Posted by Nathan Eliot Gomes on 09.25.2023, 01:08 PM:
The first one, historically, have to be the kids anime, with a cute mascot that sells plushies, selling innocence among disasters, casting children as main characters, and generally giving very good comfortable vibes. His very first (co)directed movie, Panda Kopanda (Panda ! Go, Panda !), is basically a draft for the later Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro) and Gake no Ue no Ponyo (Ponyo). About the last one, despite the animating prowess, Toshio Suzuki himself said that he doesn't like it because it is too redundant with Totoro. And this is showing how influential and important this particular movie from Miyazaki’s filmography is. Fluffy mascots were already a thing in Japan before Totoro, but it made it ten times bigger and, more importantly, it pushed it into the global international pop culture. Everyone knows what Totoro looks like nowadays, it is savagely enormous. It is no secret that Ghibli is sustainable solely thanks to merchandising sales, but although they are selling some from every franchise they own (except perhaps for obvious reasons Sanzoku no Musume Rounia), Totoro’s plushies alone are more than half of the income. It definitely holds its place in the global mass culture.
A second type of movie is the ecological fable, some darker movies in wild worlds, where a hero between nature and civilization defends a middle ground and peace for each and any side, never really succeeding to stop destruction but keeping a certain amount of hope for a better rebirth in the end. While this type is the one that didn’t have any new piece for the longest time, it's also the one with the most length of content to watch or read. It includes the filmmaker’s first solo directing project ever, Mirai Shounen Conan ([/I]Conan, Future’s Boy), which is as well its longest animated show, the movie that acted the foundation of studio Ghibli, [I]Kaze no Tani no Nausicaa (Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind), as well as the manga that it is adapted from and that he wrote for 12 years, and finally the longest movie he ever made, the longest animated movie at the time (until Haruhi Suzumiya no Shoushitsu decided to be 3 geniuses hours long), Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke). Those are not just massive pieces in terms of length, their impact is also huge. Conan inspired a generation of animators (see : Eizouken by Masaaki Yuasa). Nausicaa introduced Miyazaki to a wide audience, it is really the one movie that made the crowd remember his name, leaving a trace on a whole era’s culture (many pieces of fantasy that came after have been affected by it, for example, the Chocobos from Final Fantasy, created 3 years after the movie aired, are inspired by the mounted creatures you can see in it). Mononoke is, aside my second favorite movie of all time, in most top 100 movies of all time (especially on public’s reviews such as IMDb or Senscritique) and often rightfully cited as one of the top 10 animated movies ever created. Once again, the real importance of this movie is hard to precisely measure, from the new computer techniques for animation developed for its production to its cultural impact all over the world, from a few people attempting to replicate it and failing to many others starting to educate themselves about ecology thanks to it… It’s one of those rare films that is a milestone in a multitude of lives, that changed the worldviews of countless people, especially amongst my still young generation.
But another Hayao Miyazaki’s movie can claim that title, and it is Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away). It is simple : in every single ranking placing Mononoke Hime high, it always end up a little behind Chihiro, and when one isn’t mentioned, it’s the other, and vice-versa. This is the Japanese movie that has been the most seen in cinema in the world, just beneath the much more recent success of Kimi no Na wa (Your name.). This is still to this day the second movie the most seen in theaters of all time in Japan. It is an acclaimed masterpiece, basically with the same impact range as Mononoke but with a totally different ambiance. Indeed, Chihiro belongs to a third type of Miyazaki films, that is the shoujo type : films centered around a teenage girl that will grow from a kid to a young adult, gaining maturity while working and discovering independence, widely criticizing the capitalism at the same time. Anyone who've seen Chihiro as an adult would have spotted the consumption society’s open critics, but the other main movie of this category is talking about burnout and this overworking society, and it’s Majou no Takkyubin (Kiki’s Delivery Service). Yes, the little Chihiro and Kiki, 12 years apart from each other, face the same society, although one is more scandinavian and the other purely japanese, and grow in the same way through labor and confrontation of the life views of surrounding more or less magic people. One may see this as a secondary type, given that it features only two Miyazaki movies, but it would be missing that he scenarized Kokuriko-zaka Kara (Up On Poppy Hill, Ghibli movie directed by Goro Miyazaki, his son), Mimi wo Sumaseba (Whispers of the Heart, Ghibli movie directed by the late Yoshifumi Kondo), directed a pilot for a never aired show, Yuki no Taiyou, and made the layout (an important designing step between story-board and key-animation) for Isao Takahata’s Heidi, all those pieces he’s been very implicated in featuring girls growing and leaving childhood behind by facing work, going through depressive phases and being lost in front of various teenager’s issues. These, as well as, most likely, the rejected unachieved project of Pippi Longstocking, a canon event of Miyazaki’s life and career, can be included in this third category.
