Throughout July, The Swell celebrated the lasting cultural inspiration of animator Hayao Miyazaki and the legendary films he created with Studio Ghibli. As part of GKIDS’ annual Studio Ghibli Fest, which kicked off in June, you can enjoy theatrical re-releases of some of his most famous works.

While I would never deign to speak for all critics — I’ve been around enough to know I don’t need that smoke — we’re not generally fans of inscrutability. A little layered mystery is just fine. Many of us appreciate artistic execution that leaves plenty of openings for wild interpretations. But once we’re venturing into the territory of “What in the hell was that?” the knives tend to come out.

That’s part of the reason I left “Howl’s Moving Castle,” adapted from British author Diana Wynne Jones’ novel, for the last flight in our monthlong look at Hayao Miyazaki. The plots of “Spirited Away,” “My Neighbor Totoro,” “Princess Mononoke” and “Kiki’s Delivery Service” are as lucid and pure as spring water, relatively speaking. “Howl’s Moving Castle,” on the other hand, is an unconventional love story wrapped inside an anti-war plot about a prince who gave his heart to a demon and a young girl turned into an old woman by a jealous witch. It’s also about curses and a giant house that moves around on chicken legs and a turnip-headed scarecrow and pollution and . . . see what I mean?

It’s nice to know I was never alone in my befuddlement. “There’s much to admire in ‘Howl’s Moving Castle,’ which is precisely the problem,” remarked film critic Stephanie Zacharek in her 2005 review for Salon. “Its whimsical grandiosity practically invites us to use the passive voice, a kind of verbal genuflection.”

The benefit of returning to a story like this 20 years after a first viewing is that presumably, time has softened us. For “Howl’s Moving Castle,” that matters since its heroine, Sophie Hatter (initially voiced in the English dubbed version by Emily Mortimer), spends much of the film waxing and waning between young and elderly selves. When she’s youthful, Sophie catches the eye of a handsome, richly dressed stranger who gallantly escorts her away from two men harassing her on the street. He introduces himself as Howl (Christian Bale), a flamboyant wizard who whisks her across rooftops on her way home.

But Sophie, an introverted milliner, never asked for anyone’s attention and is convinced she’s plain and unattractive. The Witch of the Waste (Lauren Bacall) echoes her insecurities back at her when she strides into Sophie’s shop, insults her, and with a wave of her hand, transforms Sophie into a hunched-over dowager (with Jean Simmons taking over the role).

I could easily hail “Howl’s Moving Castle” as a tribute to maturity, especially when placed against other Miyazaki stories starring young heroines setting out on adventures. That feel especially valid at a time when we have plenty of shoppable salves to soothe midlife crisis ego death in whatever forms that it takes. (I have no idea what the Turnip Scarecrow’s significance is in all this, other than to be this fairy tale’s frog prince.)

But when viewed in one way of many, “Howl’s Moving Castle” is an encouragement to look inward and see the truth about ourselves honestly and kindly. Most of us aren’t the same person on the inside as we seem to be on the outside — including Sophie, a woman in the early bloom of her life whose dedication to work has shriveled her vitality.

(© 2004 Diana Wynne Jones/Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli, NDDMT)

Trapping Sophie in a crone’s body and making her realize how much harder it is to cross rolling hills and climb stairs gives her a new appreciation for everything she’s been taking for granted. But more than this, as an old woman Sophie abandons her insecurities about taking up space in the world — especially when she crosses paths with the Witch of the Waste again, and a more powerful wizard’s magic deflates said Witch into an enfeebled pile of skin.

Instead of taking pleasure in the Witch’s undoing, Sophie tenderly cares for her. She understands what it’s like to be unloved and ignored more than most, after all. Eventually, Sophie’s demonstrated empathy makes Howl fall more deeply in love with her.

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That’s one strand in this tale’s tangle. When following “Howl’s Moving Castle” as the story of Calcifer (voiced by Billy Crystal), the fire demon who holds Howl’s heart and fuels the castle, the movie becomes a fable about nurturing and destruction as two sides of the same coin. When Howl loses himself to a beastly form after attacking opposing forces in the war into which he’s drawn, it’s an allegory about how armed conflict robs us of our humanity. Its complexity makes the movie a treasure.

Ultimately, though, this vision of Miyazaki’s comes down to a lesson about the chameleonic nature of the human heart and soul, how we change to adapt to every situation and interaction, and how the those who love us must love every version. It champions the bravery of embracing maturity with a young heart.

