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| Promoting "Porco Rosso" in 1992 |
A few months ago I saw that a new version of the “Director Hayao Miyazaki's Works Collection” blu-ray box was being rereleased early July in Japan from Walt Disney Home Video. Previously released about a decade ago, this new edition was to include his latest film, “The Boy and the Heron (How Do You Live?)”. While I had the vast majority of Miyazaki’s films on DVD, I had not collected any of his films on blu-ray with the exception of “Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro”, of which I had bought the Japanese version which contained English subtitles. I got this version to avoid the existing English language blu-rays which completely replaced the credits with English ones.
From “Spirited Away (Sen and Chihiro's Spiriting Away)” onwards, I had started to find it more difficult to figure what he was trying to say with his works, and gradually became quite frustrated with him as a director. I felt that Miyazaki’s films had become rather surreal and a little nonsensical. I also noted his insistence on including odd black gloopy creatures, or similar, which seemed to inhabit almost every single one of his films since “Princess Mononoke”. But it was “The Wind Rises” which rankled me the most. I did not understand that film due to the fact it was trying to mesh two plots together unsuccessfully, jammed in a weird subplot about a German man who resists the Nazis, and quite frankly the subject matter was a difficult sell. It addition having the monotone Hideaki Anno voice the main character (and whose voice is very distinctive) was baffling to me. I didn’t even bother getting that film on DVD or blu-ray when it came out after watching it in the cinema.
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| The blu-ray box set |
However, I went and saw “The Boy and the Heron (How Do You Live?)” and thought it was his best film in the last 20 or more years. With the deprecating yen, the blu-ray box set only cost me a little less than AU$600, which for 12 films plus a couple of bonus discs I thought was a fantastic deal. The only issue was “Cagliostro” wasn’t subtitled unlike the other films, which I was fine with as I had already had that one on blu-ray. Curiously all of the special features that appear on individually released blu-rays, like theatrical trailers, had been stripped out of the discs in this set. It also included the music video/short film of Chage and Aska's “On Your Mark” on a single disc, which seemed like a waste of a disc as it only runs for seven minutes. The box set also contains two additional discs; the first disc has the pilot film for an unmade TV series of “Yuki’s Sun” from 1972 and three Miyazaki directed TV episodes of “Akado Suzunosuke” from the same time period. The other disc has the full 90 minute 2013 press conference where he announced his retirement. Neither of those discs are subtitled.
Upon watching all 12 films again, I have changed my mind on a few of them and others I have confirmed my like or dislike for them. My absolute favourite films of his are “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind”, “Porco Rosso” and “Princess Mononoke”. That has never changed. The other films I love, but not as much as the first three; “Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro”, “Laputa: Castle in the Sky”, “My Neighbour Totoro”, “Kiki's Delivery Service”, “Howl's Moving Castle” and “The Boy and the Heron (How Do You Live?)” Maybe “Kiki” is the weakest of those films, because at certain points I found it really hard to figure out what was going on in Kiki's head or why she did the things she did. I had changed my mind on “Laputa” and “Howl” from the last time I watched them. I especially came to love the bishounen lead in the latter.
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| Ponyo |
I’ve already talked about my bewilderment over “The Wind Rises”. As for “Sen and Chihiro”, it’s a well-made film brimming with great ideas, but it just left me cold. For some reason it doesn't do a lot for me. For “Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea”, Miyazaki aimed for a very young child audience, but I don't think the film has the charm of “Totoro”. Everything in it from its artwork to storyline has been simplified way too much and a lot of it is a bit too surreal. I prefer the way “Totoro” is grounded in reality as such. I am clearly not the key demographic for this film.
Watching the films again, some which I last saw 15 years ago or more, I got to thinking about how anglophone fans of Studio Ghibli, as well as film critics and academia have put Miyazaki and the studio itself on a pedestal. It’s grown to mythical status and dare I say their analysis of his works barely resembles reality. For example, I have always disagreed somewhat with the critical and fandom analysis that Miyazaki is a feminist or shows feminist themes in this work. Or more accurately; I think Miyazaki isn’t as feminist as they make out. I suppose in comparison in western cinema it’s a bit of a low bar to clear. What Miyazaki does is put the female characters in his films on a pedestal. They are idealised versions of girls and women. But what also struck me watching these films again was how the vast majority of characters, male or female, barely stray outside some fairly rigid ideas about masculinity and femininity. In particular I was taken aback by how both Sheeta in “Laputa” and Sophie in “Howl” take on the “homemaker” role in the respective “households” where they do all the cooking and cleaning, without any real complaint, while the men of the households are messy, quite masculine and never help out.
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| The air pirates volunteering to help Sheeta in "Laputa" |
Gina in “Porco Rosso” is also interesting in terms of the way she is presented. While she is very independent for an Italian woman in the late 1920’s, it is really interesting to me that she pines for Porco and continually waits in her garden for him to come to her and confess. Putting aside the fact the film is set in the late 1920’s and the social mores were different, to me that doesn’t really feel all that feminist. In addition, when people make the feminist claim, they almost always state that these themes don’t appear often in most other anime and manga. This is of course a complete load of bollocks. It always amuses me that critics and academia seem to have so much trouble trying to apply the “F” word to Motoko Kusanagi for example. I’d suggest this is because they are overly concerned with her appearance than her actions or how her gender is a complete non issue in most of the stories she appears in. Then we have the elephant in the room that few people really want to address; Miyazaki’s love of young female characters; Clarisse, Nausicaä, Sheeta, Satsuki, Kiki, Fio, Chihiro etc. Dare I go on. It’s not often in his films that a boy or adult woman or man takes centre stage.
