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Seeing with Eyes Unclouded Representations of Creativity in the Works of Hayao Miyazaki

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Seeing with Eyes Unclouded Representations of Creativity in the Works of Hayao Miyazaki Seeing With Eyes Unclouded Representations of Creativity in the Works of Hayao Miyazaki By Jonathan R. Lack Examination Committee Melinda Barlow Advisor and Honors Council Representative Film Studies Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz Film Studies Paul Strom Honors Date of Defense: November 3 rd , 2014 Table of Contents Abstract 3 Prologue: To See With Eyes Unclouded Charting a path of creative reflexivity in the films of Hayao Miyazaki 5 Endnotes 22 Chapter One: Enveloped in Tenderness Kiki’s Delivery Service and the journey towards a creative spirit 26 Endnotes 48 Chapter Two: Country Roads Whisper of the Heart and the search for home 52 Endnotes 79 Chapter Three: Vapor Trail Rectifying the kingdom of cursed dreams in The Wind Rises 84 Endnotes 122 Epilogue: Always With Me Applying the lessons of Hayao Miyazaki’s creative reflection 133 Bibliography 142 Abstract Though Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki is best known for creating imaginative fantasy and adventure features, he has also, on multiple occasions, directly engaged with realistic, contemporary, or historical settings in films that examine everyday human issues and present reflexive musings on the nature of creativity. This study explores how Miyazaki represents creativity in relation to fundamental aspects of the human condition through close analysis of three of these films: Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), Whisper of the Heart (1995, Dir. Yoshifumi Kondo, written by Hayao Miyazaki), and The Wind Rises (2013). Each of these works explores creativity as a dynamic and multifaceted force, and gives way to larger discussions of how individuals find, define, and maintain their personal voice or talent in a world that is complex, demanding, and imbalanced. This study examines how Miyazaki intertwines creative or artistic expression with the trials of adolescence and the harsh realities of adulthood, while also focusing on the political, social, and philosophical implications of how these works represent the creative spirit. Several thematic through-lines are traced between the three films, starting with Kiki’s Delivery Service, which, while not focused on creativity directly, nevertheless draws connections between talent, identity, and self-sufficiency to explore how our passions define and empower us. Whisper of the Heart then applies these themes to contemporary Japanese society, and tells its story about an individual finding her voice and place in the world through the specific lens of artistic expression. The Wind Rises, finally, explores these ideas on a much more intense and challenging historical scale, set in the years leading up to World War II and telling a fictionalized narrative about the life of Jiro Horikoshi, designer of Japan’s deadly Zero Fighter. Exploring creativity and compromise in the real world, the film is also about the dualities of life and art, 3 L a c k | 4 and ties together the themes of these three works – as well as the major recurring ideas of all Miyazaki’s films – in a highly emotional conclusion centered around the beauty and melancholy of transience. Taken together, these three films not only illustrate an insightful and inspiring theory of creativity, but illuminate the overall arc of Miyazaki’s career, with each work signifying a major evolution in his thematic development, and, in the case of Kiki and Whisper, directly anticipating his most successful and acclaimed films. Prologue: To See With Eyes Unclouded Charting a path of creative reflexivity in the films of Hayao Miyazaki As for the ‘power of fantasy,’ that was my own personal experience. When I was younger I was filled with anxiety and lacked self-confidence, and was no good at expressing myself. The few times I truly felt free were times when, for example, I read [Osamu] Tezuka’s manga, or read books that I had borrowed from someone. Nowadays people say you should face reality and not flinch from it, but I think the power of fantasy is that it provides a space for people to become heroes, even if they lack confidence when trying to face reality. It doesn’t have to be just manga or animation, it could even be myths and stories from much longer ago; I just think that humans have always brought with them stories that make them feel they can cope somehow, that things will turn out all right. Hayao Miyazaki, 2001 1 In Hayao Miyazaki’s 1997 period epic Princess Mononoke, the protagonist, Prince Ashitaka, is beset by a mysterious affliction after defending his village from an accursed boar god. The boar, which the village elder reveals had been wounded by a great iron bullet, was infected with the hatred of man, the poison of industrial society turning the once-majestic beast into a rampaging, vengeful monster. In killing the boar, both to protect his