"anime was a mistake" except for studio ghibli lmao
a few thoughts on some of my favorite movies
Dear friend—
I would say I’m a fan, in depth if not in width, of films from Hayao Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli, the creators behind Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro and a few dozen other classics of animation. Much has been written about these movies. I am just adding my own two little cents.
I have seen most of the movies, and have seen a few of them countless times, but I’ve not seen all of them. Recently, I watched Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind for the first time. A friend of mine had been shocked that I hadn't seen it before, declaring it their favorite, and so we set aside a night to watch it. I understood almost immediately what they meant. This was Miyazaki's world building at its richest, most clarified.
For films like Howl's Moving Castle and Spirited Away, the genre hits closer to magical realism than high fantasy. There are plenty of fantastical elements, but the mechanics of the world often stay murky.
What exactly is the role of wizards and the limits of their powers in Howl? We kind of know, but not quite. Exactly what kind of power does the stone in Castle in The Sky have, and what happened to the people who lived in the floating city? We have no idea, really. And don’t even get me started on the fever dream of dancing, talking cats that is The Cat Returns.
But Nausicaa is knee-deep in lore. There are warring kingdoms, a human-made apocalypse, a prophecy, thousands of years of history, and an ecosystem with gradually revealed rules and logic.
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind tells the story of the titular character, a princess of a small village residing at the edge of a forest that has kept a toxic jungle at bay for thousands of years.
Far back in the world's history, humankind had huge weapons of mass destruction that it unleashed during an apocalyptic war. What was left of humanity created new, smaller societies, while the toxic jungle, filled with deadly air and spores, became home to countless insectoid beasts that rage when threatened or disturbed.
It's a fantastical film. Medieval meets meets sci-fi, with tons of action and a quest and a powerful heroine at the center. Loving friendships and family, an old hag with ancient knowledge, an enemy queen in golden armor.
While I am a huge fan of magical realism, where the fantastical blurs into the realistic blurring fantastical again, no internal mechanics or history required, there is something satisfying and incredibly immersive about diving into a fantasy world in which every corner is airtight.
Nausicaa's message is also overtly environmental, but most fans would agree, I think, that nearly all Miyazaki's films have something to say about the beauty and preciousness of the natural world.
The sublime images of horror and destruction at the hands of war are often juxtaposed with the equally but differently sublime images of nature at its most powerful. The giant waves crashing into the shore in Ponyo. The massive trees that loom over the floating city of Laputa in Castle in the Sky. The starry night and boundless field in which Howl gives his heart to Calcifer in Howl's Moving Castle.
Soon after we watched Nausicaa, the very same friend recommended a video essay from youtuber Quality Culture about Hayao Miyazaki. The essay follows six themes throughout the filmmaker's oeuvre, examining how his own life and contradictions have shaped his work.
One of those themes was nature. They pull a quote from him that I'm still thinking about weeks later, along the lines of, "We won't solve our problems with over-exploiting nature by finding all the ways that it's useful. Rather, we must want to restore it because of its uselessness."
What a poignant way of thinking about anthropocentrism and the schemes drawn from it, like pricing carbon or finding the economic value of the Amazon Rainforest.
I've written about carbon pricing before. Under capitalism, I think we should price things taking into account all their externalities and the true cost of inputs like labor and pollution. I think that’s essential to changing our perspective about nature, fast. It would help people see that we have been paying too little for things that have a huge impact on our planet, like clothing and plastic (of course, this should be done in tandem with programs that support those with the least, living wages, etc.).
But in a better world, we would not think about money at all when it comes to nature. We would stop commodifying what is essentially our life force and our partner on the planet. That's what Sheeta and Paku fight in Castle in the Sky—the villain Muzka wants to use the floating city's stone and its powers to create a weapon of mass destruction that he can sell to the highest bidder.
Aren't we doing something similar in mining the Earth for all its “useful” plants and minerals and animals? Only, instead of bringing the destruction of a huge bomb, the destruction we're wreaking on the Earth is more piecemeal.
In one of my economics classes in grad school, we talked about the calculations that the government makes to put a dollar amount on a human life. It sounds wild, but it's done all the time to measure the public health impacts of safety measures and regulations, labor laws, pollution, etc. etc.
Perhaps it's kind of fucked up to measure a whole-ass human being, the Amazon Rainforest, and the totality of all living things with the same metric we use to measure our willingness to pay for a Starbucks latte.
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One of the most poignant points that the Quality Culture creators made about Miyazaki's films was about the way he lets contradiction exist (in fact, uses his films to come to terms with his own contradictions). Miyazaki seldom settles on good or evil within a character or conflict.
