There are a number of changes between the manga and the animated film, some trivial and some more important. The most crucial change is in living arrangements. In the comic book the Tsukushima family lives in a house, implying a certain level of affluence. However, the post-bubble recession was in full swing by 1995, and the Tsukushima family finds itself pinched, literally and figuratively. They now occupy a small apartment, with the family’s two daughters sharing a room and sleeping in bunk beds, and with their mother taking classes so that she can finish a degree and get a job. Books and papers seem to be stacked all over the apartment. The main difference is the front door. Every time it opens and closes, it does so with a hollow metallic clunk reminiscent of a hatch in a submarine. There are still futons airing out on the balcony and tatami matting on the floor, but this story is a long way from classic Japanese architecture. But then, so is its audience.
Mononoke-hime (Princess Mononoke) (1997)
This film, written and directed by Miyazaki with Kondo as a lead animator, went on to be the biggest moneymaker among Japanese films, breaking a record set by E.T. and was itself bested only by Titanic. When it was presented in English as Princess Mononoke (with a script by Neil Gaiman, best known as a comic-book creator), the second Disney-produced dub of a Miyazaki film, there were problems. After Prince Ashitaka is infected by the rampaging boar, he finds that the arrows he shoots do more damage than usual. Limbs and heads go flying, which gave Western audiences fits of nervous giggling. This is the kind of violence that had only appeared in American animation on the parody level—in the battles between Tom and Jerry, or the Road Runner and the Coyote. As absurd as the damage seemed, though, it was deliberately included in the film to demonstrate how much more lethal and corrupting firearms (the real cause of the boar’s curse) were than bows and arrows. Still, the surface violence contributed to Disney’s decision to back away temporarily from the rest of its deal with Ghibli/Tokuma.
The problem with the female dualities in this film is in choosing just one. San, the “Princess of the Evil Spirits” of the title, is an obvious contrast to Lady Eboshi, who runs the ironworks at Tataraba. She can also be compared to and contrasted with her foster mother, Moro the wolf spirit. Yet, as Moro points out, San is neither fully human nor fully wolf when the story begins. Even at the end, there’s no easy “happy ending”; she doesn’t ride off into the sunset with Prince Ashitaka. She will continue to live in the forest, while he lives in Tataraba, helping to rebuild the city along more humane lines. Meanwhile, they agree to see each other “from time to time.”
This makes San unlike Kiki or Shizuku or Sheeta, all of whom go through considerable changes by the end of their respective films. San’s true analog may be Nausicaä, who essentially stayed herself while changing the world around her.
Princess Mononoke was the last film with Yoshifumi Kondo as animation director. When the film premiered, Miyazaki announced that he would retire from filmmaking, leaving Ghibli in the capable hands of animators like Kondo. However, Kondo died suddenly in early 1998 of a brain aneurysm, at age 47. Retirement would have to wait.
Tonari no Yamada-kun (My Neighbors the Yamadas) (1999)
Directed and written by Isao Takahata and based on a manga by Hi-saichi Ishii, this movie is truly unique among animated films in general, not just among Ghibli’s films. The reason is the source material: Tonari no Yamada-kun (My Neighbors the Yamadas) is a four-panel gag strip, not a long-form manga. While it seems easy to animate some manga, since they incorporate cinematic devices into their visual vocabulary, the four-panel strip, familiar in the West to any newspaper reader, almost defies conversion into an extended narrative.
The artistic style of the strip would also seem to defy animation: simple line-drawings in an exaggerated caricature style, the antithesis of the realistic Ghibli look. Yet Takahata adopted that style—line drawings, filled in with a watercolor-style wash, and manipulated by computer—to present a movie that is a series of vignettes, some short, some long, some hilarious, and some pleasantly reflective. Like the conversion of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip into countless television specials, this is the rare success of one medium converted to another.
