The Quartet Begins
Books have been written on Miyazaki, on both sides of the Pacific.1 Here we can take only a glance at Miyazaki’s output and that of his main collaborators, paying attention to the lesser-known works and noting their reflections of Japanese culture.
Born January 5, 1941, Hayao Miyazaki could not have become who he is, or created what he has created, without the influence of both his parents. From his father, Katsuji Miyazaki, he got his love of flying and, more specifically, of flying machines. Katsuji Miyazaki was an executive at Miyazaki Airplane, a factory owned by Hayao’s uncle. This company made rudders for fighter planes during World War II, and in his youth Hayao endlessly sketched airplanes. From his intellectual mother, Hayao derived the strong, independent heroines who would become part of the signature of his work.
Because he came of school age during the tumultuous rebuilding years of Occupation Japan, from 1947 to 1952 Miyazaki went to three different grade schools. More importantly, it was during these years that his mother spent two years in the hospital and was in shaky health for seven more years. This facet of his life is most clearly reflected in My Neighbor Totoro in the mother whose health steers the plot, even when she’s not physically present.
During his final year of high school, Miyazaki saw the first Japanese feature-length color animated film, Toei Animation’s Hakujaden (Legend of the White Serpent, 1958), and decided to become an animation artist, in spite of only having ever drawn airplanes—never humans.
In 1963, Miyazaki graduated from Gakushuin University with degrees in political science and economics, which would play more of a role in his career than might seem obvious at first. After college he landed a low-level animating job at Toei. Shortly after he was hired, Toei entered a protracted labor dispute, with Miyazaki leading the demonstrating animators. Within a year he was the chief secretary of Toei’s labor union. The vice-chairman was an animator named Isao Takahata. Takahata was born six years before Miyazaki, and joined Toei in 1959. Their paths crossed not only within Toei’s labor union, but also on a pivotal film.
Prince of the Sun
In the fall of 1965, Takahata got the chance to direct his first animated feature, Hols: Prince of the Sun, which proved to be very influential in Japan but is still unknown to many Western fans. Miyazaki worked on the film under Takahata. The film was made in the mid-’60s, when both Japan and the United States were feeling waves of social shock as the Vietnam War and experimentation with alternate lifestyles shook up both societies. Another revolution was happening at the same time: television began drawing more and more of Toei’s resources, and the role of the animator seemed doomed to extinction or mediocrity. Studios like Toei were expected to churn out television programming, quickly and with little attention to detail—the broadcast equivalent of the trinkets shipped to America by the boatload earlier in the decade, which had made the phrase “Made in Japan” synonymous with shoddy workmanship.
Thinking that this might be their last chance to work together on a quality feature, Miyazaki made a pact with Takahata and Yasuo Otsuka (the film’s animation director) to take as much time as they needed to properly finish Prince of the Sun. “As much time” turned out to be three years, at a time when a feature could be put together in eight months. The time was well-spent: Prince of the Sun has a brilliant look about it that defines it as a mature work. However, the bosses at Toei either didn’t know quality when they saw it, or felt the need to stick it to union types like Takahata and Miyazaki. Prince of the Sun was shown in Japanese theaters for exactly ten days. The box office receipts were predictably small, and Toei used the poor showing to attack director Takahata. His first directorial project at Toei would also be his last.
There was reason for concern by studio executives. The movie had a sophistication of plot and character that went far beyond Toei’s previous efforts. The exhortations of Hols to the villagers to unite against the minions of the Frost King were received as thinly disguised rallying cries by the union and college student protestors disrupting the streets of Tokyo in those heady days. More importantly, the character of Hilda comes across as complex, working sometimes for good and sometimes for evil. She’s far from a powerless pawn, and can be seen as the first in the long line of multidimensional heroines from the artists who would later form Studio Ghibli.
