 Even
Miyazaki's most outlandishly imagined creatures
have an unnerving realism. The eerie, poignant No
Face in "Spirited Away" is a creature
who wears a mask, whimpers softly, and eats
everything in sight, greedily eager for communion
with others; he glides along like an inky rain
cloud, and expands just as ominously. In the same
film, a flock of white paper birds flash through
the sky: they are like origami, only sharp-edged,
and capable of drawing blood.
Miyazaki's starting point for a film, Suzuki
said, is often a small visual detail. Five years
ago, when Miyazaki read a Japanese translation of
the book "Howl's Moving Castle," by
Diana Wynne Jones, a British author, he was
immediately taken with the idea of a castle that
ambulates around the countryside. "The book
never explains how it moves, and that triggered
his imagination," Suzuki recalled. "He
wanted to solve that problem. The first thing he
did on the film was to start to design the
castle. How would it move? It must have legs, and
he was obsessed with settling this question.
Would they be Japanese warrior legs? Human-type
feet? One day, he suddenly said, 'Let's go with
chicken feet!' That was, for him, the
breakthrough." Suzuki thinks of Miyazaki's
approach as uniquely Japanese: "In
traditional Japanese architecture, you start with
one room—maybe the alcove, where you hang
some pictures. You spend a lot of time trying to
pick the right shelves, the right little pillar,
what kind of handles the drawers will have. Only
when you finish that room do you worry about the
next. In the West, you start from the general and
go to the specific. A Hitchcock movie might start
off with a panorama of the city, and then the
camera closes in on a street, and a house, and
then the stairway inside. If you're a Japanese
filmmaker, you might start with the railing on
the stairway. When Miyazaki makes a film, he is
thinking, like with this new one, O.K., first
off, here are two very important points to
settle: Does Sophie, the little girl in the
movie, have braids or not? Are they long or
short?"
But it wouldn't be quite right to describe
Miyazaki's approach as wholly Japanese. As with
fantasy writers in the British tradition, from
C.S. Lewis to J.K. Rowling, Miyazaki makes the
details of the worlds he creates concrete and
coherent, so that we might better suspend our
disbelief for the big leaps of fantasy. This
devotion to realism, Suzuki acknowledges,
"is rare in Japanese animation," which
tends to revel in the freedom from earthly laws
that the medium allows. Miyazaki can be steely in
pursuit of this goal. In a Japanese television
documentary about "Spirited Away," he
is shown at a meeting with his young staff,
explaining how they are to draw certain images
based on his storyboards. "The dragon is
supposed to fall from down the air vent, but,
being a dragon, it doesn't land on the
ground," Miyazaki says. "It attaches
itself to the wall, like a gecko. And
then—ow!—it falls—thud!—it
should fall like a serpent. Have you ever seen a
snake fall out of a tree?" He explains that
it "doesn't slither, but holds its
position." He looks around at the animators,
most of whom appear to be in their twenties and
early thirties. They are taking notes, looking
grave: nobody has seen a snake fall out of a
tree.
Miyazaki goes on to describe how the
dragon—a protean creature named Haku, who
sometimes takes this form—struggles when he
is pinned down. "This will be tricky,"
Miyazaki says, smiling. "If you want to get
an idea, go to an eel restaurant and see how an
eel is gutted." The director wriggles around
in his seat, imitating the action of a
recalcitrant eel. "Have you ever seen an eel
resisting?" Miyazaki asks.
"No, actually," admits a young man with
hipster glasses, an orange sweatshirt, and an
indoor pallor.
Miyazaki groans. "Japanese culture is
doomed!" He says. When he describes a scene
in which his heroine, Chihiro, forces open the
dragon's mouth to give it medicine, he says the
animators should be thinking, as they draw, of
what it's like to feed a dog a pill, when you tip
its head to the side, and "the dog clenches
its teeth and its gums stick out." There is
more note-taking, but no sign that this might be
a familiar experience.
"Any of you ever had a dog?" Miyazaki
asks.
"I had a cat," somebody volunteers.
"This is pathetic," Miyazaki says. The
documentary shows the chastened staff making a
field trip that night to a veterinary hospital,
videotaping a golden retriever's gums and teeth,
and then returning to the studio to study the
video.
