So you say you're under a curse? So what? So's the whole damn world.
October 29, 2018 3:05 PM   Subscribe

How do you live with a true heart when everything around you is collapsing? Hayao Miyazaki’s Cursed Worlds
posted by Artw (17 comments total) 28 users marked this as a favorite
 
Was just mentioning this to a colleague today. She has never watched any Miyazaki films, but Mononoke Hime, for example, works as an allegory about climate change (or any sort of massive, apocalyptic change, such as the arrival of European colonizers in Jamestown).
posted by JamesBay at 3:58 PM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]


Is it streaming anywhere at the moment?
posted by Wretch729 at 3:58 PM on October 29, 2018


I have not seen Mononoke , mainly because of circumstance and at the current moment, I’m rather reticent to out of fear of being too sensitive.

In any case, I suppose they can’t give away the book, but the most interesting part of the piece for me was the last third, beginnng to discuss the unpredictability of 13th c Japan and the echos Miyazaki traced to the late 20th c. I want to know more about what it did and could mean, and much more about the how one can live by either (both?) the ‘live’/ ‘unclouded eyes’ credo.
posted by queseyo at 4:00 PM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]


Wretch, looks like your best streaming site will be one of the free streaming sites. Alamo occasionally does do theatre showings of Ghibli films. Unfortunately none right now, at least in my area, but definitely worth getting tickets for if they pop up in theatres in your area.
posted by GoblinHoney at 4:02 PM on October 29, 2018


I know John Lasseter is now persona non grata, but he's the one we have to thank for Disney's release of the Miyazaki films on DVD with the original Japanese dialog tracks and subtitles alongside their English dubs (which are a very mixed bag). He's a serious Miyazaki fanboy and, at the height of Pixar's success, it was Lasseter who had the clout to pry those films out of the vault and get Disney to put some resources into high quality releases. Prior to that, Disney had basically bought up the rights then buried the films like Exxon with a car that runs on water.
posted by Naberius at 4:27 PM on October 29, 2018 [8 favorites]


Apropos not a whole lot, the manga for Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is better than the movie. The movie is good, don't get me wrong, but damn did the book really show some depth.
posted by RolandOfEld at 4:47 PM on October 29, 2018 [7 favorites]


My favorite people in that movie are the lepers and whores of Irontown, who are neither cursed nor a curse, but just up against it and trying to live. Miyazaki gets great stories out of his animistic environmentalism, but I am not at all sure that thinking of nature as full of gods helps. I always think of how the Japanese live in a great place for geothermal power and a correspondingly terrible place for nuclear power, and nevertheless won't use geothermal power. All of their hot springs have had bath houses on them for time out of mind, some of them originally for ritual purification, and they won't cap them for sentimental reasons. Giving much weight to sacredness or sentiment interferes with seeing the world clearly.

What I like best in Miyazaki's movies is an aesthetic of courtesy, simple living, and a careful touch. Everything is old-fashioned, slow, and rustic, even the machines, and everything takes place, more often than not, not in nature, but in a mixture of homes, workplaces, and nature. You could build an energy-efficient, environmentalist aesthetic out of that, and if enough people took it up, it might do some good.
posted by ckridge at 5:01 PM on October 29, 2018 [6 favorites]


Geothermal power at scale will cause more seismic activity, though. The interesting thing about nuclear power in Japan is that the plants were planned more than 50 years ago, before there was a good understanding of active fault lines in Japan, or even scientific consensus over plate tectonics.

Anyway, as most nuclear power plants have been mothballed since 2011, Japan has invested heavily in coal power plants. The country once had the lowest per capita GHG emissions in the G20.
posted by JamesBay at 5:07 PM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]


Kind of cool how Captain Phasma seems to resemble Kushana from Nausicaa.
posted by JamesBay at 10:13 PM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]


Good timing on this post - we're just nearing the end of Studio Ghibli Fest 2018.

Spirited Away is the first and only film of his I have seen so far. I watched it for the first time, at home, about four months ago. I was totally blown away. Thanks to the Ghibli Fest, I was able to go watch it in a big proper theater here in Philly on Sunday. Absolutely fantastic on the big screen and with sound. The music! Gah.

