Prologue with Two Tubs—One for Rinsing and the Other for Soaking
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p r o lo g u e In Search of Miyazakiworld On a gray Sunday in February 2014 I drag a little suitcase through rolling woodland paths outside Nagoya, Japan, to visit the sole remnant of the 2005 Aichi World Expo. The twenty-first century’s first world’s fair (121 nations ex- hibiting on the theme of humans’ harmonious coexistence with nature) drew twenty-two million visitors over six months, but its greatest attraction, and the goal of my journey, wasn’t a 3D ride or a woolly mammoth. Rather, it was a replica of a modest country house from the 1988 Japanese animated film My Neighbor Totoro (Tonari no Totoro). The house is known as Satsuki and Mei’s House in honor of the two young sisters who live in the house with their father while their mother lies ill in a nearby sanatorium. Although the girls do encounter natural wonders around their woodland home, it is less their coexistence with nature that draws so many visitors than their discov- ery of a large, furry magical being who can fly with the aid of a spinning top and an umbrella, make plants grow exponentially fast, and find lost children. This creature, whom the sisters call Totoro, becomes a quiet, benign presence lending enchantment to their lives. And, over the years, the lives of tens of millions of animated-film view- ers. Totoro, Mei, and Satsuki are characters in one of eleven feature-length animated films directed by Hayao Miyazaki since 1978. Miyazaki officially re- tired in 2013, at the age of seventy-two, but came out of retirement in 2017 and is now superintending the development of another film, to be released ix perhaps as early as 2020. Over his tenure, anime, especially Miyazaki’s work, has gone from drawing a chiefly Japanese audience to being truly inter- national, touching the lives of so many that, twelve years after the Expo’s conclusion, the local prefectural authorities keep Satsuki and Mei’s House open. It remains eerily vacant except for prearranged thirty-minute tours, such as the one I’m joining. I’m quite conscious of a strange admixture of the real and the unreal as I plod on through occasional rain showers in the largely abandoned fairgrounds. At the fair’s entrance there was nowhere to check my suitcase (full of books and articles in Japanese on Miyazaki), so it gets heavier and heavier until I am finally able to leave it behind an umbrella stand at the house. What inspires me to visit Satsuki and Mei’s House is what has inspired millions in Japan and around the globe, a love of what I call Miyazakiworld, the immersive animated realm that varies delightfully from film to film but is always marked by the director’s unique imagination. At my home uni- versity in America I teach a seminar on Miyazaki in which I explain to my students that Miyazaki is an auteur—a director whose personal and artis- tic vision is so strong that each film consistently contains trademarks that make his or her entire work a distinctive cinematic experience. Even some of my students are skeptical at first: “Can an animation director really be an auteur?” they ask. Yes, he can, as I hope to show in this book. If anything, animators have even more control over their aesthetic product than live-action directors do, and Miyazaki is someone whose detailed artistry extends to the way his characters’ hair blows in the wind. This controlling master vision enables Sat- suki and Mei’s House to be a perfect replica of the one in the movie, based, as it is, on Miyazaki’s painstakingly realized drawings. As the tour moves slowly through the house, everyone seems united by a pleasing familiarity. We have all “been here before”: in the study of the sisters’ archaeologist father, packed with books and artifacts pertaining to Japan’s prehistoric Jomon period; in the fully equipped 1950s-style kitchen, where ten-year-old Satsuki proudly makes bento boxes for her father and little sister; in the old- fashioned bath x Prologue with two tubs—one for rinsing and the other for soaking. It is while taking a family bath that the girls learn a valuable lesson from their father—to laugh and be resilient in the face of darkness—and that almost mystical combi- nation of courage, acceptance, and joy is the emotional core of Miyazaki- world. While Miyazaki’s vision has darkened over time, Miyazakiworld is still a realm where hope triumphs over despair. i f i r st encountered Miyazaki’s work more than a quarter-century ago, when I saw Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Kaze no tani no Naushika, 1984). A postapocalyptic science fiction fantasy, the film intrigued me partly because of its surreal beauty and its surprisingly nuanced vision of tech- nology, humanity, and nature. Most compelling, however, was the moral complexity of its young female protagonist, Nausicaä, and