people and put the fallen god to rest, Ashitaka has inherited this hatred, its toxicity subsumed into his flesh as a powerful and deadly curse just as it was for the boar. The elder, in revealing the path Ashitaka must now walk, tells 5 L a c k | 6 him that there is no way to change his fate – only the opportunity to rise and meet it. Striving to find and rectify the source of this hatred is the only way to abate the curse’s spread. “Calamity has befallen the land of the west,” she explains to him. “Journey there, and see with eyes unclouded. There might be a way to lift the curse.”2 It might as well be the mission statement for Miyazaki’s entire career. There are countless qualities that contribute to Hayao Miyazaki’s status as the world’s greatest living animator, and will continue to bear weight when history remembers him as cinema’s most significant and accomplished director of animated feature films: His intoxicatingly beautiful art style and meticulous attention to detail, with breathtaking, painterly backgrounds and rich, dynamic uses of color (no animator has ever incorporated the unique aesthetics of watercolor so completely into their work); his vibrant and relatable characters, three-dimensional human figures of each gender and all ages who are designed with striking, oftentimes iconic simple power, and animated with rigorous attention to both personality and physicality; and, of course, the incredible worlds these characters populate, realms of both fantasy and reality brought brilliantly to life with what friend and colleague Isao Takahata describes as “an imagination so vivid it verges on a hallucinatory vision.” 3 Yet the talent that matters most in the creation of Miyazaki’s masterful motion pictures is the one he asks of Prince Ashitaka: the ability ‘to see with eyes unclouded,’ to observe and comment upon our world and its many faults and triumphs with calm clarity and reason. To cut through the noise and chaos of human existence – and, indeed, the empty spectacle and overwrought action of modern commercial cinema – to probe at the emotional and intellectual core of what makes us fallible, what inspires our goodness, and what challenges, amazes, and inspires us in the time we walk this earth. In the realms of live-action and animated filmmaking L a c k | 7 alike, Miyazaki is one of the most accomplished purveyors of the human condition, a natural successor to the great line of Japanese directors who also dedicated their careers to exploring universal human issues in culturally or narratively specific stories and settings, and whose work resonates around the world today as a result: Yasujiro Ozu, Mikio Naruse, Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Masaki Kobayashi, and many more. Miyazaki differs greatly from these filmmakers in many ways, just as each of them stands out distinctly from one another (in fact, with his calm editing and frequently still, visually dense compositions, Miyazaki’s prime stylistic differentiation from these directors may not be his use of the animated medium so much as his employment of fantasy). But he belongs in the lineup just the same, his passionate yet level- headed explorations of the senselessness of war, the processes of grief, the nature of maturity, the power of human relationships, the structure and imperfections of human societies, and, especially, mankind’s connection to ecology – few directors have ever given such intense focus to how humans impact and are shaped by the environment – making his films deeply and universally resonant with rich intellectual and emotional power, a quality shared by the great masterworks of Japan’s cinematic golden age. This capacity to tell stories and craft art ‘with eyes unclouded’ is therefore key to Miyazaki’s creative genius. It is also, not coincidentally, a core tenant of his own conception of creative thinking, a topic that has come to the forefront of his work on three separate films, and which always represents a shift or evolution in his perception of human nature and other thematic issues. Differing from Miyazaki’s period epics like Princess Mononoke, fantasy narratives like Spirited Away (2001), or adventure films like Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986), these three films – namely, Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), Whisper of the Heart (1995; Dir. Yoshifumi Kondo; written and storyboarded by Miyazaki), and The Wind Rises (2013) 4 – feature L a c k | 8 realistic settings and grounded human stories; fantasy is not erased entirely, but it is either minimized, as in the case of Kiki’s Delivery Service, or relocated to internal dimensions, as in Whisper of the Heart and The Wind Rises, a function of the protagonist’s psyche and imagination rather than an exterior reality. These films are of a piece with Miyazaki’s other work stylistically (save, in some ways, Whisper, which features a slightly different aesthetic due to Kondo’s direction) and thematically, exploring the same broad human issues that color the whole of his filmography.
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