Miyazaki, who wrote the story, and whose own mother spent two years in a tuberculosis sanatorium, probably realized from experience that the best way to balance the delightful fantasies of the girls was to invoke childhood’s deepest and most universal anxiety: that something bad would happen to Mommy.
We have already looked at some of this movie’s reflections of Japanese culture: the Shinto-inspired worship of the giant camphor tree, the family bathing. There are many others, from the stone Jizo images by the side of the rural roads to a fleeting reference to a folktale: A crab, so the story goes, once planted a persimmon seed and stood by the garden day and night waiting for it to sprout. Satsuki writes to her mother that Mei is hovering like the legendary crab over the seeds they got from Totoro and planted.
Satsuki’s first entrance into the house contains a very Japanese gesture: without kicking off her shoes, she drops to her knees and knee-walks into the room to pick up an acorn. Even at this most exciting moment, she doesn’t forget who she is or what behavior is proper. By extension, pop culture seems to be saying, neither should the audience.
The female duality shows up here in an interesting way: the two daughters. Their names suggest this: Satsuki is the old Japanese name for the fifth month, and “Mei” suggests the English month of May. Miyazaki’s original story featured one little girl, not two. He split them along age lines, with Satsuki being the older and more responsible of the two. This is in keeping with the cultural belief that a child becomes old enough to take responsibility for its actions at age seven. In the Shichigosan (“seven-five-three”) festival, Japanese children who have reached these ages are taken to a local shrine to pray for their health and future. This may have grown out of agrarian celebrations that infant mortality had been warded off until a critical age was reached, but it now represents an index of maturity. Mei has yet to reach that level, which is why she has to be watched over by older and wiser spirits: Satsuki, her parents, the old lady next door, the stone Jizo on the road, or Totoro.
There are many ways to view My Neighbor Totoro, including its religious symbolism. If you stop and look at the film, it’s actually crowded with Shinto and Buddhist imagery. The most obvious, of course, is the camphor tree marked for worship by its shibenawa, but there’s also the fact that the tree, and the old shrine at its base, is accessible by a driveway next door to the road leading to the Kusakaba house; the driveway is marked by a torii arch, the quintessential Shinto marker of a sacred place. At the bus stop is a small Shinto shrine to inari, fox spirits that bless rice and agriculture. The area also has a number of jizo statues, stone statues of Buddhist saints intended to protect children. One jizo offers practical protection by being under a shelter, where Satsuki and Mei enter to get out of the rain (after asking the jizo’s permission first). And as the sun sets on Mei, exhausted by her attempt to take a gift to her mother, she rests beside a row of six jizo, watching over her until they hand her off to Satsuki and the catbus.
Although a lot of anime falls into the science fiction category, My Neighbor Totoro is the only one that has actually flown into space, so to speak. On July 30, 2005 the space shuttle Discovery took a day for two of its astronauts, Steve Robinson of the United States and Soichi Noguchi of Japan, to survey the outside of the shuttle to be sure that it could safely return to earth. As the wake-up call for that day, Noguchi’s young children, who were attending a Japanese preschool in Houston, made a recording with their classmates of the opening theme of Totoro: the song “Sanpo,” which means “Let’s Take a Walk.”5 It’s an idea as appropriate as it is charming.
2010 saw the release of the Pixar computer-animated film Toy Story 3. Pixar’s head, John Lasseter, has been a longtime friend of Hayao Miyazaki and an advocate of his work; this time, he was able to reach out across the ocean. Much of the action in Toy Story 3 takes place in a day care center where the core group of toys is trying to adjust to their new surroundings; eventually, they end up in the home of a young, very imaginative girl. Among the toys she already has is a Totoro.
Hotaru no Haka (Grave of the Fireflies) (1988)
The book by Akiyuki Nosaka is moving enough as it is, with the author telling of his adopted sister dying of starvation just days before the surrender of Japan in World War II and its occupation by the Americans, but no one who cares about children can watch this film, adapted from the novel and directed by Takahata, without shedding a tear. You can always distance yourself by reading the elaborate website devoted to the film, built by Dennis Fukushima, Jr., and found at www2.hawaii.edu/~dfukushi/Hotaru.html. It will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about the M-69 napalm bombs used by America against Japan. You can read his comparison of the plot to a Bunraku play and see it as another giri/ninjo conflict, with the children wanting their old life back but facing tragedy precisely because it’s impossible. You can learn that the Japanese kanji used to write hotaru in the title is a pun, meaning “raining fire” rather than “fireflies.” It won’t change the ending, though, as much as you might want it to.
