The Conflicting Ideals of Hayao Miyazaki

This video is brought to you by mubi, a curated streaming service that showcases exceptional movies from around the world. Get a full month free at movie.com. Quality culture. This is our 100,000 late special voted for by our subscribers, so to make it special, we both wrote. and narrated this thank you very much for watching and a special thanks to our sponsors for supporting the channel. Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki is universally considered a master of his craft for decades, that much goes without saying, what's equally interesting, at least to us, is the complicated embedded identity. At the heart of these stories, Miyazaki's work is distinguished by a notable rich, mostly hand-drawn animation subtext and an underlying vibe that can best be described as melancholic.

He has retired three times but keeps coming back unable to resist the lure of creating beautiful things, but all while he is plagued by feelings of inadequacy, he has developed a reputation as a workaholic perfectionist and a grumpy old man. The more you inspect his thoughts and beliefs, the more you understand that this is the art of a person in a decades-long dispute with his own cynicism. Trying to challenge or perhaps simply balance his misanthropy with feelings of hope and compassion that he himself describes as a set of contradictions, Miyazaki and his work largely convey what political philosopher Antonio Gramsci called pessimism of the intellect optimism of the will Miyazaki He often directly addresses this feeling of internal conflict as in the epilogue of Turning Point the second collection of his interviews and writings over the years so many thoughts about the world move inside my head when I speak in public or write an article I deal I try to limit my topic and present it in a positive way without expressing my destructive negativity, but that's just a part of me.

I am a person whose negative aspects, brutality, resentment, hatred, are much stronger than other people's when I suppress my negative aspects and live my life normally. I am considered a good person. that's not my real character i don't know what kind of person i really am there seems to be another

hayao

miyazaki

that i don't know i try not to worry about this discrepancy anymore to get a better understanding of that discrepancy which we will explore 6 General common threads in the 11 feature films he has directed: the themes, the context and the intentions, and although we focus on Miyazaki in this video, it obviously wouldn't have gotten very far without the dedicated teams of artists, composer Joe Hasashi, producer Toshio Suzuki or their colleagues. -the founder's friendly rival isao takahata, speaking of studio ghibli, has produced many other great films which we can explore in later videos, for now we will focus on how

miyazaki

sees the world as it is, weaves that reality into his films and, ultimately choose Represent things as they could be.

We'll start with the most obvious recurring theme, as anyone who's seen more than two Miyazaki films knows that love and respect for nature is generally his thing. Regardless, there is some element of appreciation for the natural world in every film. of the plot, but the theme is regularly in the foreground along with direct or indirect criticism of humanity's environmental problem, the most important thing to know about his views on the matter is that, although he often represents man versus nature in the classical sense, he rejects it as something natural. dichotomy, although humans are disconnected and distanced from nature, sensitive and non-sensitive, we can never be truly separated from it, we are animals that live on earth, we are still part of nature and we have to find harmony with it or perish in the anime article.

Landscapes as a tool to analyze writers point out that for Miyazaki the destruction of nature and the destruction of the human soul are the same. In the article they describe how he presents human relationships with the environment in three ways that sometimes change or overlap within a film. dominating humans humans dominating nature or balancing humans as part of nature miyazaki illustrates the consequences of the two types of imbalance and argues for the third relationship, crucially in these more ecological films, nature is never just a nice backdrop or a passive entity, but an integral character who even retaliates if threatened, he is basically saying that we don't have as much control as we think and that nature has intrinsic value unrelated to what we can extract from it with these perspectives in mind, challenges our often anthropocentric view of the environment and I believe he faced this most clearly in the 1984 film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, his second work as a director and his first original story his success allowed him, along with Suzuki and Takahata , opening Studio Ghibli the following year, and his message turned Miyazaki into something of an environmentalist figure.

When he was still director of Haier, he started the serialized manga for Nausicaa in 1982 and was then convinced to adapt it into animation. He didn't actually finish the seven-volume manga until 1994, so the movie's plot is only covered in the first two volumes. tied up, ending up scrapped and the resulting story is much more developed and a bit wild. Read it as one of Miyazaki's best works and more faithful to his vision than the film. Anyway, within the story, it's easy to find inspiration in science fiction. the dune and the land-sea of ​​the novel, the farthest coast, this is not the first time Miyazaki has worked on a post-apocalyptic project, whether the late '70s series Future Boy Conan was about a boy sailing through a war-torn landscape.

The same goes for Nausicaa. A thousand years ago, the human weapons known as warrior gods devastated the land and from the ruin arose the sea of ​​decay, a deadly forest that produced poisonous plants and fungi and deadly airborne spores, five minutes without a mask and I would be dead, oh , and there are giant armors. Insects everywhere and their swarms and deaths help expand the forest, but in the midst of this existential threat, human factions are still waging war against each other. The people of Nausicaa live peacefully in a valley protected from the forest miasma by the ocean winds, but these dilemmas eventually collide. the valley and she has to find a way to restore peace inspired by a 12th century Japanese folk tale.

The princess who loved insects. Nausea had the unique ability to peacefully communicate with insects called om. She treats all creatures with compassion and even finds quiet solitude. Within the Sea of ​​Decay using insects emphasizes Miyazaki's message against anthropomorphism, that is, giving human traits to non-humans to make them more identifiable. Environmental scholar Ursula Heist notes that animation is excellent for opening up a world in which non-human agents work in ways that resonate with environmentalist thinking even more if they are not simply presented as humans and other types, but rather as inhabiting modes of thought. and they are completely his, Omar is far from human and certainly repulsive, and that is the point Miyazaki thought.

Reptiles and mammals are too familiar to humans, regardless of how you change the design, there is still a collection of familiar parts that use a visual combination of insects and arthropods that create creatures that are more unrecognizable and therefore resist the empathy, as he said, because most people don't like insects, they were the perfect creature to express a contrasting ecosystem and he wasn't going to use butterflies either, he deliberately wanted them to be ugly, although I suppose huge butterflies would be just as terrifying . Insects are also appropriate for this story considering that insect populations are in dramatic decline and it's not as easy to advocate for beetles or wasps as it is for adorable pandas or majestic whales, but like it or not, insects Insects are vital in all terrestrial ecosystems, we are not your enemies, we do not want to harm you, nausica emphasizes that We cannot simply discard or destroy what we want for convenience, most media that shows swarms or scary insects will celebrate their killing.

They came from another world to destroy the earth, which makes sense when the big bugs are always the bad guys, even the original Nausicaa. The English dub in 1986 cut 20 minutes of duration and made a foreshadowing for purely aggressors completely erasing the environmental message and the strange poster that has nothing to do with the content of the film also suggests violence in response, but for nausicaa the om aren't villains are simply creatures trying to live and even the most recent disney dub of the uncut film fails a bit when it comes to seeing other creatures as equals in miyazaki's animism article abroad se points out how nuances in translation subtly remove respect for nature, for example, mr or miss wind was changed to simply the wind and nausicaa, which refers to a baby omu as a good boy, was translated to a good boy phrase which is usually reserved for an obedient pet, instead om are more meant to represent the powerful unknown when it comes to. to the environment miyazaki said that the more we humans anthropomorphize something and make it an easy target for empathy, the less interesting it becomes from the beginning, we seem to have a longing for a presence or a power that is much greater than ourselves and that it is not easily understood. presence beyond our current framework or whose origins are prehistoric this longing is not unique to me but is what we all feel a memory repeated over and over again of our ancestors nature exists as an incredible force as something enormous that exceeds our little ways are more than right or wrong, so at the end of the film, instead of heading into the human battle to fight with her people, Nausicaa deviates from her path to rescue the tortured baby Omu and calm the angry herd.

What is even more fascinating is his discovery at the beginning of the film of the true nature of the sea of ​​decay. There were hints of it in the secret garden of Nausica. The forest plants and their spores were not poisonous if grown in soil and water. Later, the entire earth, after falling under the sea of ​​decay in a non-toxic area, Nausica realized that the forest had been purifying the soil. This idea of ​​nature restoring itself has been inspired by Minamata Bay for years. Wastewater filled with methylmercury from a chemical plant poisoned the water. People and animals who ate contaminated fish suffered a serious illness now known as Minamata disease, although the human tragedy here is obvious, especially since the government failed to intervene for decades.

Miyazaki was also interested in what happened to the fish. There is not much information. about the effect of mercury on fish, although I found an article that said exposure can produce various toxic effects depending on the species. Miyazaki found it fascinating how fish continue to thrive in poisoned water, especially because people stopped fishing there, so he decided to explore this idea. through the sea of ​​decay telling a story of nature recovering after man-made pollution, its ability to adapt and heal itself after devastation is what interested him, that above all nature is flexible and, After all, as the article points out, the toxic heroin in Nausica. from the valley of the wind toxicity is a relative concept the sea of ​​decomposition is only toxic from our human perspective in reality it is a life force and habitat for many other species and its spores give rise to new non-human life, in addition decomposition is also toxic an overlooked factor in healthy ecosystems as noted in an article on nature and asian pluralism and the work of miyazaki the film affirms the essential role of microorganisms and decomposition in the cycle of life the sea of ​​decomposition nausica no It's just a toxic wasteland filled with life forms including insects and microbes that are driving a new phase of evolution.

The decay that appears to our ordinary human eyes as death and destruction is actually a highly fertile and creative process at the microscopic level. The sea of ​​decay personifies these two seemingly opposite but in reality completely intertwined. forces of nature, what is easy to lose sight of, especially with Miyazaki's often beautiful depictions of the natural world, is that he also hopes to emphasize the intrinsic value of nature that is not derived solely from our enjoyment or use, but It exists in itself independently of humans. Sometimes that may seem like misanthropy, but in reality it only emphasizes the idea that humans are not the center of the universe at all.Miyazaki's words.

That is why I believe that the solution to environmental problems must be to change our perspective of preserving nature because it is useful to preserve it because it is not useful, we have to discard our old way of thinking of judging something useful or not and realize that Everything is included in nature, including things that are not useful, the ending of Nausicaa leaves us with an optimistic image. A single seed growing underground and shining in a ray of sunlight suggests that environmental recovery will be slow but not impossible, especially if we adapt to the changing world.