Again the family is typical: parents, children, plus the wife’s mother and the family dog. Some characters speak Kansai Japanese.11 The children (son in junior high, daughter in third grade) are academically average. Dad is a salaryman, a section chief (hancho)12 in his corporation. There’s also a wedding, where dad is supposed to make a speech during the reception. He spends days laboring over the speech, only to show up at the reception with the wrong manuscript; consequently, he has to make up his speech off the cuff.
If there’s a message at all in this film, it’s in this vignette. You plan, you work, you try your best, and everything still ends up going wrong. But you pull yourself together and try to get through it with as much dignity as you can muster. Certainly a lesson for any nation, but definitely for recession-weary Japan.
Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (2001)
Miyazaki’s next written-and-directed feature surpassed both Princess Mononoke and Titanic at the box office, putting Miyazaki back in the lead as Japan’s top-grossing filmmaker (at least until just after Christmas 2001, when Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone swept Japan).
Once again, the title in Japanese—the film in the U.S. is titled Spirited Away—is a pun that points to a duality. “Sen” is another way of pronouncing the first character in the name “Chihiro.” In a sense, Chihiro is one person, and Sen is quite another. Chihiro is what Miyazaki considers to be an all-too-common modern ten-year-old: jaded, whining, lacking any passion for life. The change happens when her parents take her through a tunnel and come out the other side into an alternate reality, a therapeutic hot springs for spirits, monsters, and witches (including the “living soot” from Totoro), with buildings whose architecture reflects the early-1920s Taisho period. Without a thought, Chihiro’s parents eat food that was set out as an offering for the gods and are turned into animals; it’s up to Chihiro (or “Sen,” as the local spirits insist on calling her) to reverse the spell.
Although the roots of this story seem linked to Homer’s Odyssey, at least in the motif of people being turned into swine, Miyazaki is quite clear about the film’s origin. It’s a direct descendant of folktales such as “Suzume no Oyado” (Sparrows’ Inn), in which a callous act leads to demonic torment, but there’s more to it than that. Miyazaki feels that “‘Kachikachi Yama’13 and ‘Momotaro’ have lost their power of persuasion. . . . Children are losing their roots, being surrounded by high technology and cheap industrial goods. We have to tell them how rich a tradition we have.”14 But it’s not just about children; Miyazaki also joked that “it’s tough being a Japanese god today.” They face the same distractions and hi-tech toys that Japanese children face. Ideally, though, to the extent that this movie redeems Japanese ten-year-olds, it may redeem Japanese gods as well.
All of which does not necessarily bar a Western audience from understanding and enjoying the film. The basic outlines of the story translate well, even if the cultural specifics don’t. And we in the West are certainly just as much in need of redemption from our own toys as are Japanese children—or Japanese gods.
It’s hard to know exactly how much was spent making Spirited Away, but it’s clear that every yen, as the saying goes, ended up on the screen. This is more than one of the most stunningly visual anime ever made; it’s probably the most artistic animated feature since Fantasia six decades earlier. When this movie was released, Hollywood’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences had just started awarding an “Oscar” for Best Animated Feature the year before. In the voting along with Spirited Away was Spirit (about a horse in the American West), Ice Age (about three misfit animals who try to return a lost human child to its village),15 and two entries from the Disney Studios: Lilo and Stitch (a little Hawaiian girl befriends an alien monster; a film notable because of the Elvis Presley s
ongs that made up the soundtrack) and Treasure Planet (a science fiction remake of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island; this film is considered among the weakest in Disney history). When the award was announced as going to Spirited Away, several audience members heard angry muttering from some film industry people, who were clearly upset that a foreign studio had won the award.
Little did they know that there was a reason Miyazaki didn’t attend the Academy Award ceremony that year, and that recent events would color Ghibli’s next feature.
The Cat Returns (2002)
Miyazaki has become famous for saying that he’ll never do sequels or repeat himself. The closest he’s come to exploiting his own anime is with a short film that spins a story drawing loosely on figures from My Neighbor Totoro: Mei and the Kittenbus.