For this movie, another principal member of Studio Ghibli, Yoshifumi Kondo, was character designer and animation director. Before this, he had worked on-and-off with Miyazaki and Takahata on their television series of the ’70s. He now joined Studio Ghibli and, his television work behind him, served in one capacity or another on the string of major Ghibli films that was to come, through to Princess Mononoke.
Majo no Takkyubin (Kiki’s Delivery Service) (1989)
This film, directed by Miyazaki, who also adapted the children’s book by Eiko Kadono, eases up (but only a little) on Kadono’s depiction of the thirteen-year-old Kiki: a little impatient, a little sassy, a little head-strong—in short, a lot like most thirteen-year-old girls. This one just happens to be a witch who, according to custom, must settle in a village without a witch for one year and make a living through her witchcraft. However, Kiki doesn’t know all that much magic, apart from how to fly a broom.6 Kiki leaves home at a moment’s notice in the film (in the book, she prepares for about a week, but still springs the news on her family).7 Once she gets to the town of Koriko, Kiki has to be herself, even though she also wants to be like the girls in the town. She envies their clothes and socializing, and most of all envies them their friends because it takes her so long to make one. But this longing to be like the other (non-magic) girls sets up, for me, the best throwaway gag in the movie. Kiki finally uses her flying ability to save the life of a friend on a runaway dirigible, and thus becomes a media star. During the closing credits, we see Kiki looking at colorful clothes in a store window, when a mother passes by with her three-year-old child in tow. The child wears a black dress with a red hair ribbon and carries a broom like Kiki’s! Kiki has become a role model without meaning to. She is also, in a sense, reminded—as is the audience—of what will happen someday, after she spends the year alone proving herself. The appearance of the child version of herself is a reminder that motherhood is still going to be part of her life.
This film was the first one released in English under a deal worked out between Ghibli, Tokuma, and Disney (although an earlier dubbed version of Kiki was available). The deal was vindicated with good sales and at least one award: critic Ty Burr of Entertainment Weekly pronounced Kiki’s Delivery Service the best video released in 1997, noting the irony that traditional animation still had charm and power in the year that saw two CGI movies—Dreamworks’ Antz and Disney/Pixar’s A Bug’s Life—battle head to head. He might also have mentioned that, in the year when Hollywood trotted out its own version of Godzilla with the almost panicky promotional line “Size Does Matter,” Americans could find out that the biggest Japanese entertainment export was really the heart of a thirteen-year-old witch.
Omoide Poroporo (Only Yesterday) (1991)
The actual title, Omoide Poroporo, means “remembering drop by drop.” What writer/director Takahata seems to remember best is the pop culture of 1966. Movies, commercials, pop songs, even bakeries from the period an
d a Takarazuka-style all-girl theater company are alluded to in this adaptation of a nostalgic manga by Yuko Tonai and Hotaru Okamoto (published, perhaps not by coincidence, by Ghibli partner Tokuma Shoten). The manga, however, is set exclusively in 1966—as an exercise in nostalgia, it didn’t have much of a plot. Takahata created the device of setting half of the movie in 1982, with Taeko Okajima, a Tokyo “office lady,” reflecting back on 1966, when she was ten years old. . . .
Taeko takes a vacation on a farm in Yamagata, a prefecture in the north of Japan’s main island Honshu. One of Taeko’s older sisters has married into a family of benibana farmers (the benibana flower yields a crimson dye—interesting in itself, since it’s a very specialized commodity, but also a symbolic crop, as one of the flashbacks to 1966 recalls Taeko’s first instructions in matters of menstruation). While on this sabbatical, Taeko gets a proposal of marriage from a cousin of a cousin of her brother-in-law, a mildly radical back-to-the-land farmer, but doesn’t act on it by the time the train prepares to leave the pastoral farm and return her to Tokyo—except to say that, when she returns for some skiing in the winter, she won’t bring her ten-year-old self along. In this case the duality was Taeko in the past versus Taeko in the present, and she needed the trip to Yamagata to exorcise the child in her and get on with her life.