Many of what seem like the movies' villains—Ponyo's father, the Witch of the Waste in Howl's Moving Castle—are rendered harmless, revealed to be kind, actually, or to have sincere motivations that don't allow them to fit neatly into the category of villain.
This is a deeply empathetic, generous and some might say optimistic way of viewing the world. But I am coming to think it’s realist more than anything.
I think we (using a generalizing “we” to gesture toward something like culture or society) like to pick out enemies because it makes life easier, in a lot of ways.
It is easier to hate a person than it is to hate a system. It is easier to fight a person than it is to fight a system. It is easier to think of yourself as the good guy and the other person as the bad guy, than it is to consider how good and bad can exist in the same person.
This reminds me of a recent diversity & inclusion training we had at my job (no, wait, I have insights, I promise!). The facilitator said that we all have so many identities within us, or identity markers seen by others, and there are many identities that are subordinated and many that are dominant (or in other words, marginalized and privileged).
And all of us are a mix of marginalized and privileged. For example, in my case: woman (marginalized), middle-upper class (privileged), educated (privileged), East Asian (marginalized/privileged), able-bodied (privileged).
As the facilitator told us, there are very few people who have entirely marginalized or entirely privileged identities. Most of us are amalgamations of privileged and marginalized, and even that can change depending on the context.
Not to say that one is good and one is evil, but this conversation about having both marginalized and privileged identities reminds me of conversations about good and evil.
One of the motifs in Miyazaki’s films that explore this theme is aircraft. As Quality Culture’s essay explains, the filmmaker has been fascinated with airplanes all his life. You can see that throughout his films, from the titular character in Porco Rosso sailing through the air in his single-seater, to the airships in Castle in the Sky and Kiki’s Delivery Service, to the glider that Nausicaa travels by. (I actually didn’t realize this was such a strong motif until I watched this video essay.)
The films are full of stunning aerial shots by broom, by airbus, by fighter plane, by unidentified flying ship, by glider—and it all culminates in The Wind Rises, a film about an inventor whose planes were used as weapons in World War II.
Miyazaki himself loves these planes, as a both art and a technology, for what they can do and what they allow humans to do. But alongside that love resides a lot of guilt and horror, as well. His father was a manager of a company that made war planes during World War II, allowing his family to live in comfort while others struggled in the aftermath. Miyazaki knows intimately the dark side of these machines. That they are both inventions of great beauty and great destruction. Miyazaki's films create worlds that allow them to be both.
I once read a piece by Steve Alpert, the head of Studio Ghibli’s international division, about the journey to creating the English dub and release for Princess Mononoke, another Miyazaki film. The movie tells the story of a cursed prince who finds himself in the middle of a conflict between the spirits of a forest and nearby villagers who want to mine it.
The producers at the film’s American publisher were frustrated by the story, which they wanted to “adapt” for American audiences. Miyazaki refuses to make a villain out of Lady Eboshi, leader of the villagers. She has taken in lepers and sex workers—she is trying to create a safe haven after society has rejected them.
Neil Gaiman, who was hired to write the English script, put it this way. "Miyazaki created a story where there are no bad guys, just consequences."
Wow. What a line.
This comes back to the way that Miyazaki portrays nature. In an interview at UC Berkley, he says of the waves that flood Sosuke's town in Ponyo that we shouldn't portray natural disasters as only bad. The tsunami is not bad. It simply has consequences, which are good for some and bad for others.
Sometimes, what we’ve coined as disasters are essential parts of an ecosystem. Upon hearing Miyazaki talk about this, I immediately thought of the conifers in the American West that have evolved so their seeds need wildfire to germinate and spread. Their pinecones are glued shut with resin, and only after a fire roars through the forest, melting the resin, can the cones open up and release their seeds.
And perhaps, I think, it does no good to moralize natural disasters when they've been happening for countless millennia before humans even created towns and cities.
This isn’t to minimize the tragedies that have arisen out of natural disasters. Rather, when we start thinking of nature as malicious, as out to get us, as something we can fight against, we start doing things that are maybe not good. Like the levies built in New Orleans. As I’ve written about before, by way of Elizabeth Kolbert’s book Under A White Sky, the levies will protect the city for a few years, beating back storm surges—but inevitably, they will make the city sink faster and faster with rising sea waters.
This hubris, this need to dominate nature, to punch back at that which has no designs except survival, except contributing in its own way to its web of life and lives, is what got us into so many messes in the first place.
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I don't have any exacting thesis about all this, or some swelling crescendo of a conclusion. Just that the world is more complex and varied, terrifying and charming, confusing and sublime than I think we usually acknowledge. And it's not only nice, it's essential to be reminded of that. Thank you, Hayao Miyazaki.
And thank you for reading, catch you soon,
—mia xx