One thing I haven't mentioned yet is animism in general, animism is the belief that all natural things are animated. and inanimate possess a spiritual essence or soul the concept is present in nausicaa but miyazaki would explore it further in 1988 my neighbor totoro my neighbor totoro was sparked by a change in miyazaki's opinion on japan, in general he had been quite cynical about his country, which was perhaps reflected in the largely European-inspired settings in his previous work, but everything changed when he discovered the writings of ethnobotanist Saske Nikao, particularly the origins of plants cultivated in agriculture, in which Nakao discussed the hypothesis of the evergreen broadleaf forest culture, the theory that in prehistoric times broadleaf evergreen forest landscapes covered much of Asia and fueled a common culture.

This theory left a great impression on Miyazaki and revitalized his way of thinking about Japan and its nature, as anime scholar and author of Miyazaki World, Susan Napier, expressed it freed from what he saw as a narrow Japanese nationalism. Miyazaki felt he could Embracing the culture and beauty of his own country for the first time Napier also points out that's why My Neighbor Totoro's Father, an archaeologist, is studying Japan's Jomon period in his plan for the film. Miyazaki writes that it's about what we have forgotten what we do not realize what we are convinced we have lost and believing that we still have these things I propose to do my neighbor totoro continued saying it is intended to be a happy and moving film a film that allows the audience to return home with pleasant feelings of joy Lovers will feel more precious, parents will fondly remember their childhood, and children will begin to explore the bushes behind the shrines and climb trees to find a cattail.

Most people would agree that this set in rural Japan follows sisters May and Satsuki after moving to a new home with their father, while their mother recovers from an illness in a local hospital, they meet with spirits in the nearby forest, including the enormous creature Totoro, there isn't much plot, he mostly wanders around. to the climactic scene where totoro helps satsuki find the lost may, that being said it has a really nice relaxing atmosphere, largely devoid of the stress of modern life, it is often cited as having taken place in the 50s, especially considering the scribblings in kant's notebook that resemble shigeru sugita's manga. art, but miyazaki says that it is actually set in a time before television, it seems that he wanted to emphasize that it is a setting without technological distractions, it is like a memory of the post-war period when life seemed easier despite less abundance material, perhaps because the communities felt more united.

In fact, there's debate over whether any of the spirits like Totoro are real within the story, including a handful of those dark fan theories where Mei or Satsuki are actually dead at the end or whatever Miyazaki hates this one. types of theories about whether spirits are real, napier feels we never know for sure, which adds to the pleasure of the encounter. Traditionally East Asian philosophy and thought has been much more comfortable with the middle sense than Westerners. We would like to share your point of view for a while. while sir, if you don't mind, and within this middle ground are the elements of Shintoism present in the story, a belief system that is deeply tied to animism and connection to the earth.

Shinto is generally known as a native Japanese religion, although it is more of a decentralized, unstructured belief system, more about ritual and tradition than aligning with rigid dogma. Miyazaki emphasizes that he is not religious and deliberately tries to avoid overt religious symbolism. Still, you can catch glimpses of religious iconography here and there, such as Buddhist tori statues, the fox god inari most significantly. The kami are everywhere, including Totoro and his friends. Kami are deities and spirits that inhabit the natural world, both animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic, including phenomena such as weather and natural disasters, so the concept of kami is quite aligned with what animism describes, including idea that Such spirits deserve deep reverence and respect, please continue to care for us Totoro, her little companions, the soot spirits in the girl's new house and even the giant camphor tree that has a Shinto rope tied around it can be considered kami, all suggest an otherworldly world. presence and a deep connection with nature and is emphasized by Miyazaki's recurring choice to place sacred areas in dark and spooky places.

He notes that the West associates darkness with evil and light with good, but says that for the Japanese the gods often reside in darkness. like deep in the forest or mountains and eerie, overgrown isolated areas where the silence is deep. He applies this concept to the underground kingdom of Nausicaa, the ancient city submerged in tombstone and the center of the city where the giant crystal resides, the forests in the wind rising. where lovers meet again, the healing pond and princess mononoke were the great realms of the forest spirits and of course the forest where we find totoro, all evoke a disorienting sense of uncertainty and wonder, but still offer a kind of consolation which was Miyazaki's main goal with In this film it is worth noting the particular state of affairs from which the film arose, as noted in the article, the healing of nature the nature of healing to go one step beyond nostalgia and the longing for a utopian harmony with nature.

My Neighbor Totoro is a must see. Its historical context, taking into account the popularity of the film, symptomatically reveals the desolation of modern human life with its alienation from the gifts of nature, making us aware that the peaceful rural life presented in the film is, in fact, under threat of disappearance. 1988, in the midst of Japan's bubble economy, was an extravagant period marked by materialism and hyper-commercialism, but at its turning point, especially when the bubbles soon burst, people began to question their modern values, according to academic Tatsuya. yumiyama, this led to the healing craze in the 90s.

Now, in a spiritual void, the Japanese began to long for what they lost in their quest for modernity. My Neighbor Totoro and the media seemed like a bomb to people who didn't have access to the kind of nature and simpler lifestyle described in it. Miyazaki. He was disgusted with the excess and materialism in the bubble period, stating that the Japanese were not able to transcend the demon of rapid economic development and as a result we have the corruption of the world, the loss of

ideals

and the worship of material things. , but he found himself. in a dilemma blaming himself for creating more products to consume contributing to what he calls a civilization of mass consumption has long felt that the animation industry and media in general have also become subject to this consumption framework that even art doesn't matter. his level of sincerity is forced to fit within a scheme of commercialized reality, so he condemns the quality of animation the industry produces, feeling that most of it only contributes to cultural pollution and comes from a place of no understanding. or recognition.

Real human beings, you may have seen the meme where he says that the anime was a mistake and although he didn't technically say this, he might as well have taken this quote from 1979, the animator himself feels a certain level of self-satisfaction and accepting this. The situation has been subjected to the trivialization of his creative spirit. It's possible that he became an animator because he wanted to build his own fictional world, but those romantic dreams are quickly destroyed. Who could blame him for mechanically running his pencil across the paper while he sits on the conveyor belt? belt in the face of the incredible amount of work to be done, the totally inadequate production budget and production schedule, the stupidity of the announcer or sponsor or promoter and the formidable barrier of the pre-existing specialization system, there is no lack of it, it is easy to be a cog once you get used to it, Your dreams come with a contradictory reality.

He believes that children spend too much time at home raised in virtual reality and that his work only contributes to that and he is mortified when parents tell him that their children watch his movies over and over again. I had hoped that films like My Neighbor Totoro would encourage children to explore their surroundings, so again it's a return to what we've lost, emphasizing that the powers of nature and experiencing the world around us, including socializing with our communities, helps our minds and hearts heal. regarding the end napier cites kaplan and wong modernity has shattered the inherited terrain of experience and the intimate cultural networks of support and trust that until now humans have relied on for a sense of security and a meaningful life totoro offers a possibility of recovery of these intimate cultures Networks through fantasy and their vision of collective human decency, landscapes and communities like this are disappearing and Miyazaki understands that large-scale problems such as deforestation, pollution and climate change a They often seem too complicated to even think about, much less make an effort to combat in the future.

Faced with that feeling of helplessness, he feels that people should focus their attention on local efforts. His reason is that if we limit ourselves mainly to general statements about things, there are simply too many things beyond our control, so he is more in favor of an on-the-spot approach where we can work out details and details in a way. realistic. My Neighbor Totoro has inspired several conservation efforts throughout Japan and even abroad. We'll talk about the film a little later because its relaxed, healing tone helped revitalize people's sense of appreciation for the natural world, but Miyazaki's approach to environmental stories soon changed, as I mentioned, Japan's economic bubble collapsed. in 1991 due to the deterioration of the economy dubbed Japan's lost decade, as well as international political conflicts that we will talk about later.

Miyazaki felt that he could not show any other optimism. laid back movies like totoro or kiki's delivery service stating that he didn't want to pretend that children were happy, he was also fed up with the brand that ghibli mostly made soft films about nature and wanted to break away from that label feeling that if only showed the delights and elegance of nature would be a false advertiser for environmentalism somehow the post-apocalyptic film with huge insects, a sprawling deadly jungle and a giant monstrous weapon ended on a slightly more hopeful note than 1997's Princess Mononoke Now more than ever Miyazaki's attempt to emphasize how dysfunctional, traumatic and exploitative our relationship with nature really is, follows young prince Ashitaka as he saves his village from a demon, but is fatally cursed in the process, then exiled, He set out in search of a cure and ended up mediating the conflict. between a steel city and the nearby wolf gods, including their adopted human san, in search of expansion and mineral resources, the city that employs and houses several outcasts under the leadership of lady oboshi was cutting down the forest and their spirits began to take retaliation against the cursed boring god.

Ashitaka being killed earlier was a result of this ongoing dispute. Miyazaki describes this film as a period drama woven from two threads: a vertical thread of a fight between humans and spirits and a horizontal thread between a girl and a boy. This meeting is the key to his release. Although set in the Muromachi period, Miyazaki was careful to avoid common tropes and conventions associated with the time period. He loves Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, but felt it cast a spell on those who make period dramas that the depiction of this social structure. appealed to audiences of the post-war period, but is not very accurate to most actual experiences of the time, this take is greatly influenced by the writings of historianyoshihiko amino, whose studies focused on people often ignored in mainstream research, such as women artisans and the marginalized, plus miyazaki thought the samurai thing was boring and over the top at the time he actually downplayed the importance of the emperor and the samurai and Princess Mononoke are more of an afterthought and far from noble and sacred to the emperor himself.

That's good, it's supposed to be important and they understand each other. His limbs and heads were unceremoniously severed, instead Miyazaki focused on the most marginalized populations of the time and, of course, a group of forest gods. The story is set in the Muromachi period specifically because it is seen as a transitional period in Japanese history in terms of the way people interacted with the environment. According to Napier, in Miyazaki's view, the 14th century is a period of significant historical transition from a world that was still in close contact with natural and supernatural forces to a world that would become increasingly human-oriented, as he says.