In a sense The Cat Returns was a sequel to Ghibli’s Whisper of the Heart. Both are based on shojo manga by Aoi Hiiragi, and they share a character, even though that character is a statue of a cat in a three-piece suit, top hat, and walking stick. The Baron, as the statue was known, was a prized work in the antique shop run by Seiji’s grandfather. It so captured Shizuku’s imagination that she made him a central figure in her first attempt at serious writing. The Baron spoke, but only in the fantasy world of Shizuku’s story.
The story behind The Cat Returns could have been its own movie. It started out as a twenty-minute short, which doubled in length and then redoubled. The short was a request made by an amusement park in 1999, four years after the premiere of Whisper of the Heart and one year after the death of director Yoshifumi Kondo. Miyazaki, who had adapted the shojo manga by Aoi Hiiragi for Whisper of the Heart, wanted to tweeze out part of that film as the basis for the short: junior high school student Shizuku Tsukushima is riding a train when she realizes that a fat cat, with pale fur except for one dark ear, is sitting on the bench next to her. Intrigued by this, she follows the cat off the train; it leads her to an upscale neighborhood and an antique shop where Shizuku first sees the Baron.
At first, Hiiragi wanted to frame the story of the fat cat (known by several names, including Moon and Muta) and the statue as an encounter written by Shizuku and expanded. The treatment was given to Ghibli, which had to shelve it for other projects, including wrapping up Spirited Away. (Hiiragi expanded her own treatment into one of two manga sequels to Whisper of the Heart; the other sequel, Shiawase na Jikan, focused on the romance between Shizuku and Seiji.)
Ghibli, meanwhile, realized after Kondo’s sudden death that they needed to start recruiting and developing talent. Looking in-house the studio decided on animator Hiroyuki Morita (whose credits ranged from Akira and Kiki’s Delivery Service to Perfect Blue and Tenchi Forever! The Movie, the third feature in the Tenchi Muyo! franchise); he had been lead animator for Isao Takahata’s most recent film, My Neighbors the Yamadas. They asked Morita for a treatment of Hiiragi’s cats for a forty-minute film; his draft weighed in at 500 pages. Miyazaki and studio CEO Toshio Suzuki were so impressed by the heroine, who had become a high school senior named Haru, that they assigned the project to Morita to direct.
Haru lives in a recognizable modern-day Tokyo with her mother (her dad is nowhere to be seen), and at first has run-of-the-mill problems like getting to school late. One day she sees a black cat with odd-colored eyes almost get hit by a truck. Haru breaks her classmate’s school lacrosse stick while rescuing the cat, who gets up on his hind legs, brushes himself off, bows, and thanks Haru for helping him. This reminds her of something that happened years earlier: Haru gave some food to a scruffy white kitten and told her mother that the kitten spoke to her (although the audience only hears meowing). That night, a procession of cats, all walking upright, come to Haru’s house. Central to this procession is an old gray cat on a throne; he seems to be the leader of the cats because four other cats surround him like a Secret Service detail. The cat she rescued was the Prince of the Cats; hence the arrival of the royal retinue. The next morning, the house of Haru’s classmate is crowded with a hundred lacrosse sticks, while the lawn at Haru’s house is overgrown with cattails that sprang up overnight.
All the fantasy elements fall into place, leading to Haru’s entry into the feline kingdom and the problems it causes for her and the cats; the main problem being her engagement to the Prince. At first the Baron’s advice to Haru—“believe in yourself”—doesn’t seem like enough to get her through. However, the rules of the fantasy world and the timely appearance of minor characters who become major (remember the scruffy white kitten Haru fed as a child? Her name is Yuki—meaning Snow; a typical Japanese name for a white cat) help Haru along the way, even when she begins to turn into a cat.
The Cat Returns is entertaining enough for young children, yet has elements of social satire for adolescents (remember that this was based on a shojo manga). It’s certainly a fun watch, but, perhaps because Miyazaki’s involvement was limited to the “production concept,” the film doesn’t aim for the “classic” status of most Studio Ghibli films.