Kurenai no Buta (Porco Rosso) (1992)
Internally and externally, Porco Rosso is all about flight, and it comes as no surprise that it was written and directed by Miyazaki. The story is about a World War I air ace coping with peacetime and being pressed back into service, but it has much more humor than that plotline would suggest.
Marco Pagot is an Italian pilot in the 1920s. (He’s named after one of a pair of brothers who produce Italian animation that Miyazaki worked with a decade earlier on the TV series Sherlock Hound.) Marco survived seeing his comrades die in combat, but with a self-image so low it has transformed his appearance: he now looks like a pig. Hence the name of the movie, which is also his stage-name—“The Crimson Pig”—for the aerial stunt shows he performs.
His life, though, becomes very complicated. He has to deal with his old lover, the chanteuse named Gina, and with her seduction by American movie actor Donald Curtis. We find out later that, while Pagot looks like a swine, Curtis acts like one, shooting Pagot out of the sky to give himself a clearer shot at Gina. Pagot survives to have his plane rebuilt by a schoolgirl-mechanic named Fio. Fio and Gina thus become the film’s duality of innocence and experience, and Pagot will need both to be redeemed.8 In the end, Gina doesn’t follow Curtis to Hollywood, getting together in the hotel on the Adriatic each summer with the successful businesswoman Fio and legendary Marco Pagot.
The airplanes in this movie look experimental, even a little absurd, but they aren’t fantasy planes like the buglike craft flown by Ma Dola’s gang in Laputa. These planes are based on actual aircraft from the 1920s, a time when aerial technology was still evolving and designs were much more freeform. They grew out of Miyazaki’s love of aircraft and specifically from a manga he created: Hikotei Jidai (The Age of Seaplanes).
Sadly, most English dubs are inferior to the original voices, if only because American actors consider voice work a step down from “real” acting and tend not to push themselves. The dub of Porco Rosso, however, is better than most, due mainly to the voice work of Michael Keaton as Marco. He consistently hits just the right note of world-weariness, bringing the role a touch of Humphrey Bogart.
Heisei Tanuki Gassen Ponpoko (Pom Poko) (1994)
The full title Heisei Tanuki Gassen Ponpoko, literally translated, means “The Heisei-era Tanuki War Pom Poko.” We are currently in the Heisei era, and have been since Akihito became emperor after the death of his father in December 1989.9 The title is often translated “raccoon war,” but that ignores the special place of the tanuki in Japan. First of all, it’s not a legendary animal, but a real animal around which many legends have grown.
Scientifically speaking, a tanuki is a member of the dog family (hence its Latin name, Canis viverriuns). It has a fat body, short legs and tail, bushy fur, and a face resembling the Western raccoon. It’s an omnivorous eater that hibernates in the winter. It prefers to live in heavily wooded areas, always near water, but has been known to come into towns at night to raid garbage dumps. Native to Japan, the tanuki is also found in Siberia and Mongolia and was introduced into eastern Europe in the mid-twentieth century.
One magical attribute of the tanuki is, to say the least, unique: according to legend, it can inflate its scrotum to the size of a room and drum on it. This would be hard for most Western studios to translate, but almost impossible for a studio like Disney with a family-friendly reputation. The dub takes an easy way out, by finding a synonym for “sac” and translating it as “pouch.” This heads off uncomfortable questions, even if it also turns canine tanukis into temporary marsupials.
The tanuki has long been associated with drinking, and it is common to find potbellied tanuki statues, wine-gourd in hand, decorating the entrance or interior of drinking establishments.
Like the kitsune or fox, the tanuki is supposed to be a shape-shifter. Specifically, it’s capable of wrapping itself in lotus leaves to turn into a Buddhist priest. (The choice of flower is no surprise, since the lotus is a potent Buddhist symbol. A white lotus blooming in a muddy swamp symbolizes the wisdom of enlightenment shining forth even in a polluted world.)