It was in this period that people changed their value system from goods to money, apparently new views began to take hold, where people felt they could control nature rather than worship or revere it, even though blacksmithing facilities and communities like this didn't really exist on this scale. And women certainly weren't working on them, the industry was already a huge contributor to the deterioration of ecosystems and Miyazaki would give literal voices to the victims of that destruction and unbridled development by imagining what it would be like if nature could retaliate against our efforts. to destroy it this time in a rather horrific way, suffering perhaps the most jarring aspect of princess mononoke is the brutal violence which was again trying to move away from the notion that nature is harmless, peaceful and under our control based on the island from Yakushima in the south.

Japan wanted the forest to express an atmosphere of mystery and the feeling that something is watching even the cute Kodama. Tree spirits are a little creepy. He used silence and darkness again to create stillness in an eerie atmosphere. Apparently Miramax, the American distributor of the series. The Disney owned movie at the time wanted to add sound effects in some places because it was too quiet for American audiences, as they wanted to add a flickering noise for the butterflies or the sound of a cloud passing by, which you know are not real sounds from Ghibli, obviously. He said no to that and cut the movie for half an hour tormented by the memory of what happened with Nausica here the kami are a little more personified than in previous movies disgusting little creatures and they are angry the name princess mononoke is actually a The insult directed San Mononoke and Japanese folklore are elusive and often vengeful spirits, so the townspeople are degrading the kami and, by extension, San, essentially calling them monsters or angry ghosts.

The indifferent great spirit of the forest almost feels like a ghost, also called shishigami and Nightwalker, it is an unfathomable, disturbing and strange presence whether in ectoplasmic form or not, this only emphasizes miyazaki's stance against anthropocentrism and even anthropomorphism. Napier writes that it represents the shishigami and all its simultaneous beauty and grotesque. Miyazaki takes the film directly in an ethical direction that goes beyond the truism that humans dominate nature in this sense. The film contrasts with Disney films in which even enthusiasts acknowledge that a cutification of nature occurs in their analysis of Bambi; For example, Disney scholar David Whitley recognizes the sentimentalization of nature in the film and notes that choreographed interactions between animal friends or different species enhance wide-eyed facial features designed to appeal to human

ideals

of attractiveness. and the elimination of natural predators to create a world of idyllic innocence combine to create a sentimental point of view that is difficult to reconcile with full respect for the integrity and otherness of the natural world.

At once terrifying and beautiful, just like the joyful kodama who look on in awe and anticipation as the hunters illustrate, it's an otherworldly experience that makes you feel like you're looking at something you shouldn't be looking at, something sacred outside the realm. human. thought or understanding, but lord, we cannot, it is a sin to look at it, in fact, we receive the message that humans do not dominate this space or even the world in the promotional material of a short film a few years later, miyazaki wrote I am much more attracted to The idea of ​​preserving the forests not for the sake of humans but because they themselves are alive at the same time there is an overall message of harmony and vitality and of seeing the world with clear eyes Ashitaka was part of the Yamiche people a true ethnic group that was Displaced and driven north due to Japanese imperialism, their culture had practically disappeared in the Muromachi period, so it seems that Ashitaka represents the last remains of their people.

That's why his identity and unusual clothing were often questioned, but because of his elevated status as an outsider, more outsider than anyone else here he was more equipped to offer a third-party perspective. You two in this state of mind refused to view the situation with a heart full of hatred or revenge, especially since you would be dead soon anyway. What he saw from his unobstructed vantage point were two groups desperately fighting to survive. It is a realistic perspective of what many conflicts really are. They are rarely about good and evil and more about opposing interests or perspectives.

Miyazaki said in an interview that it would be very easy to create a scheme that represented humans as a name with bad people cutting down trees and good people protecting the trees, but that would have no relationship to the essence of human beings; It is more likely that those people who were hardworking and kind to their neighbors were the same ones who, in an effort to improve living conditions, carved the mountains and dispersed the animals. It is not enough to go around saying that we must respect the nature that we must always live. a pure life and a proper life in nature, if that is the case, what should people do today who have to live in cities?

Aren't there lives very valuable? I certainly think they are what some call ecological cinema. It is becoming increasingly popular with children, but the approach is often melodramatic, pitting heroic nature against evil humanity. Things are rarely so black and white and this approach tends to create a passive audience that doesn't have to think about anything beyond I hope the bad guys lose to Princess Mononoke. Instead, we are conflicted. Since the motivations of the town's people are at least somewhat understandable, the article Princess Mononoke and Beyond New Nature Narratives for Children argues that the film stands out as an alternative to the dominant mode that is based on the spectacle of melodrama, moral polarity and narrative forcefulness, this lack of clarity.

The cutaway conclusion leads to a rather bittersweet ending after the shishigami is decapitated and his deadly sludge is spread across the land. Ashitaka and san return the head, but it dies anyway, leaving behind a green landscape. Ashitaka wants the sand to be with him, but it seems that the problem is "Not quite resolved. It means a lot to me, but I cannot forgive humans for what they have done. We have heard the cries of despair after the ecological destruction, But where do we go now? We have to make sacrifices if we want to preserve the environment, especially because if we destroy nature we will destroy ourselves in the process again.

There is no simple solution, but most people still don't recognize it. completely the interdependence of nature and humanity, unlike Shinto beliefs that hold that we are at the mercy of these gods we still think that we have power over nature rather than the other way around, but as the years go by it is shown that we are wrong again and again, as illustrated in nausicaa, nature has grown, evolved and adapted for millions of years, human activity will cause the earth to lose biodiversity and ecosystems will have to acclimate and change course but the earth will continue to turn the creatures they will adapt to the instability or they will become extinct and give way to other species that can fish will continue to swim in Minamata Bay nature itself that is a constantly changing and constantly evolving concept that is not in danger but humans are in 2008 Studio Ghibli released Ponyo, a cute story inspired by Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid in which a goldfish who lives with his father and dozens of sisters meets a boy who runs away from home. and with her father's magic, she inadvertently becomes human like she wanted and unleashes a massive tsunami on the small coastal town, bringing back ancient animals from the late Devonian period in the process, the settings are based on the coastal town of tomonra, although much of the film is quite cheesy. and largely dedicated to children exploring their surroundings, just like Totoro Miyazaki, he said he couldn't make it too simple and innocent like he did back then, he wanted to add an extra layer to the premise so that the intensity of the ponyo's environment.

Considering the extreme weather and real-life natural disasters that are becoming more common and almost expected, the disastrous flood feels truly alarming. It is clear that the ocean was not just an interesting or pretty landscape, but something integral to communicating the idea of ​​transformation and lack. Of control in his intention for the project, Miyazaki wrote that the sea below, like our subconscious mind, intersects with the surface of the waves above by distorting normal space and twisting normal shapes, the sea is animated not as a backdrop to the story but as one of its main characters without straight lines, it becomes a world where even the horizon swells, sinks and sways, we witness the disaster through the eyes of children, their amazement at the transformed environment and also their anguish, but as we accompany them, the journey is for the most part serene, almost unsettling, given their surroundings I was a human long ago and had to leave all that behind to serve the earth Meanwhile, Ponyo's father, Fujimoto, has been compared to Miyazaki himself.

Humans are disgusting. Apparently he used to be human, but decided to leave humanity behind, disgusted and resentful due to its pollution and his reflections on its eventual demise, then to the era of those abominable humans, the ending is simplistic and optimistic, sosuke accepts ponyo as a girl or a fish and she willingly transforms into a human and they live happily ever after, although the art is impressive. Despite the added thematic layer, it is probably one of Miyazaki's least complex films and in some ways acknowledges his limitations. Due to the power of Sutka's heart, a new balance is achieved and the world calms down.

The film ends with instability and worry about the future, but that's it. the fate of the human race beyond the 21st century a theme that cannot be resolved in a single film if ponyo achieves anything it definitely adds to the recurring apocalyptic visions of environmental disaster in miyazaki's work flood waters destroy cities Fish are back, we are the virus, etc. It is another argument against anthropocentrism that attempts to free humans from the illusion that we are somehow in control. an earthquake so strong that it literally shifted the earth's axis by about 25 centimeters in 2011, a couple of years after ponyo was released, a magnitude 9 earthquake shook Japan's infrastructure and created a massive tsunami that completely devastated the coast northeast.

It also caused a Level 7 nuclear accident at Fukushima, joining only Chernobyl in that category, as meltdowns and explosions at the plant caused the release of radiation into the atmosphere. Thousands of people died and many more were left homeless and it remains the costliest natural disaster of that year in the annual ghibli movie marathon of a popular Japanese television channel they removed ponyo from the programming miyazaki has stated that we try to preserve nature because it produces nature useful to us as a species, but nature is essentially wild, denying culture and civilization despite human efforts to improve things for themselves.

Nature contains elements that are flatly opposed to our efforts. So I'll quickly discuss Lapida's castle in the sky because this section is already too long, let's go back in time. to Miyazaki's third film in 1986. It centers on an orphan girl, Sheeta, with a magic crystal whom people keep trying to kidnap in order to find the lost flying island of Lapida, homeShida's original, which Miyazaki named after Jonathan Swift's flying island in Gulliver's Travels that he helped. By her new friend Patsu and later by a band of flying pirates, she and Patsu finally reach the abandoned island, but soon military forces arrive led by the power-hungry Muska, who is one of Miyazaki's only declared villains for whom wants to use tombstone weapon technology. conquer the world is a device that is described as responsible for disasters in the bible in ramayana and its power is reminiscent of the atomic bombings in japan while patsu and shida were exploring the island, they discovered that the robots there are actually caretakers of the animals in the landscape when not faced with hostile threats as we saw earlier in the film the character of mooska shows that nature is often an obstacle to us something to eliminate and exterminate for convenience horrible things I will make them burn he dislikes the weeds in the center of the city ​​and the plans to get rid of it these dirty roots do not belong in this chamber, however, the entire city is built around a huge tree its true life force miyazaki presents the surprising notion that technology and modernity can coexist with nature if only we do not use it for destructive purposes in the article the city rises to lapida is a critical ecotopia, it was commented that the very image of such a place is shocking within American environmentalism and its uncritical utopianism and dystopianism, in addition, a robot guardian who saves the birds' nests and tends to the abundant garden of the future is anathema to both sides of the argument.