her interactions with the denizens of her postapocalyptic Earth—human, animal, insect, and plant. They not only showed a thinking person with a subtle, compassionate mind but also evoked a world that was far more multifaceted than a conven- tional science fiction movie’s—or most movies’, for that matter. Nausicaä, named for Miyazaki’s favorite heroine in The Odyssey, is Miyazaki’s alter ego: passionate, angry, judgmental, sentimental, and ul- timately apocalyptic, as evidenced in the startling ending of the manga version of Nausicaä, a thousand-page epic comic that Miyazaki completed twelve years after the movie. It is hardly surprising that Miyazaki, born into war-torn Japan, should be sensitive to technological and environmental ca- tastrophe, and there is a side of him that imagines world-ending events as cathartic, even purgative. “I want to see the sea rise over Tokyo and the NTV tower become like an island,” Miyazaki once told an American journalist. “Money and desire—all that is going to collapse and wild green grasses are going to take over.”1 Apocalyptic imagery is a staple of much of Japanese animation, but in Miyazakiworld it is often females who lead us through the endtimes. At a time when female characters still tended to be sidekicks or romantic in- terests in Japanese cinema, Miyazaki conjured up a battery of unforgettable Prologue xi young women: Lana, Nausicaä, Sheeta, San, Chihiro, Ponyo. Often they are associated with nature and the supernatural, expressing the animistic vision that underlies much of Miyazakiworld. And these are only the preteen or teenage heroines: Miyazaki is also one of the few directors in the world who consistently created roles for older women: Dola, Eboshi, Gina, Sophie, and Toki. Children also constitute a major focus. The director has stated, “The child is proof that the world is beautiful,” and in Miyazakiworld, childhood becomes a utopian site, reminding us of what we could be if somehow that innocence were recaptured.2 Miyazaki’s ability to create an entire story through a child’s viewpoint in a film such as Totoro is a revelation. Remark- ably, few animated films (including those of Disney and Pixar), actually have child protagonists. Totoro was the second movie I saw by Miyazaki, and Mei and Satsuki, in their believable brightness and brattiness and in their open- ness to the wonder of both nature and magic, delighted and moved me, ush- ering me back to my own childhood. Nostalgia—not only for childhood but in themes of yearning for a lost past, both national and global—also plays out across Miyazaki’s films. We discover a ruined Roman city in the director’s first feature,Castle of Cagliostro (Rupan Sansei Kariostro no Shiro, 1979), while his most recent film, The Wind Rises (Kaze tachinu, 2013), ushers us into an exquisitely detailed re-creation of prewar Japan in which technology itself becomes an object of yearning. With nostalgia come darker themes of exile, loss, and trauma that the direc- tor also explores. Although they may yearn for home, not all his characters are able to find it, and sometimes home itself is threatened or even annihi- lated. But Miyazakiworld adds up to more than apocalypse, empowered fe- male protagonists, believable children, and elegiac or utopian visions. His in- terweaving of all these elements in an emotionally resonant tapestry makes him an exceptional world builder. Miyazaki deserves his place among the great fantasy world builders, from Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne in the nine- teenth century to Tolkien, Rowling, and Disney in the twentieth. Using such xii Prologue animation hallmarks as metamorphosis and surreal or dreamlike imagery, Miyazaki creates imagined empires, sometimes uplifting, sometimes heart- breaking, realms we can walk into, inhabit, and mourn when we have to leave. From scenes of flight through translucent blue skies or under water glimpses of a surreal sea domain to a far future toxic jungle or a fourteenth-century forest inhabited by gods, his detailed fantasy creations offer alternatives to what he deems an increasingly oppressive reality. Miyazaki uses his skills as artist and animator to encompass intimate moments and create soaring epics. “We are returning to you something you have forgotten”: With this tagline Totoro recaptures childhood innocence through precisely observed instances of wonder and delight. In a three- second sequence in Totoro an insect climbs up a plant on a spring afternoon, creating a “pillow shot,” tiny visual interludes that anime critic Dani Caval- laro notes “invest [the moment] with a sense of thoughtfulness.”3 On the epic front Miyazaki’s blockbuster hit Princess Mononoke (Mono- nokehime, 1997) tackled history, humanity, and environmental apocalypse in a work running longer than two hours and built from tens of thousands of drawings that Miyazaki had done by hand.