‘NEVER A SAVIOR’ — My Miyazaki Weekend
‘NEVER A SAVIOR’ — My Miyazaki Weekend
Spirited away at The Ford
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“Many of my movies have strong female leads — brave, self-sufficient girls that don’t think twice about fighting for what they believe with all their heart. They’ll need a friend or a supporter but never a savior. Any woman is just as capable of being a hero as any man.”—Hayao Miyazaki
Somewhere between Dvorak and Gershwin at the Bowl, I made it to three nights at The Ford, a Hollywood Hills amphitheater surrounded by palm trees. At dusk, the colors of the sky look like a vintage Paper Moon postcard, and despite the heat of hot August nights, as the sun descended, it became sweater weather, and I was in heaven.
The three-night weekend at The Ford was a celebration of Studio Ghibli, and the animated films featured on the giant screen were Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.
If you’re a Hayao Miyazaki fan, as I am, then you’ll understand.
Those of you who have been with Bette Dangerous from the beginning know that I am a devoted cinephile. My expertise is in Hollywood’s Golden Age of Cinema and the French New Wave, with sprinklings of Ingmar Bergman. I consider Alfred Hitchcock, Sergio Leone, Jean-Pierre Melville, François Truffaut, Alain Resnais, Howard Hawks, Bergman to be among the great directors — there are many more.
But I believe Hayao Miyazaki is the greatest director of all time.
And there are many reasons for that, but the first reason is he gives us great women. He gives us the gift of heroic women, warrior goddesses who are real even though they’re animated. They range in age from four to more than 100 years old. He cherishes the young and the old. And even his female ‘villains’ often find redemption.
Mei, from My Neighbor Totoro, is my favorite female character, and she’s four years old. She’s brave and determined and kind, like many Miyazaki heroines.
And maybe I’m so moved by his art because I know some real warrior women in the work that I do, but he gets them right. He shows their complexities and their moments of vulnerability, always fleeting, as they conquer and defeat the evil that surrounds them.
There is a moment in Nausicaä where our heroine lies flat on the bottom of a forest she has discovered, a forest protected by insects where you can breathe without a mask. She is face down crying. When asked why, she responds: “I’m so happy.”
That’s exactly how I felt last week.
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is set 1000 years after industrialization destroyed the world, specifically an apocalyptic war that caused ecocide, creating a toxic jungle filled with giant mutant insects. Nausicaä is a princess who glides effortlessly over the land — a fox squirrel on her shoulder — observing the jungle and the ‘sea of decay’, tasked with saving her people and finding a way for the insects and humans to coexist.
She is brave and compassionate, she is determined and merciful. She respects and honors all living things. Despite being the bravest warrior of all, she is ‘human’ — she cries when she loses her father, she cries when she discovers what the insects are protecting and then takes action, preventing warring humans from further destroying the insects and the land.
For Miyazaki, the struggle between earth and humanity burns eternal.
“I came to the conclusion that I could not create a film without talking about the problems of humanity as part of the ecosystem.”—Hayao Miyazaki
Along with brave and brilliant women who rely on support but ‘never a savior,’ his films address our human failings to properly manage and cherish the earth.
That, too,makes him the greatest director in my opinion. And maybe because it’s personal for me. I got into the fight against fascism because I not only knew what it would mean for my country, but I knew what it would mean for the earth. War is hell on the birds and all living things. And fossil fuel-rich countries breed dictators who do not care if they leave future generations with a scorched earth. Miyazaki understands this.
Princess Mononoke — an apocalyptic, ecocidal, ‘western’ — is named after a human girl raised by wolves protecting the forest against humans consuming its resources. As with every Miyazaki film, there’s magic. There are gods and spirits and fantasy, and this film draws its mystical folklore from 14th century Japan, the era in which it is set.
Mononoke is the most violent of Miyazaki’s films but, in order to wake people up to over-industrialization’s impacts on the environment, he tells us the story through demon gods.
The film opens with a demon god plowing through a village — that two-minute scene took a year and seven months to create.
Although later films embraced computer animation, his early work was all drawn by hand and you only need to watch one of his films to understand the breathtaking magic of his work and the work of the Studio Ghibli animators and his founding partners in Studio Ghibli, Takahata Isao and Suzuki Toshio.
The studio was named after an Italian plane — Miyazaki’s films reveal a lifelong fascination with flying, and in fact, his first drawings as a young boy were of airplanes. Miyazaki’s animation is famous for inventive, steampunk flying machines. His father owned an aviation parts business during World War II, which created a complex struggle within Hayao. He was virulently anti-war, but always maintained a fascination with weapons of war.
I believe a reason his characters are often complex is because he understands the duality of human nature — neither good nor bad, but sometimes both. That understanding enriches his work, particularly in the villains, who often have sympathetic qualities.
In Mononoke, the woman who runs the iron mill could have been a simple villain, but instead it is revealed she rescued her women workers from the sex trade.
By now, I think you’re with me in understanding that Miyazaki’s vision is not like any other.
There are sweet love stories woven throughout his catalog but they generally end like Mononoke, where our princess and our young male hero decide to go their separate ways but plan to meet up in the future.
Never a savior.
The heroine of Spirited Away, Chihiro, endures incredible challenges and sorrow — her parents are turned into pigs early in the film. She meets a magical friend Haku — part boy, part dragon — and they save each other.
Spirited Away is the most magical film I have ever seen. It is the most creative film I have ever seen.
I taught myself to draw with Miyazaki’s color palette. In every garment there are at least two tones to show the depth and shadow.
Miyazaki, who like many directors, was an avowed taskmaster and a workaholic, preventing him from earning any Father of the Year awards. And we owe a serious debt of gratitude to his wife, Akemi Öta, who was also an animator and who gave up her career so Hayao could rise to greatness.
Although he has retired many times only to return to his drawing board and keep making more brilliant films in his magical realism style, it was in his travels in 2006 when he was seeking inspiration that he discovered the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood at the Tate Britain. He was moved by their attention to detail and despite being the GOAT, he felt his own work was shoddy in comparison to an artist like Sir John Everett Millais’ Ophelia.
So in his next film, Ponyo, the explosion of color and minimalism was directly linked to that visit to the Tate.
Call it some kind of madness.
Indeed, you can’t watch Spirited Away without being moved by both brilliance and madness. His iconic characters — the spirit ghost No Face, the boiler room operator Kamaji, who is part spider and a metaphor for Miyazaki himself, and the arachnid-like soot gremlins, or soot balls as they’re called, who appear in multiple films — are some of the most magical creatures to ever appear on screen.
In the worlds he creates, where women are heroes, and our earth must be saved, he never strays from humanity’s hard truths.
In his film Porco Rosso, centered on an Italian World War I ace fighter pilot who has been cursed into an anthropomorphic pig, there is one line that sums up Miyazaki’s body of work.
“I’d rather be a pig than a fascist.”—Porco Rosso
Me too.
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