This Week: Top Five Studio Ghibli films

by Ben Kritikos (with contributions from Anna Jacob)

Studio Ghibli is a Japanese production company responsible for some of the greatest animated films of all time.  They make Disney look like the clichéd agglomeration of turd-shaped no-brained excuses to advertise, sell action figurines, soft, cuddly toys and consumerist morality that it really is.

Almost all of Studio Ghibli’s productions have a common theme: humanity’s attitude toward nature.  Each film explores the relationship between civilisations and the natural world that precedes and in many cases endures them.  I would venture to say that the underlying message of every Ghibli film I’ve seen is: we must remember our place in the grand scheme of things, and get back into the rhythm.  Every conflict in these epic tales stems from a fundamental misunderstanding — as opposed to intrinsic “bad” or “evil” — of individuals’ relationships to the environment that gave them life in the first place.

Sure, the music in these films can be naff.  That comes with the territory.  Besides, Japan is like a different world.  They eat whale, endangered or not, and blowing your nose in public is the height of bad manners.  Their idea of what sounds good is naturally going to be different from ours.  And, in fairness, “ours” is a stretch … “our” music includes James Blunt and Cheryl Cole, let us not forget.

It’s this difference in cultures that makes the output of Studio Ghibli so enticingly exotic, if I may use such a phrase.  In the same way that Ringu‘s paranoia-inducing stillness and silence makes for a terrifying cinematic experience, the work of director/animators like Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata creates an atmosphere so unique and unfamiliar, yet so warmly invigorating, one can only watch and wonder.

Hayao Miyazaki is by far the most prominent and prolific — but by no means the only worthy — artist to emerge from the Studio Ghibli numbers, and his almost instant classics like Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle have guaranteed the front-running Japanese collective a deserved place in the hearts and minds of film lovers the world over.

Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)

Sophie works in a hat shop.  She doesn’t dress up, she doesn’t go out, and she doesn’t want much more from life than what she’s got.  She keeps herself to herself.  One day as she’s avoiding a military parade in the centre of town, she’s accosted by two overly-friendly soldiers.  A handsome stranger extricates her from this potentially sticky situation, but he proves no less overwhelming: it is the infamous wizard Howl himself, known for stealing women’s hearts (worded to suggest a potentially physical theft).  Howl, however, lands Sophie to safety at her hat shop and moves on his way.

Sophie is no sooner through the door when suddenly appears the Witch of the Waste.  The wicked witch casts a spell on Sophie, transforming her from a young girl of 19 into a hunched over, wasted old woman of 90.  In turmoil, Sophie makes the decision that she can’t stay at home, and exiles herself from her former comfortable and limited life.  True to form, Miyazaki drags us through a tragically funny, endearingly simple, and riotously complex story of love, and its power to overcome destruction.

Anna and I bonded over this film.  Howl’s Moving Castle was Anna’s introduction to the work of Studio Ghibli, so it holds a special place in her heart.  When she was a Music student working weekends in HMV, the DVD featured in their special offers; as such, the film was played in the store to attract customer attention.  Anna watched Howl’s Moving Castle several times — without sound — her curiosity piqued (“A talking flame?  A walking castle?  Wtf?”)*.  Anna wondered, “What is this film about?”  Taking the plunge, she splashed out the £12 and bought it.

Howl’s Moving Castle is unusual in the Studio Ghibli repertoire in that the story originates in the West.  The original Howl’s Moving Castle was a fantasy story for children (and other people of a younger persuasion), penned by Bristol’s own Diana Wynne Jones.  She has said of Miyazaki that, “When we met [...] I discovered that he understood my books in a way that nobody else has ever done.”

Howl’s Moving Castle is an old-fashioned love story; but its execution pioneered the genre of animated fantasy films.  Miyazaki creates a world so colourful, so palpable, it’s hard to imagine a world of mundane facts like census forms, council tax, deli sandwiches and parking lots.  The world these characters inhabit is the world I’d ideally like to live in.  I know that’s not possible without some kind of brain damage, or heavy doses of lethal drugs… but I’d like to live there anyway.

*Anna would like to point out that she would only ever say ‘Wtf?’ ironically.

Spirited Away (2001)

10-year-old Chihiro and her plain-Jane, Joe-shmoe parents are moving again.  Chihiro isn’t happy about it.  She’s only just started making friends at her last school, and now she’s got to go through the process of assimilating to a new home town, new house, new school, new friends, all over again.

