Styles and themes of Hayao Miyazaki

Hayao Miyazaki is a prominent Japanese filmmaker and producer whose animated works are characterised by several recurring themes and motifs.

Many of these recurrent features are notable for being so uncommon in the medium, for example the lack of evil or villain characters, the advocacy of pacifism and prominence of feminism. Other features are more notable for being personal idiosyncrasies, such as the obsession with flight and the symbolism of water. The formal emphasis placed on these various elements constitutes a running discourse that transcends the individual works and creates a larger, ongoing meta-narrative.

Good and evil
Most of Miyazaki's characters are dynamic, capable of change, and not easily caricatured into traditional good-evil dichotomies. Many menacing characters have redeeming features, and are not firmly defined as antagonists. In Princess Mononoke, Lady Eboshi destroys the forest for industrial raw materials without the concerns for animals' life; however lepers and former prostitutes that she shelters have great respect for her. The film culminates in reconciliation, rather than the vanquishing of some irredeemable evil. This theme is unusual for an animated film, as most films in the genre clearly divide good and evil.

Miyazaki stated in Spirited Away, "the heroine [is] thrown into a place where the good and bad dwell together. [...] She manages not because she has destroyed the 'evil,' but because she has acquired the ability to survive."

Miyazaki has explained that the lack of clearly defined good and evil is because of his views of the 21st century as a complex time, where old norms no longer are true and need to be re-examined. Simple stereotypes cannot be used, even in children's films. Even though Miyazaki sometimes feels pessimistic about the world, he prefers to show children a positive world view instead.

Some of Miyazaki's early films featured distinctly evil villains, as in Castle of Cagliostro or Castle in the Sky; other films are remarkable for having no villains at all, as in Kiki's Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro. Some of these have a strong flavour of traditional Japanese culture and ancient animistic spiritual beliefs.

Environmentalism
Miyazaki's films often emphasize environmentalism and the Earth's fragility, especially in the context of critiquing development and pollution.

In My Neighbor Totoro, the great tree tops a hillside on which magical creatures reside, and the family worships this tree. This ecological consciousness is echoed in Princess Mononoke with the giant primordial forest, trees, flowers and wolves. In Spirited Away, Miyazaki's environmental concerns surface in the "stink spirit", a river spirit who has been polluted and who must be cleansed in the bath house. Miyazaki explains in the DVD commentary that the inspiration for this scene was a personal experience of his own when he helped to clean a polluted river near his home. This theme is also reflected in the story of the river spirit Haku, whose river had been destroyed by a building project. In Miyazaki's most recent film, Ponyo, Ponyo's father shows a strong dislike for humans and their filth. This is evidenced by the disgusting condition of the bay area where Sosuke lives and the net catching nothing but garbage that also forces Ponyo into a glass bottle.

In Princess Mononoke, Castle in the Sky and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the ecological paradise is threatened by military men and violent state-controlled armies. In each film, the conflict between the natural way of life and the military destruction of culture, land and resources is central to the plight of the protagonists. When battle scenes are shown in each, the militaristic music and ecological destruction is paramount to the endangerment of the inhabitants of the villages.



In an interview with The New Yorker, Miyazaki claimed that much of modern culture is "thin and shallow and fake", and "not entirely jokingly" looked forward to an apocalyptic age in which "wild green grasses" take over. Growing up in the Shōwa period was an unhappy time for him because "nature — the mountains and rivers — was being destroyed in the name of economic progress." Nonetheless, he suggests that adults should not "impose their vision of the world on children."

Love
Many of Miyazaki's films deal with the power of love. In Miyazaki's films, the power of love is enough to break curses set upon people. In "Spirited Away", Kamajii tells Haku that Chihiro saved him from Zeniba's curse using the power of her love for him. In "Howl's Moving Castle" Sophie's confidence in herself and her love for Howl breaks the curse laid upon her by the Wicked Witch of the Waste. In "Porco Rosso" he becomes human again when he is kissed by Fio. In "Whisper of the Heart" Shizuku's love for Seiji makes her follow her passion of writing and write the book while Seiji is away in Italy. In "Ponyo", if Sousuke's love for Ponyo was true then the world would be saved.

Pacifism
Both Nausicaä and Princess Mononoke feature strong anti-war themes. Ending the humans' hateful war with themselves and nature becomes the driving force of Ashitaka in Princess Mononoke. In the manga version of Nausicaä, Miyazaki spends much time depicting the brutality and suffering of war in graphic detail through most of the story. The post-apocalyptic world is filled with remains of the old civilizations that ended with wars and the destruction of the environment. In Laputa: Castle in the Sky, the military is portrayed as mindlessly and needlessly violent, greedy, and heavyhanded. In Howl's Moving Castle, Howl's negative view of the war is clear and he refuses to join the fight in any official capacity. Despite this, he frequently participates on the magical plane of the war as a demon bird battling "hack" wizards, in hopes he might have a positive impact.

