which you simply must see to understand. The theme itself is one of the happiest tunes I've ever heard, inside a movie or out of it. Though a tune for a children's movie, it has a pleasing boogie-woogie feel to it, and would be at home in any jazz groups repertoire.

I'm also partial to his torch song in Italian from Porco Rosso, which makes this color cartoon feel like a black and white drama from Hollywood in the 1930s.

I'm almost at a loss in recommending a starting point for your journey into Miyazaki country. Fortunately, most of his work as a director is now available here in the U.S. (and about stinking time, too!).

I will avoid both his two most widely-known works here, and my own personal favorite, because I believe that each of them ought to be seen in the context of his career. Every single one of his films is worth watching, and worth watching twice at a minimum.

So, three recommendations:

Begin with My Neighbor Totoro, the movie you've been watching with a four year old. If possible, find a young child to view it with. If not, then trust me on this: do not give up because nothing seems to be happening. Give it at least 30 minutes before you even think of giving up. You won't be sorry.

Totoro is available on an inexpensive, bare-bones DVD. It is not letterboxed, and only the English dubbing is on the disc. But that doesn't matter: it was originally projected at 1.66:1, so you lose less of the image than is usual in cropping for TV; and the English dubbing is just about perfect. I think two details from the dialogue are lost in the translation, and they are details that would require a good deal more explanation for U.S. audiences.

Proceed from there to the Disney disc of Castle in the Sky. (The "Laputa" was dropped so that the spanish-language market wouldn't laugh it off the shelves. Word to the wise: do not ask a spanish speaking woman what "la puta" means unless you are very good friends, or a faster runner than she is.) It is more adventurous, features dazzling flight sequences, and is simply all-around fun.

Then pick up Kiki's Delivery Service, and enjoy. Watch it in Japanese first, then the English dubbing. The late, great Phil Hartman expands the role of his character, plays it very differently than the original voice actor played it, and yet it works.

Once you've got a solid base of Miyazaki knowledge, proceed at will to whatever you find and have an interest in. You will never be sorry.

(Oh, and my favorite Miyazaki is Porco Rosso. Nothing but flying and mostly-light-hearted adventure, or so it seems on first viewing. It is pure, exhilirating fun, until the end, when it becomes surprisingly moving.)

Resources:

[Revised 20 April 2003. Two character ages corrected, one plot incident revised so as to reflect the movie rather than my memory, and one sentence re-worded for clarity.]

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