Driving the family to the new house, her father gets lost in the woods.  They find themselves at a dead end, faced with a mysterious tunnel leading into what appears to be an abandoned theme park.  Chihiro protests as her parents uncautiously follow a scent of food, only to find themselves in a much stranger place than they could have imagined….

So begins a masterpiece of cinema that I’m not sure whether to describe as a beautiful and poetic critique of wasteful and ego-driven consumerist capitalism in the 90s; or a magical children’s story about the loss of innocence, and redemption through transformation.  The message is certainly clear: there are forces at work in our world which are beyond us, but interdependent with us, bound in our mutual source; and the choices we make affect everybody and everything that shares in this delicate, spontaneous, unlikely yet very real balance.

Pretty profound for a cartoon, eh?  I don’t think I’m exaggerating.  That’s the genius of Miyazaki for you!

A central albeit subtly touched upon theme in Spirited Away is the fuzzy gray area superceding any black and white idea of “good” and “bad”.  Spirited Away‘s characters, one and all, find themselves in various states of transformation.  The “No-face” monster begins as a mild non-entity who haunts the periphery of the story, only to break into the foreground, fuelled by the greed of other peripheral characters.  As he is fed more and more, he becomes more and more monstrous.  Left to himself, he’s benign — even loveable.  This is the stuff of the Tao Teh Ching and the Diamond Sutra; not your everyday kiddie flick.

But the story doesn’t require any appreciation of ancient Eastern philosophy; it’s simply beautiful, standing on its own as a whimsical fairytale, full of light and magic, and a moving homage to Nature itself which, this film seeks to remind us, is the tie that binds us all.

Princess Mononoke (1997)

You can sum this anime masterpiece up in a phrase: the clash of Nature versus Civlisation.  Once again, Hayao Miyazaki demonstrates his cinematic archery, hitting the bull’s-eye with a specifically Japanese ease of touch, in a completely accessible film.

The story begins when young Ashitaka kills a rampant demon who emerged from the forest in a flurry of violent rage.  Ashitaka injures his arm while fighting the beast, and the injury leaves a strange scar which seems to grow rather than heal.  The demon’s remains reveal that he was once a boar, transformed to his ghastly, violent state by a hunk of iron lodged deep in his body.

Ashitaka exiles himself from his isolated village, in search of the source of the mysterious hunk of iron, and the scar which keeps growing, threatening to consume him.

What follows is a fable of mythical power, with a Star Wars-sized story, full of gods and demons, magic forests, and that kind of whimsical thing — but not naff.  Princess Mononoke delivers the staggeringly strong message that progress, civilisation, industry and human power are destructive when left unchecked; human ignorance, disguised as progress, can kill God if it wants; but only a unity with nature can assure a sustainable existence.

This was Miyazaki’s first “mainstream” film in the West, and it’s easy to understand why.  The story is not only epic, but timeless.  The characters (which include talking animal gods and spirits deeply rooted in Shinto mythology) are troubled by something much bigger than their own problems, something seemingly universal, something that troubles us a society at present, whether we’re aware or not.  And lastly, the animation is breath-taking.  As far as enchanted forests go, the one in Princess Mononoke is not the kind you’d find Little Red Riding Hood in; and a big bad wolf would be the least of your problems.

Violence has never particularly pleased me, on screen or off.  In cinema, I find it to be drastically over-used.  Often, when it is employed, I find that the particular emphasis on what it looks like does no favours to the film-makers’ desire to achieve impact.  Violence in Princess Mononoke is dealt with not so much as a speed-inducing mechanism, nor a gratuitous visual effect, nor indeed the kind of blasé, commonplace “action” of Hollywood.  Miyazaki uses violence in a very precise way.  In every instance of violence, never once are you expected to take the drastic, contradictory nature of the act for granted.  In every moment of violence in this film, you are faced with a dilemma: with the muzzle of a gun pushed in my back, should I keep digging, even if I’m digging my own grave?

Pom Poko (1994)

If I ever have kids, and it’s not yet too late to explain climate change to them — as in, they don’t already know because there’s no such place as Los Angeles or Dover or the Maldives anymore — I’ll show them Pom Poko.  And it won’t fuck them up, either.

Pom Poko is director Isao Takahata’s documentary-style story of the raccoons of Tokyo’s Tama Hills.  Released at a time when Japan’s economy was going through what ours is going through now, it demonstrates the unwitting destruction of natural eco-systems in a greedy drive to build cheap housing for Japan’s yuppie class.  Raccoons find their homeland disappearing before their eyes at the hands of human “development”.  Drastic situations call for drastic measures, and they begin to renew their tradition — long forgotten by all but the oldest — of employing the tanuki raccoon’s mysterious art of physical transfiguration. They try, with tricks and sabotage, to scare away the humans.  When peaceful means fail, the raccoons consider a more robust defence; and when the situation becomes desperate, so too do the means some raccoons resort to.

