My Neighbor Hayao: Miyazaki’s Cross-Demographic Cinema

Susan J. Napier, Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation, (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 4.
Napier, 6-7.
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, (New York: Penguin Group, 1985), 10.
Napier, 7.
Dani Cavallaro, Anime Intersections: Tradition and Innovation in Theme and Technique, (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2007), 156.
Lenburg, 79.
Lenburg, 51.
Lenburg, 82.
Lenburg, 100.
Timothy Iles, The Crisis of Identity in Contemporary Japanese Film: Personal, Cultural, National, (Boston: Brill, 2008), 189.
IMDb, "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984)," IMDb, 2013, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087544/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1.
Iles, 190; Napier, xi; Grady Hendrix, "From Nuclear Nightmare to Networked Nirvana: Futuristic Utopianism in Japanese SF Films of the 2000s," World Literature Today 84 (2010), 56.
Napier, xvi.
IMDb, "Spirited Away (2001)," IMDb, 2013, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0245429/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1.
Lenburg, 82.
Lenburg, 82.
Alastair Phillips and Julian Stringer, eds., Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts, (New York: Routledge, 2007), 258.
Iles, 194.
IMDb, "My Neighbor Totoro (1988)," IMDb, 2013, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096283/?ref_=fn_al_ch_1a.
Lenburg, 63.
Brian Eggert, "Deep Focus Review - Collections - Hayao Miyazaki Retrsopective," Deep Focus Review, March 3, 2010, http://www.deepfocusreview.com/articles/miyazakiretrospective.asp.
Lenburg, 63.
Lenburg, 43.
Lenburg, 79.
Montserrat Rifa-Valls, "Postwar Princesses, Young Apprentices, and a Little Fish-Girl: Reading Subjectivities in Hayao Miyazaki's Tales of Fantasy," Visual Arts Research 37 (2011): 95-96.
IMDb, "Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)," IMDb, 2013, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097814/?ref_=nv_sr_1.
Lenburg, 52.
Lenburg, 69.
Iles, 176; Mark Schilling, "An audience with Miyazaki, Japan's animation king," The Japan Times, December 4, 2008, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2008/12/04/culture/an-audience-with-miyazaki-japans-animation-king/#.Uoi8Z_lQFc4.
Lenburg, 69.