Technological utopians still consider nature to be the complement and not the companion of artificial intelligence. Much of the discourse on climate change is still infected with the idea of ​​the planet as an object of control. the idea that a robot could be a best friend to the lapidary environment is a contradiction in terms of technology it is what separates humans from communion with nature what makes us more unnatural and unethical miyazaki questions the assumption that technology is imperialist in nature through lapida island the film shows the harmony between modernity and nature, but only if we shed the impulse towards power and war when cheetah and patsu recite the spell of destruction through the crystal The weapon alone was detached from the city, despite its technology, it is more than just a force for destruction, but then it flies away uninhabited, a utopia that does not yet belong to us.

Again, these two seemingly opposite lifestyles can coexist and if the Technology alone is not enough to solve our problems, we still need to protect nature if we want a healthy balance and a relatively safer world. The aforementioned article points out that the notion that environmental problems can be solved through technological innovation has been remarkably persistent in this sense. Technological utopianism has deep roots in American environmentalism, and the fetishized nature of media attention to the next electric car, the compact fluorescent light bulb, or atmospheric engineering to counter global warming underscores the persistence of this way of thinking.

Lapida insists that the fault lies not with our technology but with ourselves. True environmental progress requires cultural change that is usually harder to engineer than a light bulb, while nausicaa gave us a somewhat hopeful ending, this film questions whether we deserve an ecotopia like lapida, the central conflict emphasizes that cultural change will probably have to Coming with the renunciation of war in most of these films, Miyazaki often describes war from human to human. Conflict as a major obstacle hindering our ability to care for the environment Miyazaki was born in Tokyo in the midst of World War II.

Some of his earliest memories are of bombed cities. His family had to evacuate at least twice to avoid air raids on his father's company. He made parts for fighter planes, a fact Miyazaki clung to with resentment and guilt for decades. In college he earned a degree in political science and economics and has since been an avowed pacifist, clearly deeply troubled by his early experiences in family history. , once said that "I am fascinated by wars and I read a lot about them. Therefore, people often ask me, Miyazaki-san, do you like war? And I respond by asking them if they think AIDS researchers like it." like AIDS, so in that sense let's talk about Porco Rosso, it's probably the most adult-oriented film Miyazaki directed having described it as an animated film for tired middle-aged men whose brain cells have turned into tofu. as a manga magazine and model graphics.

The story was commissioned as a short in-flight entertainment film which was later expanded to the full version in 1992. The film follows an Italian bounty hunter, Marco, who makes a living by defeating the sky pirates He was a fighter pilot in World War I, but sense fled the country and is hiding on islands in the Adriatic Sea. Oh, and he was mysteriously cursed with a pig's head. before the war ended i bought some patriotic bonds to help serve our nation sorry im a pig unsurprisingly miyazaki's messages are explicitly anti-fascist not only has marco run away from the line of duty but he is very aware and outspoken about the dangers of nationalism, thanks for the offer, but I'd rather be a pig than a fascist.

His American rival Curtis, who challenges him to a dogfight in the film's climactic scene, is an annoying caricature, but he is not the main antagonist, which becomes clear at the end when they both have to flee. the italian air force the real villain here is fascism and war is this imminent reality always present in the background that invades the narrative, while the film has a similar vibe to casablanca, including the nightclub the unattainable lover sorry baby , i have to fly, the shark and the protagonist's cynicism and reluctance to get involved in war or politics easy guy i'm just a bounty hunter i'm not fighting a war casablanca eventually changes his stance just as the united states finally renounced neutrality during the second world war rick's sympathies for the allies grew and he took action meanwhile it seems that porco rosso pushes not only for anti-fascism but also for a total pacifism against the war marco never stops fleeing at one point remembers the memory of a brutal air combat after which thousands of pilots ascended to the sky. bright planes disappear into the horizon leaving you behind.

He begs his newly married best friend to trade places with him. What's up with Gina? You can't leave her alone, let me go. It is a haunting scene that captures the horrific consequences of war. It is inspired by Roald. Dahl's Tale, They Shall Not Grow Old, in which a WWII RAF pilot named Finn tells a similar story to Marcos, where he witnessed other planes of all types flying together and landing on a green plane that It was heading towards a bright white light that Finn longed to join. They were killed but fate had other plans Marco's experience isn't too unexpected given how many pilots and planes from both sides never returned home, but even though it's explicitly anti-fascist, you could say he's maybe too much of a bystander. passive and His reticence seems to be explained by this tragic memory.

He is removed from society due to post-traumatic stress inflicted by the experience. The curse is a physical manifestation of the survivor's guilt and the feeling that he could have done more to help his friends. The good ones were the right ones. who died or made the life of an undead like a pig is the same. He still carries the weight of what he experienced on his shoulders and feels pressured to continue life alone because of Japan's role in World War II. Miyazaki also carries a form of guilt. especially considering that his family's financial security is derived from the war, for which he is deeply angry and ashamed for both personal and national reasons.

He said that when it comes to guilt, it is a constant theme within me, my family in Japan, my home and then Japan and the world, Japan and Asia. This guilt coils around my memories and if I lose that guilt then somehow I have the feeling that I will lose the most important thing about myself I even feel that guilt is what really supports me pigs make frequent appearances in their work often associated with some kind of curse marco is no different his pig face represents how these traumatic wartime experiences alienate veterans from other people when they return home in the article when pigs fly anime auteurism and miyazaki's porco rosso se points out that a thorny issue for Japanese culture is how to make sense of the legacy of fascism, how is it possible that decent people have let such a system take over?

How could younger generations assimilate that into their cultural narratives by setting a story in Italy on the brink of fascism? Miyazaki can explore some of these moral and ethical questions. issues that indirectly suggested that one of the reasons fascism might have been able to take power was that, citing good guys like Porco, they lost themselves in cynical complacency and refused to take a stand against it, and while it is crucial to criticize the negative aspects of the pressure for social conformity if people completely turn their back on society all they are left with is the cynical pig of marco the ending leaves a bit of a mystery as to whether his curse was lifted though The empty garden implies that he met Gina and says that she is no longer waiting for him there, but throughout the film we are aware of the even worse war that is to come and it creates a feeling of bittersweet as Miyazaki worked on Porco Rosso, he said. that the ongoing political conflicts made it a more complicated film for its post-war generation.

They had been more optimistic about the possibility of a better world since they had witnessed his battered country grow from the rubble and progress for the better. According to him, there was a sense of hope for the future, but in the early 1990s the Soviet Union collapsed. The Yugoslav Wars. It burst and the Japanese government contributed billions in financial aid to the Gulf War when Japan's economic bubble burst. Miyazaki said he was stupefied running around in a haze and fast forward to 2003, when he won an Oscar for Spirited Away and refused to attend the ceremony and protested. the iraq war saying he had thought thank you for losing the war we japanese might finally have become a little more skeptical about national claims to righteousness and just causes looking at bush all I can think is that he is possessed by the ghost of john wayne telling him that this is the way a real man should act Saddam Hussein's sense of righteousness is the same this feeling directly inspired and permeated his next film Howl's Moving Castle from 2004 he said that he deliberately wanted to make a film that was bad received in the US based on a 1986 fantasy novel by Diana Wynne Jones that tells the story of a young girl named Sophie who is cursed with an aging spell by a vengeful witch Selfie seeks out the wizard Hal to help her reverse the spell and moves into his castle with his fire demon Calcifer and his young apprentice, unlike the book which is more rooted in the classic fairy tale genre, Miyazaki makes war a more central part of the narrative, apparently began because a prince was kidnapped, but we see the war mainly from a distance, it seems that this is how miyazaki avoided it by glorifying it and turning it into a great spectacle we do not see large military battles or combats the only thing we see are the civilians on the ground victims of indiscriminate killings people who have little or nothing to do with the decisions of their governments and military, the bombings are probably similar to what Miyazaki and his family experienced in World War II.

The true essence of the pacifist aspect is what burning hatred is like. Are they the enemies or one of ours? What difference there are? There are no stupid murderers. He is definitely an infused character. Miyazaki's own anger and bitterness at first prevented war by completely ignoring the mandatory summons to fight for the kingdom. His rebellion goes against what Miyazaki describes as children's citation of loyalty, which he feels is a syndrome that gives rise to tragedies such as nations and extremist groups. forcing or convincing young people to fight in unnecessary wars or exercises of power by exploiting their loyalty only to treat them as disposable, meanwhile, madame sullivan, the king's sorceress and former mentor of the house, seems more concerned with pursuing conflict thanfor helping the citizens of his country;

She represents Miyazaki's view that these problems are usually perpetrated by the callous and fickle nature of people in power and that, despite this, people often blindly support the questionable actions of the military and leaders later on, it's as if Hal is fighting the concept of war itself, but anger begins to consume him. As he consumed other mages who signed up to fight, he began to transform into what he hated, indicated by his cursed bird form and Kalcifer warns him that he may not be able to return, you shouldn't keep flying like this, you will soon win.

Unable to become human again, she illustrates how war can ruin a person not only physically but psychologically, how it can warp our perceptions of what is right, and how even a pacifist can be blinded by senseless rage against perceived enemies. . No matter the reason or circumstance, war has the potential to turn people into monsters, eventually a bomb was dropped at exactly the designated time and the explosion occurred as planned. Miyazaki emphasizes that quote, it would be false to say that because we are on the side of justice we can go ahead and destroy our opponents and the world will be at peace.