Still, it was only a matter of time before Miyazaki and Takahata left Toei. That time came in 1971, when, having worked on a few significant features (including a comic inversion of the Arabian Nights tale Ali Baba and the 40 Thieve in which the wealthy Ali Baba has become the villain) they jumped to A-Pro Studios. For the rest of the decade, they produced relatively little animation, but managed to spend a lot of time traveling around Europe: they visited Sweden to secure rights for an animated Pippi Longstocking (which was ultimately shelved), went to Switzerland to prepare scenery for Heidi, Girl of the Alps, and so on. There were a few projects with Japanese settings, one of which was an animated series from 1972–73 based on the popular postwar samurai manga Akado Suzunosuke, but the majority of their projects were based on classics of Western children’s literature (Heidi, Girl of the Alps, A Dog of Flanders, Anne of Green Gables). And at the end of the decade, the European locales would serve a successful manga hero in one of a series of movies. . . .
Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro (1979)
This feature was directed and co-written by Miyazaki for Toho Studios, based on a very popular manga series by an artist using the pen name Monkey Punch.2 The series recounted the adventures of a hero who is supposedly the direct descendant of Arsène Lupin, the “gentleman burglar” turned detective featured in dozens of novels by Maurice Leblanc (1864–1941). Leblanc was originally commissioned to write a magazine piece to capitalize on the success of Sherlock Holmes. Leblanc not only created Lupin, a criminal who could challenge Holmes on his own terms, but also mercilessly tweaked the British detective in a series of stories about a bumbling British detective named Holmlock Shears. It’s ironic that Miyazaki started with Lupin and a few years later worked on a Sherlockian television series, Sherlock Hound.
Lupin III, the grandson of Arsène Lupin, is more like a “super-deformed” James Bond than like his grandfather, and the Monkey Punch comics and other Lupin III movies are usually full of comic sex, comic violence, and comic chases. In The Castle of Cagliostro, the level of sex and violence is toned down severely. For example, the damsel in distress is the fleeing bride Princess Clarisse, who provides a plausible reason why Lupin isn’t his usual horndog self in this movie: it seems he first encountered her when she was nine years old, and he still feels toward her like a “big brother.” How convenient.
Lupin, by the way, is not the only character with a historical antecedent. One member of his gang is Ishikawa Goemon XIII, whose namesake was a samurai who was also reputedly versed in the arts of the ninja. This Goemon, a masterless ronin, provided for his wife and children by stealing. According to some legends, he preferred to steal from corrupt government officials, serving as a Japanese Robin Hood. In one legend, he tried to burglarize the quarters of the ruling warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1594, but unfortunately was caught. After he was captured, he was boiled alive in a large pot (thus giving his name to a type of Japanese bath called a goemon-buro).
The film is full of other historical antecedents, although few of these are Japanese. The plot derives in part from a 1924 Lupin novel, The Countess of Cagliostro, and partly from The Clock-Tower Mystery by Japanese author Edogawa Ranpo.3 The villain of the piece, Count Cagliostro, is modeled after a real-life counterfeiter, Giuseppi Balsamo, who passed himself off as a count at the court of France’s Louis XVI.
It also has another multidimensional female character in Fujiko Mine, a crook who competes with Lupin for whatever the prize happens to be. Her on-and-off dalliances with Lupin are off in this case. She’s scheming and cynical, yet has the good grace to stand aside and let Lupin win this one.
But she also becomes part of a d
yad of female characters (kindly Princess Clarisse being the other half). While most Ghibli films feature a complete and complex heroine, several feature a dichotomy between two heroines—one virginal, the other wise to the ways of the world. The dyad is apparent in this movie, in Porco Rosso, and in Omoide Poroporo (although in this last movie the dichotomy is the same woman at two very different stages in her life).
Kaze no Tani no Naushika (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind) (1984)
In 1983 Tokuma Shoten, publishers of the monthly animation magazine Animage, decided that there was enough interest in Hayao Miyazaki’s long-running manga series Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind to gamble on animating it. They chose Topcraft Studios, a small independent studio, on the basis of their work for the American production company Rankin-Bass, for whom they had just completed animation for a feature based on Peter S. Beagle’s fantasy novella The Last Unicorn. Their next feature would change the face of Japanese animation.