Hauru no ugoku shiro (Howl’s Moving Castle) (2004)
March 23, 2003 is memorable in part because it was day five of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the invasion of Iraq by the United States and its allies, with the intent of overthrowing the government of Saddam Hussein. Most of the world’s front pages that day talked of the war, but also of antiwar protests being held around America and the world. Only the Jerusalem Post led with an announcement that the invading troops had uncovered one of the legendary Weapons of Mass Destruction that justified the invasion, even though (a) the WMD in question turned out to be flatbed trucks, which the newspaper piece asserted had at one time carried portable bioweapons laboratories, and (b) subsequent investigations showed that the trucks in question never carried anything of the kind.
March 23, 2003 was also the night Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away was awarded an “Oscar” for Best Animated Feature. Miyazaki was not in Los Angeles to accept the award, and it was announced from the stage that he had a prior commitment. If the truth were known, there might have been far more grumbling in the audience.
Miyazaki simply thought that celebration of any kind, with the United States having just launched a war to overthrow a government, would have been unseemly at best. Miyazaki confirmed this in 2009 when he traveled to Los Angeles to receive a lifetime achievement award at Comic-Con: “The reason I wasn’t here for the Academy Award was because I didn’t want to visit a country that was bombing Iraq,” he said. “At the time, my producer [Ghibli CEO Toshio Suzuki] shut me up and did not allow me to say that, but I don’t see him around today. By the way, my producer also shared in that feeling.”16
But Miyazaki’s protest didn’t begin and end with that personal boycott. His resentment against the war, and politically motivated wars in general, shaped his next project: Howl’s Moving Castle.
Based on a fantasy novel by Welsh author Diana Wynne Jones, the movie features Sophie, a teenage village milliner who took over her father’s business after he died while her younger sister chased after boys.
Along with Sophie’s encounters with such magical folk as the wizard Howl and the Witch of the Waste, Sophie’s home is abruptly plunged into a war with a neighboring kingdom when its prince disappears. Miyazaki, serving as screenwriter and director, expanded the role of the war in the story, showing that it was started on a whim and ended on a whim by the court witch Suliman (a wizard in the book), acting without orders from the king. For her, the blood and destruction are merely part of a chess game.
This (and her kidnapping of the neighboring prince and trapping him in the form of a scarecrow to provoke the war) makes Suliman more of a villain than the Witch of the Waste. This witch’s effect on Sophie is more immediate: she ages the girl from eighteen to eighty. Elderly Sophie basically has to reinvent her life by offering to become housekeeper to the wizard Howl, who had briefly flirted with her earlier when she was a teenager. Sometimes she is up to the task, but the antics of Howl, who acts like a vain, impulsive arrested
adolescent at times, get to be too much for her. “I’ve never been beautiful in my entire life,” she cries at one point after he threw a major tantrum over a minor setback. But at another point, when she’s praising Howl (pretending to be his mother) to Suliman, she gradually turns back into the adolescent Sophie before our eyes.
This is, after all, a love story, but a complicated one: Sophie, the Witch of the Waste, and others we never hear from have all fallen for Howl, who doesn’t love any of them. It seems he had given his heart away years before, to a fire demon named Calcifer, because he had become so fascinated with its powers. The story makes the point that we can only love one thing (or person) at a time, but that the choice may not be a healthy one. In the end, the main characters end up living in Howl’s moving castle in a strange parody of traditional Japanese domesticity: Howl and Sophie as husband and wife, the Witch of the Waste (whom Suliman rendered older than Sophie ever was) as the surrogate mother-in-law, and the apprentice wizard Markl as the family child. There’s even a stray dog that got caught up in the action. And they all live happily ever after, even though none of them are related by blood.
The English dub of the movie is one of the best of a Ghibli film, due mainly to the presence of two Hollywood veterans. The elder Sophie is voiced by Jean Simmons, whose film credits include Spartacus, Elmer Gantry, Guys and Dolls, and The Big Country. The Witch of the Waste has the voice of the legendary Lauren Bacall. They help bring this movie fully to life, as does Miyazaki himself. After all, he was past sixty years old when he made Howl’s Moving Castle, and this is clearly his meditation on old age, just as Porco Rosso was his reflection on middle age.
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