That at least I could say would be a total lie now that I know that there are things like good and evil in the world and that people do good things, but the people who do good things are not necessarily good people, they just happen to be people. who have done good things, the next moment they may end up doing something bad and if we do not take that into account in our view of humans, we will constantly make mistakes when making political decisions or decisions about ourselves miyazaki's approach to anti-war stories It reminds me of the author Kurt vonnegut, a World War II veteran who once wrote I told my children that under no circumstances should they participate in massacres and that news about massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or joy like Miyazaki normally does. vonnegut does not have villains in his stories in 1983 miyazaki said that he wanted to create a version of beauty and the beast where the character is cleansed by being devoted to something and is transformed by being cleansed so that in the end the character becomes what we want him to be. would have been there all along, it seems he carried this out with Hal's character, in the end Hal recognizes his appreciation and devotion for his found family and continues to appreciate them peacefully the kidnapped prince was actually the scarecrow that Sophie had been helping she breaks the spell and the powers that be end the war rather abruptly in an article on countering it is pointed out that this futility and futility is emphasized at the end of the film when the conflict ends in a frivolous manner and the frivolous manner in which they conclude is arbitrary. hostilities begs the question if this is an end if this war can conclude so quickly surely another could begin just as easily but this is perhaps the point, in the end we see bombers heading into another war to repeat the cycle again, almost as ubiquitous Like environmental themes, almost all of Miyazaki's films contain some kind of flight sequence regarding this, he said that I have a strong desire to free myself from being tied to reality when I am forced to explain it, you could say that that is my fundamental reason, that is why I want to move away from a moving perspective that incorporates a feeling of space in the image that creates a feeling of liberation and that makes our souls want to greet the wind, the clouds and the beautiful land that we see unfolding very Below these are the wonderful scenes and machines that I dream of one day representing.

His admiration for airplanes obviously goes hand in hand with his love of flying. There are all kinds of them in his movies with different designs, shapes, sizes and mechanisms, it's not It's hard to say he's an aviation enthusiast, his most recent 2013 film The Wind Rises was the most focused on airplanes, but airplanes are not tools for war, airplanes are beautiful dreams, he's very loosely based. biographical. About the real engineer Jiro Horikoshi who designed the Mitsubishi Zero used by Japan in World War II, the film follows his journey in the industry designing aircraft for the military, as well as a romantic relationship, although that part is primarily fictional inspired by the novel. by Tatsu Ohori, The Wind.

Has Risen is a beautiful and haunting film that illustrates the disconnect between innovators and the ways their creations are used at one point depicts the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which Miyazaki's grandfather survived in a way that eerily parallels the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. Japan 2011 along with the rise of nationalism that arose from it It is clearly a much more personal film for Miyazaki and made him more emotional than all the others, but it was also the most controversial and was condemned by both sides of the political spectrum according to liberals and leftists, since Miyazaki did not explicitly describe the negative repercussions. of jiro's creations and primarily focused on creative and technological brilliance.

He was accused of evading Japan's war crimes atrocities and glorifying its weapons. The assembly of the ceros involved Korean slave workers and, of course, they were then used to kill thousands of people, including Through infamous kamikaze missions as Japan forged its empire in the South Pacific, the cero ran rampant. People felt that by distancing himself from the reality of these effects, Miyazaki was ignoring the responsibility for the death and destruction caused by the zero that he was focusing too much on. the personal fulfillment of one man and not enough about the global consequences of that man's actions, many critics and fans called the film unpleasant, out of touch and even morally repugnant, even susan napier alludes to its flaws in this film miyazaki creates a new kind of fantasy a story that stops just before the darker side of technological development appears, but this fantasy has a historical basis and as such is no longer so far away that the zeros were magnificent technological advances The achievements that brought death to tens of thousands are more than an inconvenient truth in our dream realm, now the land of the dead, while a pacifist essay he wrote for a special issue of Ghibli magazine drew criticism from the right-wing Japanese nationalists he opposed. the prime minister's plan to amend the constitution to allow more militarism and reiterated that Japan has not apologized enough for the war crimes committed in World War II because this Miyazaki was called the traitor and his film was considered anti-Japanese propaganda , etc.

On the one hand, he was criticized for being anti-military, anti-Japanese, and on the other, not being critical enough of Japan's role in the war, despite this avoidance of the war, and the narrative is a bit strange for him. He once said that he wants to avoid drawing airplanes in a way that that quote further fuels his infatuation with power, however, as someone who hates war, celebrates the beauty of its technology, his producer Suzuki encouraged him to make this film precisely because of those contradictory ideals. Miyazaki seems to be trying to reconcile some of those internal contradictions.

Jiro himself felt he had no options in a world where invention and technology inevitably fell into the hands of those who abused them, but at the same time German engineer Hugo Junkers, one of Jiro's heroes, died under house arrest trying To keep his technology out of Nazi hands, on the other hand, Jiro continued to contribute to the war efforts by designing airplanes and, while only lightly touched on, the reality of that dampens our perception of the film and Jiro's character, at least. that's how it is for me. Miyazaki would probably even agree, but I guess the guy really likes airplanes, the company is even named after an Italian warplane despite its immediate effect on his family from the beginning of his life and his parts factory. for airplanes is a major source of your lifelong guilt.

He liked to play since he was a child. I expressed my own desire for power by drawing airplanes with sleek, pointed noses and battleships with enormous cannons and was moved by the bravery of the sailors who, even as their burning ships sank, continued to fire their cannons to the bitter end for the men. Immersed in the hail of fire and fire spewed by the cannons of an enemy formation, it was only much later that I realized that in reality these men had desperately wanted to live and had been forced to die in vain. The Wind Rises was initially a manga series in Hobby magazine's model graphics in the early 2000s, Napier's notes citing page after page of careful, intricately rendered images of war machines are front and center. center and occupy the majority of the overall manga, rather than combat sequences, these manga seem to privilege military technology for its own sake.

As complicated works of art that almost take on a life of their own, interestingly, the engineers, including Jiro, are drawn as pigs, which might recall Miyazaki's use of pigs as a symbol of curses. Humanity has always dreamed of light, but the dream is cursed. Miyazaki wanted to portray the beauty of a craft and the dedication of a creator, but ultimately recognizes it as a cursed dream, beautiful things distorted and exploited by a corrupt world, he admits the sad truth that these planes are, ultimately, instruments of war, in an interview with a historian, he said he wanted to cite how to recover the zero fighter from the hands of military technology fanatics and military fantasy novels wanted to depict it as Doom's design really was.

It is the sad reality that many major technological developments are in some way related to war or the military-industrial complex, as discussed in an Edge article, The Wind Rises illustrates a quote of the tragic near-impossibility of combining dreams and reality, but along with this the wind rises is also the story of a man more dedicated to his work than to his family, a family dilemma. To Miyazaki as he was a largely absent husband and father in the film, Jiro loves his wife, but not as much as he loves airplanes. In parallel to Jiro's disappointment at the use of his creation, Miyazaki has also said that has no pride or sense of achievement in his work in his own way, filmmaking was Miyazaki's cursed dream, but perhaps even more significant is that the film allowed him to explore his father's moral contradictions, as I mentioned.

Miyazaki harbored a lot of guilt due to his family's role in the war. He was deeply shocked by a case in which his family was evacuating in a small truck and he had to leave behind a woman and child who were calling for help. I quote the voice says please let us continue it receded and gradually took root in my head in the same way that a traumatic event influences the fact that we had grown up comfortably in a family that was getting rich off of ammunition at a time when that most people suffered materially and that in the midst of people dying our family was able to escape in a truck where there was almost no gasoline and we ended up abandoning the people who beg us to let them in.

This is a memory that became a firm part of my four-year-old self. Miyazaki rebelled against his father for much of his life, holding on to resentment that he says built up in him like mud. They rarely saw face to face and did not understand how his father could have contributed to such a senseless war in the documentary The Kingdom. of dreams and madness received a letter from a stranger extending his gratitude to his father, who treated them with a memorable moment of kindness during the war, when they had nowhere to go. Miyazaki laughed at the moral inconsistency, fascinated by the fact that a man who sold bomber parts could turn around and be good-hearted anyway.

Much of his work seems to emphasize that duality of personality by trying to reconcile how compassion and cruelty can live simultaneously within us. Producer Suzuki notes that most people, especially those with families to feed, would not have gone against Japan's increasingly militaristic state at the time. At a later point in his life, after his father's death, Miyazaki felt that he would approach a conversation with him differently if he had the opportunity to talk to his parents again, that he would be more able to understand and sympathize with their perspective, recognizing that he cited that the lower strata of society mostly operated under a sense of realism that perhaps simply could not be reduced to militarism or nationalism and that his father was doing everything he could to protect his family in 1995, He said that if I regret anything it is that I never talk seriously about things with my old man since I was young I always looked at him as an examplenegative but at the end of the day it seems that I am like him.

I have inherited my old man's anarchist feelings and his lack of concern for hugging. Contradictions Miyazaki compares filmmaking or perhaps storytelling in general to setting up a Christmas tree. You can put in a lot of pretty, shiny embellishments, i.e. art and cinematography, but the ornamental aspects are only one part of a whole. You need a strong and solid trunk. A broader theme or purpose. with many branches to support the decoration, but a film with only one message would be like a big fat dry log propped up properly. All components are necessary to create something worthwhile and memorable.

I imagine that his characters are the branches of the tree and Needles are the details of his experiences and motivations. I think this perspective is partly what helped him create a variety of female characters throughout his career, often unconventional ones that defy stereotypes, typecasting, or one-dimensionality. It seems that he was ahead of his time in this general sense. sense, but especially in Japanese anime where excessive sexualization of female characters, even minors, is extremely common. Miyazaki doesn't cater to fan service and generally doesn't even depict an open romance. In 2001, he said that he felt that this country only offered things like crushes. and romance with ten year old girls and looking at my young friends I felt that this was not what they wanted in their hearts or what they wanted, so I asked myself if I could make a movie in which they could be heroines instead of molding . making them a strong one-note female character, what gives them agency is simply that they are active rather than passive driving the plot forward through their own choices and development with strong moments and vulnerable moments, qualities both commendable and questionable. and flawed and in other words, fallible, they are realistic, in Miyazaki's words, you need characters that are life-affirming and have clear hopes and goals.