My Neighbor Hayao: Miyazaki's Cross-Demographic Cinema

Many American children and adults are very familiar with movies such as 2001's Spirited Away and 2004's Howl's Moving Castle. These and many more films of Japanese animator Miyazaki Hayao have seen global success, though they are very much different than what contemporary Western studios like Disney and Pixar have been producing. While it may be baffling to some, I have identified three reasons why Miyazaki's unique style of animated film has had such lasting appeal with people of all ages and cultural backgrounds. First, I will analyze how the technical preparation of Miyazaki's films helps to create rich, engaging worlds, by putting it in the context of the Japanese anime style, describing Miyazaki's research during the film process, and highlighting the unique style of his films. Next, I will demonstrate how the idealism and honesty of his work appeals to all generations. It does this through its contrast with typical Japanese animation of the period, by including accurate Asian folklore and mythology, and by showing a possible ideal world community. Finally, I will explain how Miyazaki's films went against the grain of other modern animation through Miyazaki creating complex characters, emphasizing feminist themes, and emphasizing environmental themes. By linking these three large ideas together, it will be easy to see why Miyazaki Hayao's films are so important to Japanese cinema, world cinema, animation, and people all across the world from Osaka to Ontario.
First, let's examine what defines the Japanese anime style. While in the Western world, animated films/television programs are usually viewed as being childish or immature, in Japan anime is a very popular cultural form that draws from many classical high cultural traditions, such as Kabuki theatre and the woodblock print. In addition to these "high culture" inspirations, anime also reflects modern day customs, technologies, and concerns in complex ways that Western animation rarely does. According to Susan J. Napier, "anime works include everything that Western audiences are accustomed to seeing in live-action films: romance, comedy, tragedy, adventure, even psychological probing of a kind seldom attempted in recent mass-culture Western film or television." The link between anime and the theories of Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan is especially obvious when you consider how different Japanese and Western animation styles and messages are. Marshall McLuhan is noted for his phrase "the medium is the message," and Postman explains that what this really means is that "each medium… makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility." Here we see that the medium of Japanese anime is unique in its ability to portray different themes and cultural ideas, and Miyazaki certainly finds ways to stand out amongst all other animators.
One reason that Miyazaki is able to create films that absolutely capture the hearts and minds of audiencemembers is how he prepares to use the anime medium. Japan is more of what is called a "pictocentric" society than places in the West, meaning that its culture relies more heavily on visual imagery, as seen in the written form of the Japanese language. This emphasis on visual imagery applies to the medium of anime as well. In order to create precisely the imagery that he desires for his films, Miyazaki will often make extensive trips to locations around the world researching the culture and architecture of a particular place. For example, Miyazaki's 1986 film Laputa: Castle in the Sky has many visual, cultural, and political references to events Miyazaki experienced during a trip through the country of Wales. He observes the people and artifacts around him, and in fact, the now-classic 2001 film Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi) was inspired by his desire to create more compelling stories than those he found in magazines left behind by the daughters of his friends. For Kiki's Delivery Service, released in 1989, Miyazaki traveled with a team around Sweden to capture the people, architecture, and culture for inspiration.
After seeing Spirited Away for the first time, one mother of four commented that "the images were so beautiful. They are dreamlike, yet convincing. If you see trees, you can almost feel their presence." Miyazaki is frequently praised for his utter dedication to the quality of the animation he creates, which has become a trademark style. In a time when much animation was switching from traditional hand-drawn art to computer-generated art, Miyazaki stands out because he deliberately chose to remain with the "outdated" way of creating cartoons. In the film Ponyo, Miyazaki drew each image of the sea and waves himself, resulting in 170,000 separate images created – all because he wanted to ensure that the vision of the film was precisely crafted. The ideal worlds created in Miyazaki's films are "composed of pristine nature and much beauty, in which the viewer can imagine his or her own personal growth and completion. Miyazaki and his team of animators create these representations of ideal spaces as modern fairytales, as fantasies which aspire to a universal accessibility." Miyazaki's 1984 film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, in which "warrior/pacifist Princess Nausicaä desperately struggles to prevent two warring nations from destroying themselves and their dying planet," showcases these principles, and established many of the recurring themes that would make later Miyazaki films so important and memorable: morally ambiguous characters, a concern for ecology and the environment, and others to be discussed later.
As previously stated, the context of other animations that Miyazaki was entering into was very different than the work he hoped to create. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Japanese popular film was very urban and featured genres like the stereotypical big robot "mecha" genre and the massive output of Japanese horror films. Literature scholar Tomiko Yoda stated that "Japan in the 1990's has come to be widely perceived as the site of an imploding national economic system, a disintegrating social order, and the virtual absence of ethical and competent leadership." This is the backdrop against which Miyazaki's empowering films emerged, showing a stark contrast to the negativity and problems he saw emerging in modern Japanese society, where the ancient traditions and the newest technologies seemed to be at complete odds with one another.
