A friend introduced me to Hayao Miyazaki, and I’ve been watching (and rewatching) his films ever since. They are visual feasts, stories that seem to slice underneath the skin and sit there, releasing their themes in minute, digestible increments over years. These days, every student of a Western education is required to analyze the themes in any creative work and explain them, which is a little bit like trying to do a vivisection and expose only the circulatory system. It can be done, of course, and we’ve all seen the red and blue images of arteries and veins in an outline of the human body, but how do you really observe a circulatory system if all you have is a dead body, when the blood has stopped flowing? You can’t. Similarly, talking about themes as a list of the arteries and veins in a story doesn’t help us understand why and how themes infuse the story with life.
A quick Google search gives a simplistic understanding of recurring themes in Miyazaki’s work: strong women heroines, environmentalism and humanity’s eroding connection with the elements and spirits, war and the loss of innocence, flying machines, and the power of love. Reading through a list like that makes it seem almost like a recipe ingredient list, one that should “just work” if you try it at home. Oh, I’ve read books like that! Even my own stories have some of those themes! But try to do it yourself and you end up in one of those online shopping memes about expectation and reality. No, you can’t just drop in those themes and make your own Miyazaki.
Below: what it would look like if you just took the list of themes and tried to put them in a novel.
I’m currently in Rome, seeing the works of Michelangelo and Bernini everywhere, and realizing that themes are what make an artist’s work recognizable, more clearly than any signature. You can tell a Michelangelo from the intense emotions and exaggerated muscles (I mean, what is even happening with Santa Caterina here? Woman has Biceps!)
And you can tell Bernini from the angles, the dynamism of movement, and the way he makes marble and bronze seem almost weightless. But those aren’t the same thing as knowing why they were haunted by these ideas, why they show up in every piece of art they make.
I believe most artists are haunted by a particular problem, and they create art almost compulsively as a way to answer it. For instance, Miyazaki was born in Japan in 1941. Of course war haunts his work. How could it not?
The creative space for an artist involves getting asymptotically closer and closer to an answer without ever reaching one. An answer ends the creative process, and probably means the question was too simple to bother with in the first place. War is bad is an answer, but to read Miyazaki’s work as simply answering a question of good and evil does him very little credit. The questions he wrestles with are far more interesting.
Can you love the undisturbed spirits in the forest and the flying machines that disturb them without contradiction? By living in this world, humans disturb it. But humans are fascinating, humans are capable of miracles, and humans have built these airplanes that at once make my heart soar but can also be used as weapons of war. How can I claim to love nature in its most pristine form but also love these creatures who destroy it?
Looking at these two quotes from Miyazaki next to each other, we see the real theme emerge:
Quote 1
But when, for instance, one of my staff has a baby you can't help but bless them for a good future. Because I can't tell that child, 'Oh, you shouldn't have come into this life.' And yet I know the world is heading in a bad direction. So with those conflicting thoughts in mind, I think about what kind of films I should be making.”
Quote 2
I would like to make a film to tell children "it's good to be alive".
An ambitious undertaking then, to create art that inspires a hope that the creator himself struggles to feel. That’s the real thematic question.
As I work on my own stories, I write down the questions that I personally wrestle with, questions that have no clear cut answer. There aren’t going to be two people with diametrically opposed answers, and the hero defeats the villain, proving out one answer over the other. If it were that easy, I wouldn’t bother writing a story to figure out how I really feel.
Especially not the current story, which, at 75,000 words and in its third draft, is a question I have now been wrestling with for nearly 15 years.
But I don’t need an answer yet. I just need to keep getting closer to one.
Love this. In case we haven't already talked about it, I highly recommend the documentary "The Kingdom of Dreams of Madness". It was filmed at Ghibli a year after the tsunami, during Miyazaki's supposed final film and Takahata's final film.