He may have been at least partially inspired to create these life-affirming heroines by the 1958 Tale of the White Serpent, his first. color anime feature film that ignited Miyazaki's desire to pursue animation as a career, but it seems his relationship with his mother was also a factor. Producer Suzuki has stated bluntly that Miyazaki was a mama's boy among four children, he was especially close to his mother, who was bedridden for much of his childhood, sharp and strong-willed, he is said to have influenced many of the characters in her work, including recurring references to tuberculosis because you're a girl, a woman, that's a man's job, but your captain in particular, according to Napier Dola.

From the Castle in the Sky is widely considered to be a loving tribute to Miyazaki's mother. Dola's meddling and extravagance clearly resonate with the Miyazaki children's memory of his Miyazaki younger brother. Shiro wonders if on some level Lapida was an awkward but fiery parting gift to his recently deceased. Mother At the end of the film we see Dola and her burly sons perched on her fleet of flying machines offering the children a family to return to if they ever need one. I think Miyazaki's respect for his mother definitely influenced his ability to create these characters that felt so real while varying so much in age and behavior Nausicaa seemed to be the main starting point a kind and loving person but not as harmless and delicate as they tend to be. to be these types of caring characters, for example, she was still susceptible to anger since she knew she killed a group of people and this was not presented as an empowering moment, but as something she expressed remorse for and While it would have been easy to go with the trope of a sweet nature-loving woman pitted against an aggressive, power-hungry man, the main antagonist was also a woman, Kushana, who was mauled in a bug attack, sees the om like the enemy and wants to fight to reclaim the land, but she's not a one-note villain.

She seems reasonable in some cases and she really wants to talk things out in this one. In the sense that it feels like a precursor to Princess Mononoke's Lady Oboshi who fights against nature for what they believe is the greater good for the good of humanity and because creatures like om are easy to vilify in science Fiction, Kushana would be the hero in most stories like this. Through these types of characters, Miyazaki reinforces the notion that if you want to write interesting and developed female characters, sometimes the best place to start is to ignore that label entirely, as if the character is a woman and it's no big deal. say that it should never matter that identity will usually inform your experience and perception of the world in some way, such as Howl's Moving Castle's Sophie, which is a particularly interesting exploration of the stigma of aging using a curse to directly contrast between the social freedom allowed by Age vs.

Limitations of Youth in Grandma's Uplifting Article Elizabeth Parsons writes that in Miyazaki's balancing act older women can be powerful and weak, positive and negative, protective and selfish, maligned and loved; In short, they cannot be simply categorized or stereotyped and they cannot be dismissed as Fantasy Male Factors embodied by evil witches, that's right, I am the scariest of them all. Sophie was cursed by old age and sure it came with the aches and pains of it, but on some level she actually felt liberated by that, if anything, the doubts and uncertainty of youth. The real curse was that she was plagued with insecurity because women are socialized to value physical appearance above all their other traits.

I have never been beautiful in my entire life if self-confidence was established or expressed openly it lessened the curse of it but it was common. self-hatred and low self-esteem let the spell take over again sophie you are beautiful with just your old appearance she felt safe enough to speak her mind and do whatever it took to take care of herself miyazaki emphasizes that it would be a lie to say that becoming young again would mean living happily ever after. I didn't mean that I didn't want it to seem like getting older was such a bad thing.

Sophie transformed from a shy and timid girl to an outspoken and honest woman. It is not a motif that is often seen and especially with an old woman taking up the entire screen, it is a great theatrical risk but it is an illusion that being young means that you are happy in the book room tells her that she likes being dressed up and although she Annoyingly, it's true enough that the curse became a way to protect herself from judgment on her true crone form; she could hide away peacefully without worrying about people's standards of attractiveness and instead, focusing on what was really important to her, she took pride in her new role. in the castle, which was certainly traditional, but that is not inherently bad, it is a common and perhaps the oldest way in history to express love to those around you, which many can attest to if you have a mother or grandmother who always He asks you if you are hungry and insists on feeding him regardless of the answer, Howell and Mark will even do the same in this expression of love and division of responsibilities, taking on the task of cooking and doing laundry, wanting to share this role of taking care of the home.

In summary, these everyday tasks are shown. To be as valuable as the magical howl she uses to transform her space, only Sophie did it without magic, Parsons writes. Sophie's real powers, rather than those of fantasy or those typically associated with the grandmother she also calls herself On the surface, this logic is open to criticism as a limited description of what women can do and what they are reduced to. older and no longer sexually desirable women as representative of typical cultural patterns, by refiguring these conventional grandmother behaviors as powerful, magical, heroic, and successful, the film transcends the problems associated with feminist offerings to show empowered women. only if they are successful.

Meanwhile, in traditionally masculine tasks, her character transcends ideals of beauty and even welcomes into her home the Witch of Waste, another old woman who used to suppress her age with magic due to insecurity, but was forced to accept it, curiously. She is the main one who had to overcome her excessive vanity. I see no point in living if I can't be beautiful. He seems to do it based on his naturally black hair in the end, so by then he and Sophie feel free and comfortable enough with themselves to live openly and shamelessly in love with the true versions of each other the beast no longer transforms romance. open is relatively rare in miyazaki films but in hal's moving castle, although sophie has an elderly appearance for most of the film, two men fell in love with her for her heart more than her outward appearance, she saves them both and manages to end the war in the process.

The realization that her kind nature would always be more valuable than her appearance is what transformed her confidence into her spirit with a little help from her. The family, like I said, Miyazaki doesn't usually prioritize romance in his narratives, but when he does, he again wants to portray it as a part of life that should be affirming and sincere. He once said that I have become skeptical of the unwritten rule that simply because a boy and a girl appear in the same film, a romance must arise, rather I want to portray a slightly different relationship, one in which the two two inspire each other to live, if I can, then perhaps they are closer to portraying a true expression of love in that note princess mononoke's san and ashitaka portray a loving relationship in complicated terms throughout much of the film, she seems to represent miyazaki's feelings of misanthropy like fujimoto and ponyo.

I never hate all of you humans and along with the kind side. and a nature lover like Nausicaa, she is often angry and murderous, it would have been easy to make her a heroine who is the unquestioned champion of nature, but instead, like her adversary, Lady Oboshi, she sees the world with misty eyes. for hate, look everyone, this is what Hayford looks like. This is what she does when she catches you raised by wolves She has only interacted with other humans in the context of violent conflict Meanwhile, Lady Oboshi operates with more arrogance than malice as Kushana She believes she is justified in her campaign against nature Her affinity because the outcasts seem to have solidified an us versus them mentality and in their mind the angry spirits wreaking havoc on their people are the same as the samurai emperor who attacks them and attempts to subjugate them, on the one hand he employs and shelters former sex workers. -thieves and ostracized lepers, on the other, she is killing the forest gods so she can expand her operation at the expense of the environment.

She clearly feels that she is doing the right thing and doesn't seem cruel for cruelty's sake. That brain is a pig. I am the. one should have cursed you, not you, neil gaiman, the english author who wrote the english script for princess mononoke said that in a meeting with miramax they were trying to press the question of whether lady oboshi was good or bad, if the Shishigami was good or bad, responded Miyazaki built a film in which there are no bad guys, there are only consequences. The black and white binary system of good and evil that dominates so many narratives, especially in children's media and especially Disney, sets a generally poor precedent for our perception of other people who are almost never simply good or bad, Lady Oboshi, It represents the broader concept of modernity and, by extension, the idea that modernity and technological advancement are not inherently bad, but are just a means for humans to try and improve their lives.

Sometimes they get out of control, as Napier writes, illustrating the kind of moral compromises that being a leader or simply being human can impose on us, both Oboshi and San seem to operate under the notion that only their own people matter and are worth living and draws on much of miyazaki's work feels this is the crux of most human conflict to touch on a film we haven't yet discussed on kiki miyazaki's delivery service places a witch in the modern era for a story about 1989's coming of age, which is quite appropriate The timing, considering that the '90s were full of witch stories, when Pam Grossman awakens the witch, she writes that the teenage witch is an avatar of the miseries, the insecurities and the strange inclinations that many of us hold in mind as we navigate our young lives.

Miyazaki seems to echo that. feeling since he wanted a film focused on young girls navigating the uncertainty ofyouth an expression of solidarity with young viewers who find themselves torn between dependence and independence. He also portrays the discord between tradition versus modernity and how the former gradually gives way to the latter as it progresses. Young people are beginning to succeed in the world on their own. I wish I had something nice to wear. My dress is so ugly. It tells the story of 13-year-old Kiki, who leaves her home and her family behind to spend a year alone as part of her family.

Thanks to witch training, since she knows how to fly, she quickly finds work as a delivery girl, but exhaustion and self-doubt weigh heavily on her conscience, so she loses her magical abilities and has to overcome insecurity. and loss of passion from her. The corporate lifestyle is difficult in general, but she is 13 years old. and working in a new and unknown city that will surely make you lose a little of your spark, not only that, but she also has to see other young people having fun freely and doing whatever they want while she has responsibilities to attend to.

She made a delivery to my house on my birthday, you mean she is working at her age. Kiki's magic is tied to the spirit within her, so it is not surprising that she loses her abilities when she has to fly out of obligation rather than for her own fulfillment. It is deliberately parallel to that of her new friend Ursula. Kiki lifestyle develops a network of relationships within the city, mostly different types of women and girls in different phases of life. her older women's guide includes her mother and her grandmother. the pregnant baker who shelters her and employs her, her first client, the fashion designer, the older women she helps and of course Ursula the artist, that same spirit is what makes me paint but each of us needs to find our own inspiration when Kiki loses Her magic takes a break with her at her cabin in the woods Ursula describes how her and Kiki's artistic creativity magic seems to operate in similar ways and that when she loses her own creativity it only means that it is time to take a step back. long walks looking at the scenery falling asleep at noon not even thinking about flying their friendship illustrates how important it is for young people, especially those on the verge of independence, to have role models to guide them miyazaki said ursula understands kiki's anguish in an affirmative way.

I think these aspects are much more valuable to Kiki than whether her business will be successful and whether she will receive help. To those around her, even when she is not aware of it, what is important to Kiki is not that her business is successful, although of course that is certainly important, but how she herself is able to meet many different people. Kiki follows Úrsula's advice and tries not to insist. About her temporary flaws at the end, when her Tombow friend needs help and Kiki regains her power, Miyazaki wanted to emphasize that not only will she live happily ever after, but that she will still face setbacks, but that she will be able to recover.

