Teenage Wildlife: Princess Mononoke and Hayao Miyazaki's Theory of The

McCarthy, Helen. "Teenage Wildlife: Princess Mononoke and Hayao Miyazaki’s Theory of the Feminine." Princess Mononoke: Understanding Studio Ghibli’s Monster Princess. By Rayna Denison. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. 97–114. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 25 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501329753.ch-005>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 25 September 2021, 00:31 UTC. Copyright © Rayna Denison 2018. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 97 Chapter 5 T EENAGE WILDLIFE: PRINCESS MONONOKE AND HAYAO MIYAZAKI’S THEORY OF THE FEMININE Helen McCarthy Hayao Miyazaki’s1 fi lm Mononokehime ( Princess Mononoke ) was released in 1997. Its release brought to an end one of the most productive and creatively fulfi lling cycles in the history of animation. From the time he embarked on the creation of his manga Kaze no tani no Naushika ( Nausica ä of the Valley of Winds ) in 1983, Miyazaki had been laying the groundwork to create a protagonist who could fi ght evil without demonizing its proponents (for more on Princess Mononoke’s antagonist, see Chapter 6 ). He wanted to do this to open up the story and give it more possibilities, to ensure that the leading character would linger in the minds of the audience as someone who could cope with whatever life had in store. Promoting the movie in 1984 he told Young magazine ‘Nausica ä is not a protagonist who defeats an opponent, but a protagonist who understands, or accepts. She is someone who lives in a diff erent dimension. Th at kind of character should be female rather than male.’ 2 In an interview with Ry ū Murakami several years later, Miyazaki said, ‘If it’s a story like, “Everything will be fi ne once we defeat him,” it’s better to have a male as a lead. But, if we try to make an adventure story with a male lead, we have no choice other than doing Indiana Jones. With a Nazi, or someone else who is a villain.’ 3 Th is is an interesting viewpoint from a man who had experienced war as a small child and had grown up in a country in the process of being invaded, culturally as well as physically, by the society that would go on to create Indiana Jones. Th e young Osamu Tezuka observed the American invasion of Japan in his fi rst published manga, Maa- chan no nikkichou ( Maa- chan’s Diary ) in 1946. Th e 5- year- old protagonist’s view of the invaders was that they were infi nitely cooler and more intriguing than his Japanese father. Miyazaki, who turned 5 years old in the year of Tezuka’s debut, seems to have taken away a diff erent impres- sion, one that Tezuka also articulated in later manga such as MW (1976– 78), where the American military colonists are sometimes depicted as bombastic, 99781501329760_pi-220.indd781501329760_pi-220.indd 9977 111/1/20171/1/2017 44:21:07:21:07 PPMM 98 98 Helen McCarthy arrogant villains. Miyazaki uses the term Nazi as shorthand for a villain, much as it is used in the Indiana Jones fi lms, where the hero makes two clearly equiv- alent statements: that he hates snakes, and that he hates Nazis. In Miyazaki’s eyes, dehumanizing the villain is an inevitable consequence of idolizing the male hero, and of identifying confl icts as best resolved by defeat rather than negotiation. Miyazaki fi rst set out to make audiences accept the possibility, then the pri- macy, of the young female hero – a girl as capable in action and intellect as any male, but with the ability to embrace and promote reconciliation and coexis- tence. Having created a market for a diff erent kind of heroine, he could map her qualities onto a hero no longer forced to wear a white hat or shoot without asking questions. Movie by movie, he forged his sacrifi cial warrior- prince – Ashitaka – from a succession of glorious girls, conditioning his audiences to accept tolerance, openness and willingness to live and let live in a heroic male by demonstrating how these qualities did not hamper heroism in a female. But throughout the process he did not waver from his starting point – that women inhabit a diff erent dimension. Princess Mononoke can be summarized in many ways – as Tarzan starring Jane, as boy meets girl with a twist, as the clash of rural life and industrializa- tion, or as a new riff on the mediaeval story that Miyazaki loved, the tale of a clever princess who loved insects.4 Th is princess would not fuss over fashion, or follow the extreme makeup codes of Heian Japan. Instead, she wandered the fi elds studying and