But that’s just my take. Zacharek accurately referred to Miyazaki’s narratives as “wriggly, noodle-shaped things,” and not in offering her compliments to the chef. I get it. I’ve also come to understand that some of Miyazaki’s offerings are tastes worth acquiring through a few tries, even for skeptics. His filmography is as vast and varied as this bizarre castle’s meanderings, with life lessons for anyone.

The post This Miyazaki film sees who we really are at heart appeared first on Salon.com.

Throughout July, The Swell is celebrating the lasting cultural inspiration of animator Hayao Miyazaki and the legendary films he created with Studio Ghibli. As part of GKIDS’ annual Studio Ghibli Fest, which kicked off in June, you can enjoy theatrical re-releases of some of his most famous works.

To young children, Kiki’s adventure is a simple fantasy about a kid who can fly on her mother’s broom and launches a business with the same enthusiasm that elementary schoolers radiate while running a lemonade stand. 

Once Kiki leaves her village with her constant companion Jiji, a talking cat, she sails through the skies, albeit insecurely. She’s uncertain about her flight capabilities, and even less sure of herself when she encounters a more experienced and stuck-up witch who’s around her age, and who brushes her off instead of propping up her confidence. 

Eventually Kiki ends up in a bustling seaside city that hasn’t had a witch in its midst in many years. After a rough start, including a run-in with an irritating policeman, she lands at the home of a baker, Osono, who gives her a place to stay in exchange for labor and her delivery services.

Since Kiki’s abilities allow her to defy gravity, she runs packages across town, avoiding auto traffic and pedestrian crowds. Her world looks and operates like ours, and that means there are no free lunches.

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“Princess Mononoke” is a warning we didn’t heed

Osono’s kindness is part of the fantasy, in that she takes in a strange little girl and lets her live in her extra room without asking many questions. But even when Kiki botches a delivery by dropping a toy mid-air, sending it tumbling into a nearby forest, a bit of reciprocal effort solves the problem. Ursula, the artist who lives there, finds it broken and has Kiki scrub her floors in exchange for repairing it.  

I’ve read a few interpretations of the narrative’s emphasis on labor exchange that assume these moments are meant to teach children that labor has value. Maybe. As I see it, Kiki’s willingness to help others conveys a more important teaching about interdependence as an integral part of independence. Her efforts are acts of caring, moving others to do the same for her.

While Kiki’s coming-of-age year as a witch requires her to live on her own, she’s never alone and can’t succeed without other people. That part of the story appeals to the restless adolescent versions of ourselves that can’t wait to find our place in the world.

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The third act, however, hits hardest when you’ve lived long enough to lose your mojo and doubt yourself. Kiki meets a boy, Tombo, who is obsessed with flight and, specifically, Kiki’s marvelous ability to fly without the help of a machine. Initially she pushes him away, but Tombo is persistent. Eventually they become friends. And it’s to him that she admits, “Flying used to be fun until I started doing it for a living.”

Soon after that, Kiki wakes up to find her magic is absent. She’s expended so much of it on others that she has none left for herself. She can’t even understand Jiji anymore.

(1989 Eiko Kadono/Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli, N) A still from “Kiki’s Delivery Service.”

If every Miyazaki movie has a whiff of biographical relevance, one might see “Kiki’s Delivery Service” as his statement of creative purpose and motivation. Who can help a witch who’s lost her flight? A woman who lives alone in a house in the woods, of course – although she’s an artist, not a witch. Ursula’s advice to Kiki is the same as any career coach or mental health professional counseling someone through a crisis of confidence: Stop working so hard, take a walk and look at the world for a while.

“We each need to find our own inspiration, Kiki,” says Ursula. “Sometimes it’s not easy.”

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I can’t think of a person who makes a living from their talent that doesn’t feel that way at some point. We call it burnout. To Miyazaki, Kiki’s depletion is a sign that she’s leaving childhood behind. She regains her ability to fly but is never able to communicate with Jiji again. So maybe she doesn’t quite regain her magic but taps into a new version of it.

Magic is a five-letter word that does so much heavy lifting when it comes to describing the essence of what makes something special. Thinking of it that way makes life sweeter, too. Science can explain the world around us, but magic helps us appreciate the wonder in the atomic arrangement of nature, chance meetings with open-hearted souls and kindness without expectation of anything in return. “Kiki’s Delivery Service” has been telling us that since the very first time we saw it, and in new ways with each repeat viewing.

“Kiki’s Delivery Service” is streaming on HBO Max.