For a film that ultimately attempts to bring viewers’ awareness to their place in the natural environment around them, I feel Pom Poko is particularly laudable in that it doesn’t pander or insult one’s intelligence.  This is not a film set in a fantasy world, but in modern-day (well, 90s) urban Japan.  It does not portray the raccoons as helpless victims, but as interested parties with courage, skill, organisation and death-defying resolve to combat our senseless destruction.  They practically exhaust every avenue of exchange with our species; it is our own inability to listen, rather than humanity’s “supremacy”, that is portrayed as the problem.  How astute!

I love the way the film deals with profound questions of survival (not limited to raccoons, mind you) with deft humour, and passionate, unsentimental facing of facts.  Takahata’s masterful hand leads us through a world sometimes tongue-in-cheek (American documentary-style narration), sometimes surreal (a parade of ghosts and spirits like something out of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), and heart-wrenching sadness (wait until you see the land before human development).

And “Randy” from Home Improvement does the voice of the main character.  Anna tells me all the girls her age had a crush on him.

As I said before, I’d love my kids (if I ever have any) to see this film growing up.  They wouldn’t come away from the telly environmentalists or anything — Japanese film is subtle, keeping didacticism on a short lead — but it would certainly plant the seeds of critical-minded adults who keep in constant correspondence with their natural environment.  Hell, even I didn’t care as much about the land my human world inhabited before I saw this film as I do now.

Only Yesterday (1991)

Most Japanese anime films — those of this blog not excluded — tend toward the whimsical.  Spirits, myths, gods and demons, they’re all there in the Studio Ghibli catalogue; they rank among the best of that genre.

However, one of our favourite Studio Ghibli films again comes from director Isao Takahata, and dispenses with high-flown whimsicality.  Only Yesterday is an unusual film in that it uses anime to tell a deep and insightful story one would think resisted animation.  Rather than inhibit this introspective and slow-paced film, animation ornaments it in a way camera work may not have been able to achieve.

Only Yesterday follows Taeko, a Tokyo office worker who feels that all-too-familiar emptiness inside.  She wonders if she’s been true to the aspirations and concerns of her pubescent self.  The film is split between Taeko’s holiday, spent picking safflower in the old tradition, on a farm in the countryside; and memories of Taeko’s past, centred around her younger self, plagued with puberty’s concern with boys, menstruation, doing badly at math, and getting on with siblings and parents.

Takahata paints the inner world of Only Yesterday‘s characters with such sensitivity, such a seemingly loving touch, it’s hard to believe a man could deal so confidently in the angst of young women.  Taeko isn’t some whingey cow: her emptiness reflects the machinery of modern civilisation, fuelled by ambition, progress and the accumulation of wealth.  Those of us who don’t share in the dividends of desperation; who crave fulfilment above attainment; who prefer a connection with nature to the indulgent dissipation of isolated, individual satisfaction; those of us for whom desire is a compass pointing to what’s good for us, instead of a goading in the direction of some one else’s merchandise — these are Takahata’s audience, these are Taeko’s kindred spirits.

A love story can do so much, despite how worn out and clichéd so many of them have become.  Don’t despair, you fans of the tear-jerker!  Only Yesterday does what a love story is supposed to do: it points to the heart, and beckons.  A really good love story — I mean a really, really good one — points in different directions for different people, because some people have to walk the length of the earth and end up where they started to find what they’re looking for, and some just have to notice the nose on their face.

Afterword

I’d like to make special mention of a film that, for one reason or another, did not make it into this Top Five.  The film I would like to suggest to you is Grave Of The Fireflies by Isao Takahata.  Be warned: if you don’t like depressing films, you should definitely steer clear of this one.  But, if you like serious cinema, this is a film you cannot go without seeing.  The action follows two young brothers who are orphaned by the Second World War.  Takahata portrays a perspective of this admittedly over-used subject matter that most Western audiences would be unfamiliar with.

I couldn’t bring myself to write about it, because I don’t believe I have sufficient words to do so.  Every now and again, you see encounter a piece of art that humbles you.  It’s not necessarily a pleasant experience, and not something you’d want to happen all the time.  But if you want to face some one else’s truth, it usually hurts.  The reward, of course, is Beauty.  But Beauty is not always pretty.