I remember when a certain section of US fandom was having conniptions over the moe boom of the 2000’s and almost refused to believe that the character Clarisse from “Cagliostro” was more or less ground zero for the “Lolita Complex” (or “Lolicon” for short) movement/subculture in fandom and in a certain group of mangaka in the early 1980’s (with lolicon having a direct influence on moe). Considering Miyazaki’s love for these kinds of characters in his works, the obvious question pops up; is Miyazaki a lolicon? And please note that I use that expression in the Japanese fandom sense, not in the weird hand wringing anglophone “concern for fictional characters” way. What struck me watching “Laputa” this time around is how the male air pirates, mostly maybe in their early 20’s, have a crush on Sheeta, who is about 13. Add in the anecdote in the 2004 book “The World of Hayao Miyazaki” where at a pub, a drunken Miyazaki proclaimed to Mamoru Oshii “What’s wrong with falling in love with a 12-year-old girl?”. In addition, Miyazaki has said his love for the young girl character Bai-Niang in the 1958 anime film “The White Snake Enchantress (Panda and the Magic Serpent)” was what changed his mind to move from manga into animation.
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| Future Boy Conan |
Prior to watching this box set, a couple of years back I watched his 1978 TV series “Future Boy Conan” again as it had just been released on blu-ray at the time. Watching that series in conjunction with Miyazaki’s films, one theme constantly popped up that people seem to rarely mention; Miyazaki’s idealism around small towns and villages. In “Conan”, the way Miyazaki presents the mechanised Industra versus the island High Harbour is a little bit unsubtle in retrospect. The way the latter was presented initially as some sort of socialist utopia in complete harmony with nature was kind of laughable. This theme also appears in a more subtle way in “Nausicaä”, “Laputa” and “Mononoke”. In addition, you have really idealised homes, surrounded by blooming plants and nature as seen in “Totoro” and to a degree in “The Boy and the Heron”. I guess this ties in with his reoccurring themes of environmentalism and nature, but to me this feels more like a separate theme.
Lastly, Miyazaki is known as being anti-war and a pacifist. Many in academia and fandom alike note his anti-fascist themes. But yet again we have another elephant in the room; his love for war machines. Personally, I can reconcile the fact that you can be very anti-war but also have a deep interest in planes, tanks, ships, guns and other mechanised pieces of military equipment. And of course, everyone knows Miyazaki absolutely loves planes and other flying machines. Putting that aside, lets talk about the plot of “The Wind Rises”. It’s a film about the guy who designed the Mitsubishi A5M and the far more deadly and devastating A6M Zero (the Mitsubishi Zero). In the film, the growing fascism in Japan (and Germany) during the 1920’s and 1930’s is touched upon, but there seems to be no effort made to connect these events with Jiro’s work. There is practically nothing shown of the death and destruction the Mitsubishi A5M and the Mitsubishi A6M Zero caused, nor the fact they were built using slave labour. Compare and contrast how fascism was depicted in “Porco Rosso”. I found it rather astonishing that this was almost never mentioned in reviews or articles in English about the film.
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| Miyazaki with Otto Carius |
Then we have Miyazaki and his manga “A Pig’s Tiger” or “The Return of Hans, Tigers Covered With Mud”. Created as a part of a larger series of illustrated essays for Model Graphix magazine in the early 1990’s, the manga was based on the book “Tigers in the Mud: The Combat Career of German Panzer Commander Otto Carius”. This was a memoir of a literal World War II Nazi tank commander, known as a panzer ace, credited with anywhere between 60 and 150 enemy tank kills. Astonishingly Miyazaki met Carius before he published the manga for research purposes. While the manga depicts the Nazi soldiers as anthropomorphic pigs, the anglophone interpretation in some quarters seems to be that Miyazaki is depicting them as fascists. However, in Japanese culture there isn’t an association with pigs and fascists in the same way as there is in the west. Otherwise, how do you explain the depiction of the explicitly anti-fascist Marco Pagot (Porco in “Porco Rosso”)?
It was really nice to revisit Miyazaki’s films again after not watching them for the longest time. For some of these films, I hadn’t watched them for around 15 years or more. For the vast majority I hadn’t watched them since I had bought them on DVD. For me, the point where I started losing interest in Studio Ghibli was the mid to late 2000’s, as the studio and Miyazaki himself, was becoming more mainstream and a lot of critics and academics were overhyping him and ignoring other worthy films and directors. I also felt the studio had almost deliberately sabotaged itself by not nurturing new and upcoming directors. For example, the way Mamoru Hosoda was treated by the studio during the production of “Howl”. After a year of preproduction on the film and having his concepts for the film rejected several times, he left and went on to be a highly regarded director in his own right. The only director besides Miyazaki and Isao Takahata to make more than one film at the studio is Goro Miyazaki, and you could easily argue that he’s pretty mediocre.
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| Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki |
Having said that, even if the studio never makes another feature film ever again, Miyazaki’s legacy is incredible. I have to admit he’s one of the best anime directors ever. No other anime director has won two Oscars, or even one. Or a BAFTA Award. Or a Golden Lion or a Golden Bear. Perhaps he is over hyped by western audiences and critics. But his films will always stick with me, especially “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind”, “Porco Rosso” and “Princess Mononoke”. He is as old as my mother now, 83 years old. And though he’s in far better shape than her, I kind of doubt we’ll get another feature film out of him. He’s also a flawed man. He certainly isn’t the squeaky clean, socialist, feminist old man that a lot of people promote him as. In particular I highly doubt his feminist credentials. However, I still have to respect the man for his body of work and highly enjoyed watching his films on this blu-ray box set.