It seems almost inevitable that the world's
greatest animator should be Japanese. Over the
past decade or so, Japan has become, outside the
United States, the most successful exporter of
children's pop culture. With television shows
like "Poké-mon" and
"Yu-Gi-Oh!," which have large casts of
creatures accompanied by their own stats and
trading cards, the Japanese figured out how to
tap into children's mania for collecting and
classifying. With shows like "Hamtaro"
(Little Hamsters, Big Adventures") and
"Sailor Moon" (in which giggly,
shopaholic schoolgirls turn into saviors of the
world), they got the idea that overmuscled
superheroes, as alluring as they are, can seem
out of reach, whereas smaller creatures that are
simultaneously cute and powerful are easy to
identify with. With Hello Kitty—the blank,
big-headed cartoon cat—they proved that
innocence was an aesthetic that could be pushed
to extremes. Sanrio, the company that
manufactures tens of thousands of Hello Kitty
products—from pink vinyl coin purses to
packets of "sweet squid chunks" bearing
her wide-eyed likeness—is a billion-dollar
business.
One reason the Japanese are so good at this kind
of thing is that many adults in Japan are
curiously attuned to cuteness. Even in a
cosmopolitan city like Tokyo, kawaii—or
"cute" culture—is everywhere: road
signs are adorned with adorable raccoons and
bunnies; stuffed animals sit on salarymen's
desks; Hello Kitty charms are offered for sale at
Shinto shrines. It is also a culture where anime
(cartoons) and manga (comic books) are both
widely consumed and, in some cases, highly
regarded as art and literature. No one knows
exactly why comic books are so popular in Japan;
one theory is that they grew out of woodblock
prints and seemed naturally connected to a
broader artistic tradition that produced some of
its best work in ephemeral, everyday objects like
fans and screens. In any case, manga make up
nearly half of the book sales in Japan, and you
see people of all ages reading them on the
subway. Animated programs, of which ninety or so
air on Japanese TV every week, have long been
shown in prime time, on the assumption that
families will watch them together. And while much
anime and manga is intended for
adults—violent sci-fi and pornography, as
well as contemplative family dramas—the
market for children remains the largest. Although
much of Japan's kid-oriented anime has been
exported to the U.S., a great deal more—such
as "Anpanman," a hugely popular series
about a bean-paste-stuffed bread roll—has
not. (A fan Web site notes, "To a
non-Japanese person, the concept of a living
bread superman who fights giant germs and feeds
the hungry with pieces of his head may seem
bizarre.")
Miyazaki distances himself from all this
commercialism. He doesn't care for a lot of
contemporary Japanese animation. "Animators
are getting too old," he told me.
"Animation used to be for young people. Now
people in their forties are the ones who are
supporting it." When he watches movies at
all these days, he said, he prefers
documentaries, especially "the simple ones
that just try to show other people and other
civilizations. They have their own distortions,
but, still, I like them." He is a leftist
who thinks that too many people are making money
off children, who frets over the spectre of
virtual reality "eating into our emotional
life," and who wishes that we could
drastically reduce the number of video games and
DVDs available for sale. He worries that he is
contributing to the problem by making anime
himself, and isn't keen on promoting his own
films, which is one reason that he resists giving
interviews.
Several people who know Miyazaki told me that
mothers frequently approach him to tell him that
their child watches "Totoro" or
"Kiki" every day, and he always acts
horrified. "Don't do that!" he will
say. "Let them see it once a year, at
most!" In an essay he wrote in 1987, he was
already concerned: "No matter how we may
think of ourselves as conscientious, it is true
that images such as anime stimulate only the
visual and auditory sensations of children, and
deprive them of the world they go out to find,
touch, and taste." And yet he would not be
quite the figure he is—recognized by
children on the street, in a position to make
just about any movie he wants—in a country
that did not honor animation and fetishize
childhood quite so much.
Hayao Miyazaki was born in Tokyo in 1941. His
father helped run a family-owned factory that
made parts for military airplanes. His mother,
like the mother in "Totoro," was sickly
and often bedridden, but she was also smart and
strong-willed. "My grandfather was affluent,
and he knew how to live," Goro Miyazaki, one
of the director's two sons, recalled. I spoke
with him last summer at the Ghibli Museum, where
he is the curator. "He liked to have
fun—he liked to go to restaurants and
movies. My grandmother was very intelligent and
not particularly interested in going out. She had
her own mind and she didn't like to spend money.
She exerted a huge influence on Miyazaki. When he
was young, he had all these questions—big
ideas—and it was his mother he could talk to
about them. He was on of four boys, and he was
the closest to her."
His friend Suzuki was more direct. "He was a
mama's boy," he said. Suzuki thinks the fact
that there is always an old woman in Miyazaki's
films, and that she is often a trenchant
character, is a tribute to the director's mother.