I am so looking forward to watching through the catalogue. Next up, though, I will be catching the last of the Ghibli fest films in theaters, I hope - Castle in the Sky.
posted by lazaruslong at 5:41 AM on October 30, 2018 [3 favorites]


Kind of cool how Captain Phasma seems to resemble Kushana from Nausicaa.

I honestly wonder if Nausicaa came up during the early discussions and writing on the new Star Wars trilogy. The scene where we're introduced to Rey, salvaging scrap from the crashed Star Destroyer feels very influenced by the early scene in Nausicaa where she finds the giant insect shell. I do wish that Phasma was nearly as fleshed out and complex an antagonist as Kushana, but maybe we'll get some late-stage character development with her in Ep IX.
posted by Strange Interlude at 6:38 AM on October 30, 2018 [5 favorites]


Princess Mononoke was the first movie of his that I went to see, as it was highly touted by Roger Ebert at the time of its North American premiere and I had been (and still am) an enormous fan of the Nausicäa manga. I've gone on to see and own copies of all his other movies on the strength of it--and infected a niece with the same bug too.

I think a lot of their power comes from the depth of the secondary worlds he creates. They're detailed in a way that feels realistic, and it grounds the characters and lets their investment in the goals they have feel real too. It's quite the trick too. Apart from Lord of the Rings, I can't think of any other fantasy world that feels as real as the Valley of the Wind and its larger war-torn neighbors. The upper-crust of his movies (Mononoke, Spirited Away, Porco, Totoro) rely more on grace touches due to their relative shortness but it's easy to feel that even minor characters like the Radish Spirit or Kaya have lives outside the film's frame.

From that comes the lack of good guys and bad guys. Most everyone stumbles along doing ill by accident, but their complex environment makes it understandable--even sympathetic. The exceptions are the few who have clarity (Ashitaka) or grow into it (Chihiro) and they're often less likable than the people they interact with.
posted by Quindar Beep at 6:52 AM on October 30, 2018 [4 favorites]


Thank you for posting this! I enjoyed reading the article.
posted by minsies at 9:09 AM on October 30, 2018


By the way, I was pretty proud that after introducing my, how old was she then, three maybe, daughter to Spirited Away that she loved it and wasn't freaked out at all by the odder parts. For a while there it stole the show of 'movie that she wants to watch when the TV gets turned on' but, for whatever reason, she didn't firmly grasp the name and instead consistently called it "the movie about the girl that lost her name". Cute. As. Hell.

I was sad that there wasn't a theater locally that was playing it during the recent theater event thing. Maybe she's due a re-watch now that she's a bit older.
posted by RolandOfEld at 9:11 AM on October 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


Also, oddly enough, because we're all about strong female role models and trying not to fall into the 'girls are princesses/you are pretty/go put a dress on' gender trap, my wife wasn't really thrilled that I introduced her to it despite the fact that it's freaking beautifully done and is a huge example of a strong girl doing her thing in all the right ways. I dunno, she (MsEld) doesn't like anime and I feel like it was an odd flavor of stigma that still somewhat persisted even after the movie's darker moments didn't freak her out at all.
posted by RolandOfEld at 9:14 AM on October 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


For the sake of having a thesis, the author makes it seem like Mononoke is the first Miyazaki movie with no clearcut bad guy, but that's a trend that goes all the way back to Nausicäa. Also Mononoke's "unprecedented depiction of environmental collapse" was very much preceded by the depiction of the environmental holocaust in Nausicäa, so the author is very careful to credit the manga, but not the feature film that came out thirteen years before Mononoke did. It's a nerdy detail to be bugged about, but I don't think Mononoke is some sort of quantum leap in Miyazaki's filmmaking. All his films have the same elegiac yet hopeful spiritual outlook. It's weird to me to single it out.
posted by servoret at 11:08 AM on October 30, 2018 [4 favorites]


When we moved back to Canada from Japan, it was really rough for me. I realized I had made a big mistake and I experienced what must have been clinical depression for at least a year or so.

Totoro really helped me out. I must have watched it at least fifty times with my oldest son, who was just three or four at the time. I liked that particular film because the landscape resembles where I have spent the most time in Japan -- rural Fukui and the Noto Peninsula.

But all of his films are just so interesting.
posted by JamesBay at 11:16 AM on October 30, 2018 [7 favorites]


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