To them, the fact that she still can't talk to her cat Gigi is another sign of her growing independence and self-sufficiency, yet her new community will always be there to affirm her path and Help her along the way, in the end she will. Be OK, Miyazaki's films tend to take their time, which makes them completely stand out when it comes to animation. You'll find a few action sequences here and there - while they're often subtle and measured, they don't require a thousand cuts to ramp up the intensity - but for the most part, the scenes are simple, leaving room to breathe and contemplate.

This is probably one of the main reasons why people mean when they say Ghibli films are comforting or cozy. Some would say the slow momentum is just a cinematic strategy rather than a theme, but I think it speaks to something bigger than practical pacing or attractive cinematography; conveys a vital message about life. Miyazaki feels that children know best how to live in the present that for them the present does not exist just for the sake of the future, so they are the best example of observing the wonders of ordinary life, he began to explore the concept for the first time.

In the 1972 film Pandago Panda, directed by his old colleague Isa Takahata, it is about a girl with a found family, a dad and a baby panda, in it Miyazaki hoped to represent a vision of Japan as it could have been and, by extension , how children could experience it. He said that at the time it was thought that children liked flashy, loud movies, but we thought that fun and excitement were best found in the small moments of everyday life that we see. back in ponyo, he marvels at running water, the function of a light bulb, the comfort of a fuzzy towel, a hot cup of milk and honey, and a bowl of lovingly prepared ramen.

For Miyazaki, seeing the world through the eyes of young children allows us to look at things anew. Again, what we take for granted can be regarded with awe or at least gratitude. Appreciating simple, mundane pleasures is often a staple of life media that is particularly popular in Japan. They underline the poetic nature of everyday life. Kiki learned this lesson. Ursula's slow down when life becomes too irritating and full of noise remember to return to the simple joys that bring you peace miyazaki represents rainy days naps sunsets bike rides meals with people you love or even things like taking care of the home with all the love and the charm they deserve, especially all the food.

It may not necessarily be illustrating life exactly as it is, but it is showing it as it feels. I don't know if food ever looks this good, but it definitely tastes this good. Animated works often appear to be either a vessel for dialogue or action to drive the plot forward or for action or comedy purposes, it is understandable given that every move a character makes, unlike live action, must be meticulously planned and painfully deliberate, especially with the time-consuming, sasuke-heavy hand-drawn animation. through a fence now folds the laundry or the path to the hero puts on his shoes moments roger ebert affectionately calls gratuitous movement these are useless and time consuming in the grand scheme of the plot, but they help paint a truer picture of the world than that of these characters.

We talked about this in an old video, but it's an important choice to have a mostly silent scene with little to no action, often to convey emotional processing. Miyazaki described these moments as ma or emptiness denoted by the pauses between applause that this intentional emptiness inserts. to allow a breather and take a moment to build tension and impact so the film can grow to a broader dimension. There are moments like Lupine resting in his car, Nausica meditating in the toxic forest or Kiki waiting for customers at the bakery. Long moments of nothing. with very few cuts, children rarely have these kinds of moments and media made for them, Miyazaki feels that if you have a constant tension at 80 degrees all the time you just go numb, the people who make the films are afraid of silence and They want to wallpaper. and covering it up they worry that the public will get bored what my friends and I have been trying to do since the 1970s is try to calm things down a bit, not just bombard them with noise and distractions and follow the path of emotions and feelings of children while making a movie, if you stay true to joy, wonder and empathy, you don't have to have violence and you don't have to have action, they will follow you instead of giving us something to distract us from our own thoughts we are forced to consider them while we wait with the characters like in perhaps the most famous scene from studio ghibli where may and satsuki wait in the rain for their father's bus to arrive. may had already met totoro but her older sister was skeptical as they stood in the dark near a sanctuary.

Totoro casually appears next to them and Sasuke offers them an umbrella. They wait together in silence until Totoro is delighted by the sound of rain and then his bus arrives followed by his father's. Bus shortly after on the surface nothing important happens, although on a character level it is Satsuki's disconcerting introduction to Totoro and the end of his skepticism and, despite its calm nature, it is Miyazaki's most recognizable scene. There is another uneventful but hugely impactful scene in 2001's Spirited Away. Away is another film that heavily features kami and Miyazaki likes to think of it as a descendant of Japanese folktales.

In it we follow the young and sullen Chihiro as she moves to a new town, she and her parents stumble upon what looks like an abandoned amusement park after her parents are cursed, she is stuck working at a bathhouse that serves spirits, Miyazaki lends to the ideal of simple pleasures and appreciating what we have by weaving anti-consumerism into the film's message, first then eating piles of food in a seemingly empty restaurant her parents were transformed into pigs second Chihiro had to help cleanse the spirit stinky who turned out to be a polluted river spirit his corruption reflects what mass consumption and materialism does to nature and was directly inspired by miyazaki's experiment cleaning a local river and finally, after spending time in the house of baths, the faceless spirit became consumed by greed and excess, growing in size and impatience.

Jihiro had treated him kindly from the beginning, so she repeatedly tried to win his affections with favors and gold. No, I only need one, I don't want any, but thanks, what would you like? Just name it. He couldn't understand why she didn't operate the same way as everyone else in the bathhouse. Why she didn't always want more than. what she needed, take the gold, take it, are you going to eat me?, take it, she had not settled for excess and desperation for money and she did not understand this difference in their priorities, she could not appeal to a superficial ideal as easily as he could. have with everyone else I haven't gone crazy where is your house?

Don't you have friends or family? no, I feel alone in response, she fed him the dumpling that the river spirit gave him and he quickly began to regurgitate everything he consumed in his insatiable spree cleansing himself of the influence of the bathhouse, he followed her to the train platform where Miyazaki once again slows everything down to a silent scene where a hero contemplates how much he's had to grow in the last few days, it's just a few characters sitting around. on a train watching the world go by outside the window this train ride where not much happens on the surface is the emotional climax of the film in which a hero processes his feelings and experiences a level of introspection he seems to have never achieved before Miyazaki said, "Children today feel sheltered and distanced from reality to the point where they have only a vague idea of ​​what it means to be alive, where the only solution is to inflate their weak sense of self into the hero's thin limbs." and her deliberately annoyed and apathetic expressions are symbolic of this, but as reality sets in and she faces directly a danger she cannot easily extricate herself from, she demonstrates an adaptability and toughness that not even she had been aware of. and realizes that she has a life force in her that makes her capable of bold decisions and action, it all led to this point of maturation of standing still and legitimately thinking about her place in the world, realizing that she was capable of doing more than I thought.

It's a stark contrast to the chihuahua we saw so distracted at the beginning of the movie. and unsure of herself as kiki's delivery service gone is a coming of age narrative in which a young girl gains a sense of independence and it all leads up to this quiet contemplative moment on a train, we sit with her there in that moment and because there is nothing to make noise or distract us, we are thinking along with it, this type of meditative rhythm to achieve a certain emotional tone is a masterful feat, not only animation but cinema in general, it is the same type of atmosphere that you tried to create in the ghibli. museum where cameras are not allowed so visitors can really pay attention and take everything in fully and I'm sure the theme park opening later this year will be pretty similar, especially considering there won't be any attractions like the characters from their movies .

They are encouraged to live in the present in each avenue. Miyazaki prioritizes genuinely exploring and experiencing the world around him as it is before the opportunity is missed. Along with the silence and slow pace, there is often a sense of melancholy imbued in Miyazaki's work, which I don't. I think it can really come down to simple nostalgia, although it's definitely an interesting factor. He believes that nostalgia is not something you acquire when you grow up, but rather a fundamental part of our existence, even from the time we are children, a kind of deeply rooted longing. in the depths of oursouls that never really goes away, the innate feeling of being incomplete in some way and there are certain moments, no matter how small, that have the ability to stay with us for a lifetime, moments of emotional potency that images or art will never be. fully.

Able to capture the way our memories Explain when people talk about a beautiful sunset? Do you hurriedly flip through a book of sunset photographs or go in search of a sunset? No, you talk about it based on the many sunsets stored within your feelings. deeply etched in the folds of your consciousness the sunset you saw when your mother was carrying her so long ago that the memory is almost a dream or the sunset-drenched landscape you saw when for the first time in your life you were not you were enchanted by the scene around you or the sunsets you witnessed that were wrapped in loneliness, anguish or warmth.

Sometimes I think that there is something accumulated in the human mind, something that is in our memory that we cannot remember but have not forgotten or something buried even deeper. Like the stones that form the foundation, it could include things like our DNA, something in the limbs, something we don't understand very well, something connected to something else, which is completely mysterious, it seems that it has been trying to regain the intensity of those feelings. and memories from throughout his career, Totoro's catchphrase was: "we'll reuse something you've forgotten", although it's worth noting that he said he didn't do it out of personal nostalgia and was again trying to encourage children to play. outside and use their bodies, minds and imagination, yet the film's atmosphere emits a kind of longing for a simpler, rural lifestyle of a different time, a phenomenon some scholars have called eco-nostalgia: the desire Returning to a period when we were more in tune with nature and life didn't seem so complicated, there is also the idea, often supported by research, that spending time in nature has positive benefits for health, fresh air, birdsong, pretty views and all that good stuff, this way you can think of my neighbor totoro. like a yashike, a slice-of-life subgenre that portrays characters living in calm, peaceful, and healing environments.

The landscape and characters of My Neighbor Totoro appear to have been influenced by Miyazaki's own childhood, including the girl's sick mother, as if Miyazaki's mother was bedridden. with tuberculosis for several years and as satsuki miyazaki had to take over in the house producer suzuki once insisted that a child as good as satsuki could not exist and miyazaki angrily told her that she did exist, that was me, so although Miyazaki denies it. There seems to be some merit to the idea that the film was influenced by personal nostalgia through the romanticization of the natural landscape and due to its distaste for extensive urbanization, it can be said that it misses this type of style of film. life, many would dismiss his complaints as the rants of an old man. man of my time, but there is at least some truth in what he says about how industrialization and the culture of instant gratification have altered our values ​​and quality of life.