In 2003, when Spirited Away won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, Miyazaki didn't attend the awards show personally. He later explained that it was because he "didn’t want to visit a country that was bombing Iraq".

Flying
Flight, especially human flight, is a recurring theme in Miyazaki's films. He thinks of flight as a form of liberation from gravity and how it keeps you stuck in one place. The Studio Ghibli 2002 short film Imaginary Flying Machines is completely devoted to the wonders of flight and is voiced by Miyazaki himself.

In addition to the many aerial devices and drawings of Laputa: Castle in the Sky, which is a flying city, this theme is found in Nausicaä piloting her Mehve and the airborne armies in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Kiki riding her broomstick and watching dirigibles fly over her city in Kiki’s Delivery Service, the large Totoro carrying Satsuki and Mei across the night sky in My Neighbor Totoro, Chihiro riding on Haku's back when in his dragon form in Spirited Away and Howl and Sophie soaring above their town in Howl's Moving Castle. The protagonist in Porco Rosso is a pilot and the film is focused on flying, airplanes and aerial combat, as well as the connection between flight, Ascension and the afterlife.

Interestingly, one of Miyazaki's most successful films, Princess Mononoke, does not contain a flying sequence, or any flying characters. However, it could be argued that the scenes in which Yakul leaps across large rocks and ledges are moments of "flight".

Politics
The influence of Miyazaki's early interest in Marxism is apparent in some of his films, such as Porco Rosso. In Castle in the Sky, the working class is portrayed in idealized terms. In Future Boy Conan, the ideologies of the friendly town High Harbor and the antagonistic nation Industria are reversed from their source in the (Cold War-era) Alexander Key novel The Incredible Tide on which the series is based—the originally Communist Industria becomes a runaway capitalist state, and the capitalist High Harbor becomes a farming commune.

Miyazaki abandoned Marxism while creating his manga Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind. He states he "stopped seeing things by class, as it's a lie that one is right just because he/she is a laborer." However, Miyazaki still holds some socialist ideas and is critical of capitalism, globalization and their impacts on modern life.

Feminism
Miyazaki has been called a feminist by Studio Ghibli President Toshio Suzuki, in reference to his attitude to female workers. This is evident in the all-female factories of Porco Rosso and Princess Mononoke, as well as the matriachal bath-house of Spirited Away. All of Miyazaki's films are populated by strong female protagonists that go against gender roles common in Japanese animation and fiction, from pirate captains to industrialists. Even in lighter films such as Kiki's Delivery Service, all of the leading characters are professional women such as artists (Ursula), bakers (Orsono), fashion-designers (Maki) and witches (Kiki and Kokiri).

Children and childhood
Many of Miyazaki's works deal with childhood. For example, My Neighbor Totoro has two young girls who, unlike adults, can see the spirit world, and in Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea a boy befriends a magic creature from the sea. Both Kiki's Delivery Service and Spirited Away deal with growing up.

Miyazaki has expressed strong feelings about childhood, saying that it's a paradisical time when "you're protected by your parents and unaware of the problems around you". His views of children in the modern world are a bit worried, though, as he wonders about their dependence on the "virtual world" and the lack of contact with the natural world. Because of this, he creates his films inspired by children near himself, with an aim to "understand their world".

Water
Water, or, more specifically, retrograde fluidity, is a recurring theme in opposition to the Ascension symbolism of flight (cf. Porco Rosso). Miyazki’s characters are often on the verge of discorporating into liquid entirely: from the stink-demon, to the river dragon spirit Haku in Spirited Away and the God-Warrior at the climax of Nausicaa to the globular henchmen of the Witch of the Waste in Howl's Moving Castle. This theme is pivotal throughout 2009's Ponyo. This conflict between the two themes of flight and watery dissolution is best embodied in the sea-planes of Porco Rosso, the heroes being able to navigate through both worlds. Water symbolically represents the contradictions of entrapment and freedom, life and death.

Miyazaki has stated his warm appreciation for Shinto water purification rituals, and these have been cited as the inspiration for the role of water in Spirited Away: the characters of Haku the river dragon and the polluted river spirit; the setting and function of the bathhouse itself. Rain as an element is also a key plot device in both Kiki's Delivery Service and My Neighbour Totoro.