In one story, the tanuki and the fox had a contest to see which was the better shape-shifter. The fox disguised itself as a roadside stone statue of the bodhisattva Jizo and used its disguise to steal the tanuki’s lunch. The tanuki, for its part, said that the next day it would appear to the fox disguised as the emperor. Sure enough, the next day, what looked like the emperor and his retinue came down the road. The fox rushed out to congratulate the tanuki—and because it really was the emperor—was beaten by one of the guards.
The modern tanuki war alluded to in the movie title is against humankind, to stop people from overdeveloping the tanuki’s natural habitat by cutting down the forests. (This isn’t just ecological sentimentality. The closer that tanuki live to people, the more likely they are to succumb to diseases, particularly to mange, which causes their bushy fur to fall out and leads to their freezing to death.) Actually, though, the events of this movie, directed and written by Takahata, mirror an earlier Great Tanuki War.
This war is captured on an emaki (illustrated scroll) in the Kyoto National Museum.10 Known as the Junirui Emaki, it begins with the twelve animals of Chinese astrology deciding to have a poetry competition, with the deer (an animal favored by Buddhists) as the judge. When the tanuki volunteers to also be a judge, the other animals laugh him out of the hall, whereupon he rounds up other spirit-animals (such as the fox and the crow) for battle. Needless to say, the battle doesn’t go so well for the tanuki, who in the end decides to stop the war and pursue the Buddhist path of peace and wisdom.
The movie follows the legends closely, including the emaki tradition of satirizing human follies by putting animals in kimono. What was satirical in the old days becomes literal in this movie, as the tanuki decide, having lost the war with the developers, to shape-shift one last time, put on human clothes, and live as humans for the rest of their days.
Mimi o Sumaseba (Whisper of the Heart) (1995)
This movie version of Aoi Hiiragi’s girls comic is the only film directed by Ghibli lead animator Yoshifumi Kondo. The location of the movie is important in the context of Ghibli movies. At one point in the movie, student/heroine Shizuku Tsukushima writes satiric lyrics to the pop song “Take Me Home, Country Roads”:
Concrete Road, wherever I go
Plow the valleys, cut the trees
Western Tokyo, Old Mount Tama
That’s my home, a Concrete Road.
In this case, it’s literal. The action takes place in western Tokyo, on Mount Tama—the same mountain area that the tanuki tried to protect from human development in Pom Poko. In fact, the
final scene of Pom Poko dovetails precisely into the first shot of Mimi o Sumaseba. The same piece of ground, now changed for all time.
The title Mimi o Sumaseba is deliberately chosen: “If you listen carefully . . .” are the opening words of the epic story written by the heroine, Shizuku. It’s her last year of junior high, and this bookworm is known to her friends as “Queen of Verse” for her talent at putting new words to old melodies. (In fact, her version of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” is a thread running throughout the movie.) But she’s finding it rather boring, especially when she meets Seiji Amasawa. They get off on the wrong foot at first, as happens so often, but after a while he tells her of his ambition: to become not a player of violins but a maker of them. In fact, he’s taking several months to travel to the mecca of violin-making, Cremona, Italy, to try his hand as an apprentice. This inspires Shizuku to write while he’s gone—not just another parody lyric, but her first extended prose story, a fantasy-romance that weaves in characters and plot-threads already seen in the movie, including items seen in the antique shop owned by Seiji’s grandfather. It’s a purely internal quest, but she grows stronger when she comes out the other side.
That the quest happens at all brings up one interesting scene. While she’s writing her epic story, Shizuku’s mind wanders off of schoolwork and her grades suffer. Her parents call her on the carpet for it but, instead of laying down the law and telling her to shape up, they listen to her insistence that she has to do this (although she’s vague about what “this” is) to test herself. Shizuku’s mother recalls going through something similar in her youth; her father warns her that, if things go wrong, she’ll have nobody to blame but herself. That’s it. Once again, harmony (wa) is restored through consensus, and once again a risky behavior (Shizuku gambling with her transition from junior high to high school) is justified in the context of the traditional cultural value system. In contrast, Shizuku’s friend Yuko complains that her parents give orders rather than discuss, and we see her refuse to talk to her father because they had a quarrel. Lack of discussion leads to lack of consensus, which in turn leads to lack of wa.
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