marvelling at the insect world. Our age reads this ancient fable as a story of a young girl refusing to let her individuality be compromised by the fashions of her day.5 For Miyazaki, the boy from a well- to- do middle- class home educated at an elite university, the rebellion at the heart of the story must have seemed like pure and heroic self- determination. Th e era for which it was written, however, may have seen the tale as a satire on those who are fashionably eccentric, who deliberately break the social norms, or even as a cautionary tale suggesting that those who stray too far outside their society’s boundaries may lose the chance of love and acceptance inside them. I argue in this chapter that Miyazaki’s women and girls are all wonderfully observed creations – alive, convincing, sometimes enchanting and sometimes repellent; but they are all viewed through the director’s masculine lens and their utility is determined from an entirely masculine perspective. Several Japanese and foreign DVD releases of Nausicaa include a featurette entitled ‘Th e Birth of Studio Ghibli’ in which Toshio Suzuki, Miyazaki’s producer, fi xer and friend for over 30 years, says, ‘ Miyazaki is a feminist, actually. He has this conviction that to be successful, companies have to make it possible for their female employees to succeed too. You can see this attitude in Princess Mononoke . All [the] characters working the bellows in the iron works are women. Th en there’s Porco Rosso . Porco’s plane is rebuilt entirely by women.’ But, this view of feminism is at one and the same time profoundly patriarchal and profoundly socialist. Its 99781501329760_pi-220.indd781501329760_pi-220.indd 9988 111/1/20171/1/2017 44:21:07:21:07 PPMM 99 Teenage Wildlife 99 women succeed in, and on the terms of, a world defi ned, designed and man- aged by men. It is undoubtedly better for the women of the Tataraba iron works in Princess Mononoke to be paid a fair wage than to be sex slaves; but is it better for them to be cogs in the industrial machine than to live a more hazardous but more self- determined life like San? Miyazaki obviously thinks so; he never made another female character like her. At the high point of a career spent creating and taming his heroines, using them as the matrix from which he could forge his perfect hero, Miyazaki chose to mate that hero with an untameable nature spirit. Th en, rather than going on to experiment even further with this original and daring character, he suggested the incompatibility of any such relationship with male self- determination and dignity in his 2008 movie Gake no ue no Ponyo ( Ponyo ). San is not only the culmination of a line of characters that transformed the animation world’s view of the heroine’s function, but also a truly revolutionary character type. In her absolute rejection of conventional life, even for the sake of love, she is the only truly free and independent protagonist in the Miyazaki canon, and one of far too few in the whole of fi lm. San does not fi t in. She does not want to and she does not try to. In Japan, where the nail that sticks up must be hammered down ( deru kugi wa utateru ), and in the patriarchal socialism of the Miyazaki movie, this is revolutionary. Miyazaki’s female characters are creatures of magic and power,6 irresistible, but dangerous unless that power is tamed and contained within defi ned social structures. Men who love such creatures can only safely do so if the women are willing to give up their magic and accept conformity as the price of love. Women who start life with such powers in Miyazaki’s fi lms must surrender them or risk exclusion from the conventional happiness of love, marriage and social acceptance. Only in old age can women reclaim some of their abandoned powers, and even then the risks are extreme. Miyazaki also sets San in a context that brings her into contact, and confl ict, with females as remarkable as she is – the wolf goddess Moro and the revolutionary Eboshi. Both are important aspects of the Miyazaki female arche- type, and Eboshi appears closest of all his female characters to the political sympathies and confl icted relationship with ecology expressed in his work, in interviews, in his published conversations with novelist Ernest Callenbach and his association with Welsh- Japanese environmentalist CW Nicol,7 whose novel Tree he illustrated. 8 In August 1993, Miyazaki told Anim ē ju ( Animage ) magazine that ‘there has never been a work of art which didn’t somehow refl ect its own time.

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