Funding for the movie wasn’t too hard to find. Some of it came from Tokuma Shoten. Additional money came from the Hakuhodo advertising agency, where Miyazaki’s youngest brother worked.
If any film, in any genre, deserves to be called a groundbreaking masterpiece, it is this feature. How else do we account for the fact that, from its release in 1984, it won first place ten years in a row in the Animage magazine poll of fans? Even after the nihilistic Akira burst onto the scene in 1988, fans of Japanese animation (those who voted, anyway) still considered Nausicaä to be state of the art.
It’s safe to say that anyone who has seen the film—even if what they saw was Warriors of the Wind, the horrendous English dub from schlock-genius Roger Corman’s New World Pictures that cut out twenty minutes, including the entire ecological subplot—remembers it vividly. There are too many memorable scenes to mention, but I’ll pick one. Toward the end, Nausicaä is dealing with a baby insect (quite a baby; it’s as big as a compact car). Injured and tormented, it is thrashing about, and Nausicaä is trying to physically force it away from a polluted lake filled with water like acid. She’s been injured herself, and the insect pushes her wounded heel into the burning water.
And she screams. It’s a scream that tears at the listener and raises the bar for cartoon voices. This is acting. (The actress, by the way, was Sumi Shimamoto, who also voiced Princess Clarisse in The Castle of Cagliostro, is remembered as the voice of the widowed landlady Kyoko Otonashi in Maison Ikkoku, and has recently returned to voice-work as the mother of girl pitching sensation Ryo Hayakawa in Princess Nine.)
The Princess Who Loved Insects
One rather outrageous line of dialogue vanished altogether in the dubbed version, yet it helps to clarify the feminine duality in this movie: between Nausicaä and Queen Kushana of Torumekia, who leads an invading army against the Valley of the Wind. The Torumekians want to recover a terrible and ancient weapon from an airplane that had crashed into the Valley, a weapon Kushana thinks is the only force powerful enough to destroy the giant insects laying waste to the planet.
Kushana, it seems, has a grudge against the bugs. She demonstrates to Nausicaä’s advisors that one of her arms is artificial, having been claimed by one of the giant insects. Then comes the line: “Only the man who becomes my husband will see things that are even worse,” and we realize that both Kushana’s legs are armored in the same manner as her artificial arm. Her battle against the giant insects is thus both planetary and personal. Kushana may be doing what she thinks is the right thing, but she is going about it the wrong way, by using the same weapon that destroyed human civilization thousands of years earlier and thus opened the door for the giant insects in the first place. She may possess weapons to turn against the insects, but what she lacks is compassion, the yasashii spirit of Nausicaä, who truly sees the insects for what they are.
Nausicaä’s interest in insects turns out to be important for the entire planet. It is rooted not in science, however, but in Japanese folklore. Miyazaki cites as a model for Nausicaä “The Princess Who Loved Insects,” a story from the twelfth-century collection Tsutsumi Chunagon Monogatari. It told of a girl who refused to act as she was supposed to. She didn’t shave her eyebrows, didn’t blacken her teeth, and didn’t spend day and night indoors cultivating the deathly pallor that would mark her as a member of a noble house. And she liked insects. As anyone who watches Pokémon can tell you, Kasumi (aka Misty) in that series (and girls in general) are not supposed to be fans of caterpillars and bugs. The princess in this story, however, has a deeper understanding of nature than her peers. She feels that in order to love the butterflies, one also needs to love the caterpillars that will become butterflies.
Nausicaä takes this attitude one step further. Her unorthodox actions would hardly make her traditional heroine material, but there is a context for everything she does that justifies her behavior. She collects plant specimens from the toxic forest, and has set up a sophisticated laboratory in the castle to study the pollution of the planet. She studies the insects, but in the central events of the movie and in a flashback to her younger years we also see her maternally protect baby insects from the grownups who would destroy them without a second thought, demonstrating the yasashii aspect of her character. Even when she takes a sword and fights off a half-dozen invading soldiers, she does so in order to avenge the assassination of her father, the king. A girl can act aggressively, even violently, and still be yasashii. We’ll see another example of this when we meet Nausicaä’s distant cousin San in Princess Mononoke.