"When he was small, and his mother was ill,
the four brothers took turns helping out with
chores. But he loved her the best of all of
them." (Like the tough grannies in his
movies, Miyazaki's mother surprised everyone by
living into old age.)
Neither of Miyazaki's parents was artistic.
"My grandfather liked buying paintings, and
he liked to show them off to guests," Goro
Miyazaki said. "But I don't know that he had
any particular artistic understanding. It's a
mystery where Miyazaki's talent came from. He had
a kind of a complex toward his brothers, and that
gave him a strong motivation to succeed at
animation. His brothers went into business; they
were more influenced by their father. But success
wasn't easy for him. He wasn't dexterous, and he
really had to work to achieve what he has."
At Gakushuin University, in Tokyo, Miyazaki
studied economics and political science. But he
also joined a children's-literature group, where
members read and discussed fantasy fiction. As a
senior in high school, Miyazaki had sneaked out
to see the first Japanese animated film made in
color, "The Legend of the White Snake,"
when he was supposed to be studying for his
entrance exams. The film had a big impact on him,
he wrote years later, because while he could see
that it was "cheap melodrama," its
naked emotionalism touched him. "My soul was
moved and I stumbled back home in the snow that
had just started. Comparing my pitiful situation
to the characters' earnestness, I was ashamed of
myself, and cried all night." At the time,
he had been trying to write a sophisticated,
absurdist manga, but he realized, somewhat to his
embarrassment, that he was more interested in
creating something sincere.
In 1963, Miyazaki went to work as a rookie
animator at Toei Animation, in Tokyo, which
primarily made cartoons for television. The
company's animation had a particular
style—the style we associate with anime in
general, though not so much with
Miyazaki—and it derived mainly from economic
necessity. Japanese studios were not the wealthy
behemoths that Disney and Warner Bros. were, and
they saved money by having animators draw fewer
cels. The result was jerkier, with more stilted
movements and longer close-ups, in which faces
often filled the screens: a kind of cut-rate
Expressionism. The big, round eyes that
Westerners associate with anime because
signatures then—the legacy of Osamu Tezuka,
the comic artist who, in the nineteen-fifties and
sixties, drew Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion.
(One theory is that Tezuka was influenced by
Betty Boop, who was very popular in Japan.)
Miyazaki admired the soulful Tezuka, but his
influences were more cosmopolitan: he loved
Chagall, Bosch, and the Russian animators Lev
Atamanov and Yuri Norstein, who made bewitching
animations based on Russian folktales. His image
of Japan was so shaken by memories of the
country's postwar devastation that for years
afterward, he told Kurosawa, his imagination
turned reflexively to Europe—a fantasy
version, stitched together in his mind, that had
never experienced the Second World War. (In his
films, Europe looks like a harmonious amalgam of
Scandinavia, Alsace, and the Amalfi coast, with a
bit of Dalmatia tossed in.)
At Toei, Miyazaki met Akemi Ota, an animator,
whom he married in 1965, and who decided to stay
at home when the couple's two sons were young.
(Goro, who was a landscape designer before going
to work at the Ghibli Museum, was born in 1967;
Keisuke, an artist who makes intricate wood
engravings, was born two years later.) On his
first job at Toei, Miyazaki also met Isao
Takahata, an animation director with an
intellectual bent, who had graduated from the
University of Tokyo with a degree in French
literature; and Michiyo Yasuda, the gifted color
designer, who went on to work on most of his
films. The three of them were officials of the
animation workers' union, and spent a lot of time
during union meetings discussing their own
artistic futures, which they were determined to
entwine. "It wasn't too
philosophical—more practical," Takahata
recalled. " 'O.K., you're drawing a robot.
It's got to be heavy. What kind of holes does it
make in the ground when it moves?' We talked a
lot about the challenges of depicting things
correctly."
 In the seventies,
Miyazaki and Takahata both took jobs at Nippon
Animation. Between 1974 and 1979, Miyazaki was a
key artist or scene designer for five of
Takahata's television series, including
"Heidi," and worked on a film for
television that Takahata directed: "Panda!
Go Panda!," a funny, sweet movie featuring a
spirited, pigtailed, pug-faced little
girl—the precursor of Miyazaki's own
heroines. "She was modeled on Pippi
Longstocking," Yasuo Ohtsuka, an animator
who worked with Miyazaki on several projects,
said. "Miyazaki wanted to draw an audacious,
energetic little girl—they're just a lot
more fun to draw. We thought of her as a girl
from American or European literature, because
Japanese girls aren't—or weren't,
anyway—all that high-spirited." |
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