For those who have fallen under Ghibli’s spell, it’s difficult to choose a favorite, but for the uninitiated, the obvious starting point is 1988’s My Neighbor Totoro, which perfectly encapsulates the beguiling mystery of Miyazaki’s films. The story is simple: 9-year-old Satsuki and her little sister Mei move to the country with their father to be nearer the hospital that houses their ailing mother. They pass their time investigating the surrounding woods, which turn out to be full of all manner of magical creatures, including a round, fuzzy forest spirit Mei names Totoro, in imitation of its earth-shaking voice. (Miyazaki compares the creature to an owl or a bear; it also resembles a plump, neckless rabbit.) But as is often the case in Miyazaki’s films, the plot is only a pretext to explore a magical world, sometimes located right under the noses of inattentive grownups. Wait by a bus stop long enough, and the mundane forms of public transport will be replaced by a sentient, many-legged, cat-shaped bus whose route quickly leaves the earth’s surface behind.
Now enshrined as Studio Ghibli’s mascot, Totoro is an iconic (and, inevitably, marketable) character. But Miyazaki never cedes the film to his non-human creations. Rather than standing in for the magic of the natural world, Totoro merely embodies the qualities already present in the sisters’ surroundings. There’s as much enchantment in ordinary activities, like the girls chasing each other around the house, as in any flight of fancy. My Neighbor Totoro has its roots in Miyazaki’s own life—his mother was hospitalized when he was a child—and the movie is informed by the texture of memory, so reality and imagination become indistinguishable.
In Miyazaki’s films, the characters are rendered in cartoon fashion, but the world around them is painted in more realistic hues, more closely resembling an impressionist painting than a comic strip. The evident care with which Miyazaki depicts the texture of a clump of grass or a tree is a subtle but persistent reminder of one of his great themes: the power and fragility of the natural world. In Princess Mononoke, his ecological bent crystallizes into an environmentalist parable, but it also has deep roots in Japanese tradition, where seemingly inanimate objects like rocks and trees are inhabited by living spirits.
Princess Mononoke was Ghibli’s beachhead in the U.S., the movie that got the studio the mainstream recognition and theatrical audiences it deserved. (For a glimpse at the bad old days, seek out the dubbed, panned-and-scanned Fox DVDs of Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service—or, better yet, don’t.) With an English script by Neil Gaiman and a high-profile voice cast, it seemed poised for a Stateside breakthrough. Though box-office returns in the U.S. were modest—and a drop in the bucket compared to those in Japan, where it was the highest-grossing film in the country’s history until it was dethroned by Titanic—the notion that Studio Ghibli made animated films that culturally literate adults could attend without a pint-sized companion as pretext had been firmly planted in the nation’s mind. In the context of Miyazaki’s other films, Mononoke’s story of a wandering warrior who gets caught in the battle between an angry forest spirit and a mining town seems slightly ponderous, and a tad too aware of its own epic scope, but it is undeniably a majestic work, a lyrical vision with metaphorical weight.
Certain aspects of Ghibli’s films inevitably get lost in translation. While it’s commendable that Disney’s DVDs regularly include the original Japanese-language tracks as well as their star-studded English dubs, it’s unfortunate that the subtitles (or rather, “dubtitles”) simply replicate the English dialogue, which is sometimes significantly tweaked in order to make the films more palatable to an American audience. It’s far better treatment than Ghibli got in earlier decades; Disney learned its lesson from the fan outcry that arose when Miramax announced plans to release Princess Mononoke with only the English audio track. But the movies still suffer from schizophrenic treatment at Disney’s hands. Pixar’s John Lasseter, who has been Miyazaki’s most vocal champion, pays tribute in video introductions on some of the discs, but Miyazaki’s presence is otherwise ignored in favor of highlighting the films’ American voice talent. The dubbed versions are fine—and, needless to say, much easier on younger viewers—but even without access to a literal translation, the Japanese-language tracks convey an emotional volatility that better matches the characters’ actions. (And yet the English dubs are sometimes better matched to the characters’ lip movements, since in the Japanese tradition, dialogue is added after the film has been animated, where most animators match the characters’ mouths to a prerecorded vocal track.)
While it’s a blessing to have nearly all Ghibli’s features available on DVD in the U.S., it’s clear that Disney still thinks their primary audience is children, which is presumably why it’s never released the adult-themed Only Yesterday and Ocean Waves. Fortunately, Isao Takahata’s Grave Of The Fireflies is excluded from Disney’s holdings, which allowed Sentai Filmworks to bring the sobering film back into print earlier this year. Although the movie’s protagonists, 14-year-old Seita and his 4-year-old sister, Setsuko, are children, the film is hardly fit for preteen audiences. Even adults may find the story of a boy and his sister trying to fend for themselves amid the rubble of immediately post-World War II Japan difficult to endure, at least without shedding copious amounts of tears along the way.
While Miyazaki often approaches the same themes from different angles, Takahata is Ghibli’s wild card, an inventive, versatile craftsman whose talents lend themselves to a wide range of approaches. Grave Of The Fireflies is part memoir and part ghost story, beginning with Seita homeless and near death, his only apparent possession a small tin full of ash and bone fragments. Where Totoro uses animation to envision a world that doesn’t exist, Grave uses animation to tell a story that would be unbearable in a more realistic medium. The opening scene foreshadows the inevitable tragedy, but that hardly makes the sorrowful forward march of time easier to weather. Even amid the ashes of a defeated, disheartened nation, though, Takahata finds moments of beauty, like the incandescent insects of the film’s title. But few films, animated or otherwise, have the courage to pursue such a bleak, fatalistic view of the world, to say nothing of one that so determinedly casts its native country’s past in such a dour light.
Intermediate work
The breadth of Takahata’s sensibilities becomes clear a few frames into Pom Poko, which is as rich and complex a fable as any of Miyazaki’s more familiar works. The film’s protagonists are the tanuki, a race of raccoon tricksters familiar from Japanese mythology. With a story that pits the manmade destruction of the tanukis’ natural habitat against the species’ out-of-control overpopulation, the movie roughly parallels Miyazaki’s environmentalist concerns. But the tanuki are hardly a benevolent or wise race. In a bid to stop the development of Tama New Town, an enormous housing development built outside Tokyo in the mid-1960s, the tanuki use their shape-changing abilities to infiltrate humankind and cause sometimes deadly mischief. As they watch the news on a trash-picked TV set, the tanuki cheer a delay in construction, their cries drowning out the announcement of several human deaths. The historical setting means the tanuki are doomed to failure—Tama New Town, which houses some 200,000 Japanese, will be built no matter what they do—so the film isn’t the story of underdog triumph so much as a referendum on the tanukis’ character, and that of their human counterparts. Both are found wanting.
Miyazaki’s films are characterized by their artistic discipline, but Takahata’s is a more protean, unpredictable gift. Like the tanuki themselves, Pom Poko frequently shifts form, depicting the ravages of construction by picturing bulldozers as pests eating away at a leaf, or interrupting the fluid animation with a sequence in the style of an 8-bit videogame. Only Yesterday, never released on Region 1 DVD, is similarly slippery in its shifts between past and present, moving between the life of a disillusioned 27-year-old Tokyo woman and her memories of her childhood. The film’s vision of the past is more bittersweet than nostalgic, befitting a director who rarely gives in to unbridled sentiment.