Killer Joe
Nausicaä is finally noteworthy because it marks the arrival of another member of the group associated with Miyazaki. Composer Joe Hisaishi was born in 1950 and attended a music conservatory with the intention of writing contemporary classical music. In 1983, the year after the first album of his compositions was recorded, his record label recommended him to write “image music” (pieces that would not necessarily be heard on the soundtrack) for Nausicaä. Another composer was being considered for the actual film score, but when they heard Hisaishi’s music, both Miyazaki and Takahata wanted him to score the film. Since that time, while he’s also written concert music and scores to video games, he has scored most of the Ghibli movies, using a full and rich orchestral palette that is immediately recognizable.
Hisaishi claims his name is recognizable to American music fans. It’s another Japanese pun; by putting his family name first (Hisaishi Jo) and changing the way the first part of the family name can be read (from “hisa” to “ku”), we get “Kuishi Jo,” which reminds Hisaishi of American composer and bandleader Quincy Jones. Hisaishi also favors spelling his given name “Joe” instead of “Jo,” perhaps recalling one of Quincy Jones’s biggest hits, “Killer Joe.”
Tenku no Shiro Rapyuta (Laputa: Castle in the Sky) (1986)
This film is the first actually produced under the name of Studio Ghibli. (The name, by the way, is Italian: the nickname of a World War II scout plane. The ghibli were planes that scouted the Sahara, and were so called because the name meant “hot desert wind.” Miyazaki, let the record show, likes flying and Italy but not Fascism, as his later film Porco Rosso makes clear.)
The profits from Nausicaä enabled Miyazaki and Takahata to create Studio Ghibli in 1985, with additional funds coming from Tokuma Shoten. Studio Ghibli was a daring move from the start, because it dedicated itself to animated theatrical features. For most animation studios, television series pay the bills, with theatrical films being produced whenever possible. But remember that Ghibli was started by the men who took as much time as they needed to finish Prince of the Sun. In addition to their string of feature films, Studio Ghibli, after almost two decades, has animated a handful of commercials, a couple of music videos and a made-for-TV movie, but no TV series.
Laputa took a full year to produce, and the effort shows. The artwork is highly detailed, from the streets of the mining village to the machinery of the floating castle. (Also visible in Laputa are the same fox-squirrel hybrids tha
t Nausicaä kept as pets.) Those interested in the details of the Japanese production might want to note that the voice cast includes a young up-and-coming actress in a tiny role: Megumi Hayashibara.
Names in Laputa were one of the big problems for those who wanted to market the film in the West. “Laputa” would read in Spanish-speaking neighborhoods as “the prostitute.” (Jonathan Swift knew this already when he created Laputa for his darkly satiric 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels. As Takahata noted in one interview, Swift gave the cloud-shrouded floating castle this denigrating name not so that it could stay hidden, but because it was an evil place that did not deserve sunlight.)4 The names of the young heroes are likewise a problem, with Pazu pronounced uncomfortably close to the Yiddish epithet putz and Sheeta . . . you get the idea. Sheeta’s name, by the way, derives from India; it’s an alternate spelling of Sita, wife of Prince Rama, hero of the epic Ramayana.
Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro) (1988)
This is arguably the finest children’s movie ever made. In a mid-twentieth-century Japan seemingly never blighted by war and never over-industrialized, a father and his two daughters, ten-year-old Satsuki and four-year-old Mei, have moved to the country (the country locale is based on Tokorozawa City, which has resisted—with Miyazaki’s help—being absorbed into Tokyo). The girls’ mother is in a tuberculosis sanatorium, and they have moved to be close to her. In occupying a battered but beautiful old house, the girls find delights both real and imaginary—the latter include Totoro, a giant furball of a nature spirit, and a creature that looks half Cheshire cat and half cross-town bus. These fantasy creatures enter the girls’ reality when mother seems to take a turn for the worse.
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