The fourth movie type is the one of the purest beautiful heroes in a vicious world, facing a somewhat manichean situation and often war, directly, but with magic and in a universe that can be described as Steampunk. Influenced by the British Isles, opposingly as the Shoujo type, here, the male protagonist is often not nearly as interesting as the world he evolves in and the characters he meets. It includes at first Sherlock Hounds, in England, where the ambiguous detective is replaced by a good and noble dog, and the set of side characters, the originality of the situations and the original foreign conception of England are what moderately saves the show. Then, Tenkuu no Shiro, Laputa (Castle in the Sky) features the perfect boy Pazu rescuing a princess and destroying a dangerous war power in the doing, the whole thing being inspired by a mine workers’ strike in Wales. And finally, Hauru no Ugoku Shiro (Owl’s Moving Castle) is from an Irish book from whom it basically kept only the Irish inspiration, showing the most steampunk building ever and a (despicable) knightly hero everyone loves solely because he’s handsome. Seriously, not me judging your awful tastes in men, but-... Those three films are variations of a same fight, good versus evil, beauty against chaos, the war of the powerful few and the peace of the meaningful plenty. All that in a British Victorian landscape with dirty coal, creative (flying) machines and modern creatures - living robots, suited scarecrow or burning speaking flame.
Finally, the fifth type is the one I call the Personal Category : movies where Miyazaki portrays himself by discussing our current world. Often pretty geopolitical, they are considered by the critics as “personal letters” from the author. Jiro in Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Rises) is both his father and himself, while exploring his trauma with his mother sickness and talking about a dangerous pre-war Japanese politics background while being openly anti-military at a time where re-militarizing Japan was seriously considered and heated debate in the Archipelago. The Wind Rises is who Hayao Miyazaki was in his early 70’s. Toshio Suzuki said about Kurenai no Buta (Porco Rosso) that “when you see Marco, what you really are watching is Miya-san”, while the movie was produced at the fall of the USSR and Yugoslav Wars and became is a metaphorical comment about the situation : a young american actor aiming to become president in a blue plane fighting a disappearing aging pig in a red plane that says “better a pig than a fascist” and started to refuse to kill and join new wars. Porco Rosso is who Hayao Miyazaki was in his early 50’s. Lupin III : Cagliostro no Shiro (The Castle of Calgiostro) has immediately been seen when it aired as a weirdly personal movie for a command film linked to a popular show, and while it is very limited due to its nature of movie derived from a show derived from a manga, it remains the first full solo-directed movie of Miyazaki, a movie he put everything he was in because, by then, he acknowledgedly believed it would be his only one. According to him, it’s when he dedicated his time to this movie that he started to be a less good father to Goro, and give less time to his family. Also, the Count Cagliostro in the movie is in the middle of political shady business in a country that truly seems like a Balkans dictatorship. The Castle of Cagliostro is who Hayao Miyazaki was in his late 30’s. Those three films are the same process at different times of his life, a simple formula : “me + geopolitical analysis + cool planes”. Note how there’s an early-career movie, a middle-career one, and a late-career one. Note how the 3 are one step further in the representation of planes as a central subject and being overly mechanic-nerd’s movies. Note as well how all those films happened, rare decision for him, in a clear period of time, especially between the end of WW1 and the beginning of WW2, periods defined by how close those wars are or will be. Note finally how it would have been perfect to finish everything on Kaze Tachinu. However, Hayao Miyazaki decided to make another film, and here’s where we come back to it : what was there still to say leading to Kimitachi wa dou Ikiru ka ?
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