One way that Miyazaki approached the problem of the seeming loss of Japanese culture was to fill his movies with accurate, deep Asian folklore and mythology, such as in 2001's Spirited Away, with a synopsis that reads "[i]n the middle of her family's move to the suburbs, a sullen 10-year-old girl wanders into a world ruled by gods, witches, and monsters; where humans are changed into animals; and a bathhouse for these creatures." Lenberg Brian perfectly captures the cross-generational appeal to pride and nostalgia that this creates, stating that "[a]udiences leaving Japanese theaters enjoyed the fact that the movie was rich in Japanese culture and mythology. As one patron, 15-year-old Emio Omata, told a reporter after a screening, 'Sen to Chihiro [Spirited Away] is so Japanese-ish. The music, the culture, the background are closer to Japanese people. My grandparents love Hayao's anime. They ask me if I have seen the latest one yet.'" Lenburg continues to explain that Spirited Away captured the setting of old Japan so authentically that many adults in attendance at the film cried when they saw the scenery that was little more than a memory to them, and for children, it is a complete fantasy world. In this way, Miyazaki films like Spirited Away can deeply emotionally connect with not only Japanese people of all ages, but international audiences can experience the deeply fantastical setting of old Japanese elements.
Miyazaki also draws heavily from the Shinto religion of Japan, the original animistic Japanese religion where every tree or waterfall or boulder could be a deity. His 1988 film My Neighbor Totoro (Tonari no Totoro) is filled with references to Shintoism, representing the "viability of a notion of community as something encompassing, nurturing, and protected by the natural/spirit world nexus." The plot of Totoro revolves around two girls who move to the country to be near their sick mother, and during the course of their stay they have adventures with the nearby forest spirits. This blend of old principles of spirituality and new principles of modern, young urban Japanese living is what makes Miyazaki's films so compelling to people of all classes, genders and identities. Miyazaki once stated in an interview that he doesn't "want to depict the world as someplace not worth living in." His films create a possible ideal world community – the type of world that he wants to live in. Part of what sets his brand of animation apart from other big names is that he is unafraid to create children's films that tackle complex issues; "he communicates to his viewers with a tone of respect and maturity. He never talks down. He tells stories that, delightfully, resonate for everyone. His appeal is universal."
By contrast, Miyazaki has a very negative view of other contemporary animation, telling an interviewer that Disney films lacked "decency" for straying from their original "pure" stories and that Beauty and the Beast reminded him of a psychiatric patient and his counselor. Part of the respect that Miyazaki affords his viewers is that he believes that they are intelligent enough to wrestle with the complexities of human nature in all of its forms. There is never any clearcut good nor evil in his films, simply "characters reacting to the horrific events around them." His films are entertaining and heartwarming, but also reflective of the diversity of human beings.
One particular group he focuses on empowering is young girls, with many differing representations of what it means to be a girl, as opposed to the limited options depicted in other media. To return to the previously stated inspiration for Spirited Away:
The bristly bearded and bushy browed animator conceived the idea after five young girls, daughters of friends of his, had visited him at his cabin in the mountains every summer. After one of their visits, he read some girls' comics they had left behind that seemed to provide nothing but, as a he said, "a certain kind of cheap romance, which is now what
girls that age really dream about."
Following this epiphany, Hayao decided "a more interesting story" was having a 10-year-old girl play the leading role that was more typical of girls that age, someone that 10-year-olds could recognize in themselves. He wanted to show audiences that "people have strengths within them that can be called on in extraordinary circumstances," he said. "That is how I wish my young friends to be, and I think that's how they
hope to be."
Many of Miyazaki's films feature a female protagonist who is intelligent, inquisitive, and most of all human. When Montserrat Rifa-Vallas writes that "[i]n Miyazaki's films, there are multiple subjective positions available for women/girls, who defend causes, do jobs, govern microterritories, and form social communities," he is essentially stating that Miyazaki uncommonly treats young girls as human beings with complex personalities, not just playthings to be written off like in many other media portrayals; rather, he "narrates the learning, motivations, and interests of each age/subjectivity highlighting intergenerational dialogue." With a film like Kiki's Delivery Service, which centers on "[a] young witch, on her mandatory year of independent life, finds fitting into a new community difficult while she supports herself by running an air courier service," Miyazaki deliberately took a cultural icon (the witch), and created a new positive narrative around it, as he "wanted to go beyond the standard coming-of-age themes by focusing on how a girl that age dealt with her creativity and talent and the difficulty every girl her age faces in coming into their own through luck, hard work, or confidence."
Finally, each of Miyazaki's films has a strong underpinning of environmentalism that appeals to today's earth-conscious media consumer. He has stated in an interview that "I've come to the point where I just can't make a movie without addressing the problem of humanity as part of an ecosystem." Given both his frequent use of Shinto beliefs in his work, and the culture he grew up in, it is not hard to understand where this position comes from. The Shinto religion focuses on a sense of harmony: harmony between humans and spirits, harmony between humans and nature, and harmony between humans. Miyazaki has also spoken out against the path Japan took after World War II: "A lot of people now are nostalgic for Japan as it was in the Showa '30s (1955-1965), but it was actually an unhappy period for me," he said. "Why? I was frustrated because nature — the mountains and rivers — was being destroyed in the name of economic progress." In his 1997 film Princess Mononoke, humanity is made to face their destructive nature – Miyazaki "chose Princess Mononoke's ancient mythical setting to underscore his statement about world affairs and the destructive power of greed. 'There can be no happy endings between the rampaging forest gods and humanity,' he said at the time. 'There is still much to live for. Wonderful encounters and beautiful things exist."
The films of Miyazaki Hayao are and will remain popular because they fundamentally connect to the concerns of 21st century people: the desire for positivity, the desire for quality entertainment, the desire for a sense of collective memory and belonging, and the desire for positive role models and causes to stand up for. Though I have only provided a brief sketch of a handful of Miyazaki's repertoire, each of his films has his personal mark on it that will be continuously beloved by audiences of all ages and nationalities. From the way he bridges the gap between tradition and innovation to optimistically envisioning a world as it ought to be rather than how it is, Miyazaki Hayao is celebrated by many as a visionary filmmaker and has carved a place in the history of Japanese animation and world cinema as a whole.



Bibliography

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