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The post Your magical burnout cure is in this Miyazaki film appeared first on Salon.com.

Throughout July, The Swell is celebrating the lasting cultural inspiration of animator Hayao Miyazaki and the legendary films he created with Studio Ghibli. As part of GKIDS’ annual Studio Ghibli Fest, which kicked off in June, you can enjoy theatrical re-releases of some of his most famous works.

My first gray whale sighting was entirely accidental. My husband and I had pulled over at a park somewhere on the Washington Coast, gotten out of the car to stretch our legs and decided to take a brief walk on a nearby beach. 

I must have only taken about 10 steps when the sea titan breached, its spotted skin flashing in the sunlight briefly before plunging beneath the waves. Then it emerged again and submerged, rising and falling and growing smaller as it moved further away. 

Before I relocated to the Pacific Northwest, I had only seen whales and other wildlife common to this region on TV.  That makes Seattle a fitting place to have taken in “Princess Mononoke” for the first time. 

When it made its stateside debut in 1999, I was still intoxicated by the city’s proximity to mountains, old growth forests and water – so much of it, fresh or salty. With all that in my backyard, Hayao Miyazaki’s verdant scenery teeming with ancient trees did not look so foreign. That made its giant beast gods feel real too, along with their snarling rage against annihilation.

Next year, “Princess Mononoke” turns 30. Its setting is much older, a version of medieval Japan where humans are crafting iron into firearms and beasts can talk, but nobody wants to listen to each other. 

It’s a turning point similar to what we face now.

“Princess Mononoke” begins with a worm-covered demon attacking a pastoral village, only to be slain by its prince, Ashitaka. When the thing dies, the worms fall away to reveal that it wasn’t always a demon, but a boar god felled by a dark force. The village elders send Ashitaka west to find out how this curse came to be. What he finds is a conflict pitting human progress, and its attenuating battle for power and domination, against nature.

I was raised near the shore of Chicago’s slice of Lake Michigan, a body of water wide and blue enough to pass for the sea. We didn’t have whales, just freshwater fish like alewifes, which stunk up the beaches with annual die-offs that occurred in huge numbers. When I was a kid, I always wondered why that happened, and the only explanation adults could provide amounted to, “Because.”

Humans are raised to accept such things are part of a cycle that repeats no matter what we do, and regardless of whether whatever we’re doing impacts that cycle. Right now, gray whale carcasses are washing ashore in Washington at an alarming rate, with 30 dead ones counted so far, only five short of the 2019 record that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration designated as an unusual mortality event.

What’s more depressing is that a research biologist interviewed by KING-TV, Seattle’s NBC affiliate, stated that the beached whales people have encountered likely represent only a quarter to a fifth of the total death toll.

The suspected culprit behind this loss is precisely what most would guess – warming seas, melting arctic ice and a decrease in prey availability. Yet many still doubt that the choices we make for convenience’s sake are destroying the planet.

(©1997 Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli)

Ashitaka’s frustrations hit me like an earthquake decades ago, and still do. His people are ancient and few, a clan whose kinship with nature left them vulnerable to warring nobles who all but wiped them out. When he comes upon Irontown, led by the highborn Lady Eboshi, and listens to its people brag about burning down the boar god’s forest, one might expect him to be angry.

But while I fumed at seeing a tavern full of men laughing at the wanton destruction of life, Ashitaka simply listens, then heads to their neighboring woods to find San, the wild girl the locals whisper about, a human raised by a wolf god.

San was also raised to hate humans, and understandably so: the people of Irontown don’t just want to murder her mother, they’re also intent on beheading the Forest Spirit that keeps the land and plants healthy. Without it, the trees and animals will die, making it easier for the humans to clear-cut the land and settle there.

Miyazaki is a noted pacifist, but “Princess Mononoke” is his most humanist work. Its English language version is also marvelously cast, with Claire Danes voicing San, Billy Crudup as Ashitaka, Minnie Driver as Lady Eboshi and, best of all, Gillian Anderson lending her imperious snarl to Moro, San’s wolf mother.

Their work is a cultural bridge much like Ashitaka’s effort to bring the worlds of beasts and men together for a common cause, depicting what Miyazaki sees as one of humanism’s central conundrums. “One wild elephant, or the people who have to deal in ivory on the black market to survive – which do you value more?” he asked in an Animerica magazine interview tied to the film’s U.S. premiere.

“It’s like this that humanism itself gets swallowed up by nihilism,” he adds, concretizing that image in his movie with many scenes of environmental degradation realized as crawling blobs of death.