Instead, My Neighbor Totoro's setting provides a healing space that is both charming and relaxing. It's a break from the rapid pace of modernization that most of us have become accustomed to, and even if you've never lived in a place like this, its appeal and calm energy run deep, so this kind of longing isn't limited to the people. with real nostalgic memories of times like this, as described in the article longing for absolute satoyama, these are eco-nostalgic concepts that glorify a lost past that many urban Japanese might have experienced only in their early childhood, perhaps when visiting relatives in the field, but not As a historian of everyday life, Boyam uses the term pop nostalgia to name images of nostalgia popularized by those who have little or no experience of the past situation they long for.

Such imagined nostalgia for rural Japan can be found in My Neighbor Totoro, which is especially appealing. to the urban audience and feeds their feelings of loss, whether imagined or real, they are basically suggesting that the aesthetic images of the film are a hyperreal version of things that do not represent this type of lifestyle as it really is, but rather a vision romantic and sentimental. vision of a life that can actually be quite difficult and it is true that things are rarely as vibrant, beautiful and simple as they are in ghibli films, but it still evokes the feelings of peace that we experience in the moments when Things feel bright and cheerful, Napier writes, although the exceptional beauty of his images creates another world of immense appeal.

It is not an other world in itself but a critical tool that finds the current world insufficient, it has been suggested that it is That's why Mein Satsuki needed Totoro in the first place to transcend a painful reality: his sick mother and inhabit a world where everything is calm, his acorns grow and fear is kept at bay for just a time. Things that don't make sense, including the injustice of the world, can be accepted and assimilated as part of the healing process. It seems that this repeated attempt to capture this distant feeling has been a bittersweet adventure for Miyazaki and clinging to hand-drawn animation seems to be another attempt to hold on to a fragment of the past so as not to lose another part of himself in modernization, but he recognize. the futility of viewing the past through rose-colored glasses quote it is difficult to strip the past of any sentimentality and glamor we have added to it a memory that may have been the size of a single postage stamp at one time suddenly grows into a picture of five feet by four feet for all the joy and beauty depicted in his films and our corresponding feelings when we watch them, his creator can't seem to capture those feelings himself, it seems like he's somehow trying to prove himself through the art and always striving for something that is out of reach longing for something that can only exist now as a memory and this sense of loss has only intensified as he ages at the subsequent turning point in 2008, he wrote when you reach old age , a door creaks open. that door opened for me a few years ago what I see through the door is not a straight path but a foggy gray world as if heaven and earth have merged when I turn around I see a familiar alley but I can't go back there for the only time.

What I can do is walk into the gray world here and there I see the shadowy figures of my elders walking a little ahead of me, but it's not that we build a sense of solidarity and I must walk alone to their The characters continue, I still think that The one who most reflects Miyazaki is Marco, who first appeared to him as the image of a single pig flying alone. This is the vision he imagined as he saw himself as a cursed man facing the impermanence and accumulated disillusionment he repeatedly speaks of. missing out on other possibilities of life that existing here now means missing out on the possibility of becoming countless other selves and the world of animation represents the longing for those lost selves and the attempts to experience those lost possibilities even as it feels like we are trapped inside.

These limitations and the morbid realities of the world of animation have offered a modicum of hope, the opportunity to free ourselves from our complexes and tangled relationships so that we can live strong in a freer and more open world. Miyazaki's art is striking because though he evokes feelings of gratitude. and joy it's not like he ignores the reality of suffering within his narratives there is the grim knowledge that people have had these problems for hundreds of years and we will have to continue living repeating the same mistakes there are angry ghosts around us dead from wars , disease, hunger and no one cares, in truth, he feels that humanity is desperate and irredeemable and has no faith that humans can control our egos enough for the change required.

That's partly why he's earned a reputation for being grumpy and pessimistic, so you say you're under a Curse, well, so what, the whole damn world, but ultimately he uses his art to try to fight against his natural pessimism. It's a life strategy embedded in him from the beginning, from the moment he finished watching the story of the white snake. I realized that, behind a facade of cynical statements, he was actually really in love with the pure, serious world of the film, even if it was just another cheap melodrama. He could no longer deny the fact that there was another self, a self he desperately longed for.

To affirm the world rather than deny it, he seems to pursue this type of affirmation primarily with ambivalent characters and settings. We've already touched on this a bit, but it's an aspect worth highlighting, as I think it's the most vital element in almost all of Miyazaki's films. seems to be the central tenet of his view of the world and shows his confrontation with cynicism most clearly in Western cinema. Things are often clear: there is a bad person doing bad things and a good person is the protagonist whom we root for to stop them. Miyazaki paints. a view of the world that is more true to life, one with bad circumstances, bad decisions, bad reasoning and very few genuinely bad people, most of the time, if there is even an antagonist, we can consider things from their point of view , our perspective of them changes drastically at the end or even become a dear friend, he finds it difficult to portray a purely evil person because as he works on his projects for years, the characters become more real to him, so who imagines what their own lives and motivations might have been for this pattern.

It's even evident in his first feature film, he directed Cagliostro Castle back in 79, although the antagonist is a fairly classic villain, the main character, Lupine, was also originally something of an idiot in the manga and anime.series is Grandson of Maurice Leblanc's gentleman thief and master of disguise, Arsene Lupine, and followed in his footsteps into the occupation. Lupine is a clever conspirator and channels James Bond and his brand of violent adventures and promiscuity. Napier writes that he was also the kind of openly man. sexist who could be booed off screen these days a man largely ruled by lust for money, women and the thrill of the chase miyazaki and takahata directed some of the series' episodes, but he had other plans for the movie in which I wanted lupine to be more sympathetic and understanding.

In a fan club newsletter, he argued that Lupine would not be motivated by superficial reasons, but that in his soul a rage swirls towards the machinery of society that suffocates humanity and he tries to bury the falsehood of his heart by driving himself forward. himself to the action he is struggling to give. the meaning of his life and longs for someone who can take him into that fight despite the protests of the fans, he fulfilled that plan by transforming Lupine into a character who had grown from his life of greed and debauchery into a somewhat more honorable and Thoughtful that proves that anyone can change Another often overlooked character is Princess Mononoke's Jigo, who at first seemed like something of an ally but then became a major antagonist.

Miyazaki considers him the most common type of person in the world, an approachable person who fits well into his role and who usually operates on the basis of what is beneficial to them, although he may feel conflicted with what he is doing and fully recognizes questionable aspects, you will ignore it and continue to feel like you don't have much choice, even if your actions are frustrating and your reasoning is cowardly. miyazaki said that if we disowned these types of people we would have to disown almost all human beings. I give up. I can't beat fools. This is often the reality of what it means to be alive.

It's not so much good or bad as just trying to do it. survive and miyazaki insists that we must survive stressed over and over again in the recurring feeling we must continue living you must live even if you die in vain he is not dead son he is here right now trying to tell us something that it is time for the two living while visiting a leper sanatorium in the '90s, when patients were still forced into isolation, he learned something that became vital to his outlook on life writing in the midst of no matter what kind of misery, there is joy and laughter in human life tending towards ambiguity I have never seen a place that shows this so clearly.

The world is cursed, but you still find reasons to continue living. That's why this particular scene speaks to Miyazaki's recognition of life's difficulties, but at the same time, her insistence on embracing it and living it fully. of optimistic nihilism instead of giving up letting go and allowing misery and apathy to prevail, you mustremembering the resilience of human beings through all the difficult times in history, knowing that an imperfect ending is all we can get, but the fact that we have history. not at all also a gift in his proposal for princess mononoke, he wrote the battle between the rampaging forest gods and humanity it cannot end well there cannot be a happy ending but even in the midst of hate and slaughter there are things worthy of life it is possible to have wonderful encounters for them to occur and for beautiful things to exist, it would represent hatred, but only to show that there is something more valuable.

I will act out a curse to show the joy of being free from it. It would represent the understanding that the boy has of the girl and the process by which the girl opens her heart to the boy in the end the girl will probably say to the boy I love you Ashitaka but I cannot forgive humanity smiling the boy will probably say that it's okay, let's live together in peace it's clear that miyazaki sprinkles his own package of contradictions and all our contradictions on almost every character he creates, he seeks to amplify the good parts and still wants to acknowledge the not so good because it's real to live with that balance It is something we all have to do and yet there are things worth working for.

Contradictions are worth living for, the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will applies not only to him but to all of us and is one of the main reasons why he has managed to perfect the art of connecting and impacting us on a level deep and sincere in this last quote. It was about Kiki's delivery service, but I think it applies to all of his work. Basically I think I just want children to know that the world is deep and full of variety, that there are infinite possibilities in the world they live in and that they are a part of this world maybe it's enough to just say that the world is rich and precious and that they have it in their hands.

Honestly, I made this movie just wanting to tell you guys don't worry, you can do it right. There is another one directed by Miyazaki. The film will be released next year and will be titled How Do You Live, based on the 1937 novel of the same name. If the title is any indication, it will have a similar feel to his other work, according to a long-time Ghibli colleague. The 2016 television documentary called Never Ending. man would have been better translated to the man who was never finished even at the age of 81 can't help but throw himself into his craft producer suzuki said miyazaki is creating the film for his grandson as a way of saying that grandfather is moving towards next world soon, but he will leave this movie behind for you, it's fitting considering the last sentiment he expressed at the turning point was that children are the spirit of hope for a better future, although perhaps the movie is his farewell to everyone , is bittersweet but moving.

A cynical and grumpy old man has dedicated his life to inspiring younger generations to have more hope and optimism for the world than ever before and we hope that his masterpieces will continue to inspire and uplift people for generations to come. Hello everyone, thank you so much for Watch I can't believe we've reached 100k, that's crazy. If you like our videos, consider supporting the channel for just two dollars on Patreon. It's only like the cost of a chocolate bar a month, and of course supporting and appreciating great films is pretty important. to us, so we want to thank mubi for sponsoring this video. mubi is a curated streaming service, a place to watch beautiful, interesting and incredible cinema every day. mubi releases a new film, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs.

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