(©1997 Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli)

Even so, “Princess Mononoke” doesn’t glorify violence or tilt the audience against people like Lady Eboshi, who is more like us than we’d probably admit. Yes, she’s manufacturing weapons to kill the wolves, and we love the wolves! She also employs and supports a community of lepers and former sex workers who society would have otherwise cast aside. “The world is cursed,” says one of the lepers, “but still you find reasons to keep living.”

Seattleites compensate for months of rain and darkness by spending as much time outside as possible. I’m writing this from a chair in my backyard garden, which is where I’ll probably be when you’re reading it. It’s a good way not to think about the inevitability of the clouds and cold returning, and to enjoy hummingbirds and other winged neighbors up close instead of through a clammy windowpane.

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But it also reminds me of why Ashitaka’s central question remains as moving as the film’s visual feasts: Why can’t humans and the forest live together in harmony?  Nobody has an answer – not Lady Eboshi, certainly not San’s wolf mother or a monk who turns out not to be a monk at all. The best wisdom that man can offer is that everybody wants everything. “That’s the way the world is,” he says.

“Princess Mononoke” proves that sometimes losing too much motivates us to help nature to regain some ground. I drew that potent conclusion from it when I first saw it, before our summers grew hotter and a long-ago sight I’d planned to repeat became something closer to a once-in-a-lifetime experience. All these years later the story is still one of my favorites – as resplendent as it was the first time, and more necessary than ever.

“Princess Mononoke” is streaming on HBO Max.

The post “Princess Mononoke” is a warning we didn’t heed appeared first on Salon.com.

People still marvel at Miyazaki’s handcrafted backgrounds and his painstaking dedication to balancing its feather-light score with the melodies of flowing water or the gentle crunch of a child’s footfalls on grass and gravel. But Mei’s first meet-cute with her giant friend Totoro is what got me: she plops on his round belly as he sleeps, waking him up with her laugh as he yawns with a mouth big enough to swallow her whole. But Totoro would never harm Mei. That would break the spell Miyazaki weaves in every frame leading up to that moment.

“Totoro is where my consciousness begins,” Miyazaki once said. “It explains how my mind works.”

In the late 1980s – and certainly today, much more so – urban living distanced millions of people from their close connection to nature . . . and their parents. America had its latchkey generation and, along with that, a growing sense that the world is a dangerous place, especially its wilder parts.

Among the many culturally specific details that distributors feared would be misconstrued by Americans, the sight of a small child tumbling into a troll’s nest in the woods without any element of threat must have been low on their list.

Yet that’s precisely what made my first viewing of “Totoro” so unforgettable: Mei and Satsuki’s safety was never in doubt. Their father doesn’t dismiss their brush with the forest’s spirits as juvenile fantasy, either. Instead, he tells them that trees and people used to be good friends. By rekindling that relationship, the sisters (who are voiced by Dakota and Elle Fanning in the 2005 English language version) gain a huge and adorable new neighbor.

 

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All that said, there were parts of the spirit world that I wasn’t entirely on board with. The Catbus is the movie’s second most popular mascot, but let’s be real — it looks like something out of acid nightmare. The thing’s Cheshire feline grin even made Satsuki a little nervous. Only when it reappeared later to give the girls a ride to the hospital did I drop my guard.

Today we take the hallowed status of “My Neighbor Totoro” for granted. In Japan, he’s a beloved figure on par with any Disney character. Pixar affirms this by incorporating a Totoro cameo into “Toy Story 3.” Sulley from “Monsters, Inc.” is said to have been inspired by Totoro, which Studio Ghibli winked at in 2021 by tweeting a version of the rainy bus stop scene that inserted him and his buddy Mike into the frame.

(©1988 Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli) Still from “My Neighbor Totoro.” ©1988 Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli

“Totoro is where my consciousness begins,” Miyazaki once said. “It explains how my mind works.” Deep observers of his catalog also view it as his most biographical feature, citing how closely Satsuki and Mei’s bucolic retreat resembles a chapter in the filmmaker’s childhood when his own mother was gravely ill.

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But to me, it’s a calm establishment of Miyazaki’s genius, acknowledged by its ranking on many best film lists, including one compiled by the late Akira Kurosawa — the only animated title he included on a list of 100 movies.

“My Neighbor Totoro” is a gateway into a pastoral ideal that still exists in living memory, reviving parts of our imagination that maturity has stifled into dormancy.  And for 86 minutes, it assures us that some of the greatest cinematic treasures are also blissfully conflict-free.

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