The Joy of Incomprehensibility in Miyazaki
This week I'm wrong about the latest Studio Ghibli film, plus romcom soundtracks and R-rated puppetry
My most recent solo-expedition to the Downtown Brooklyn Alamo Drafthouse was to see Studio Ghibli’s The Boy and The Heron, the latest by the legendary Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki.
I am extremely late to seeing and therefore appreciating Miyazaki’s work with the reverence and awe it deserves, and I’m still only about halfway through his filmography. But I think I’ve started to figure out a few of his patterns.
First, Miyazaki’s work is beautiful. The scenery is alive in a way that recent 2D animated films rarely are, and even objects are imbued with a dignity that comes from the care of their creation. People’s faces are drawn with precision, nuance, and emotion. And then every old person is drawn like they clean their nostrils with poison ivy and just saw the ark of the covenant.
Second, the first half of his movies straddle a wonderful line between the restrained emotional realism of subtle family and societal tensions and the glimmers of a magical, chaotic fantasy world. Moments of weirdness and conflict are allowed to linger. He is in no rush to answer questions or get to a resolution.
And then when the weirdness fully takes over in the second half of the story, and the fantasy world comes into full view, he ratchets up the weirdness and whimsy repeatedly and without a moment’s pause. In The Boy and the Heron (major spoiler alert), a mysterious castle becomes an ocean world filled with murderous pelicans guarding a strange gated tomb and ghosts and ghost ships and unborn baby souls and a warlike civilization of humanoid carnivorous parakeets and a girl who can teleport and control fire and a mysterious man who lives beyond a strange passageway in a separate garden world where he maintains existence through stacking blocks of magical stones every day. I’ve only listed about half of the strange and delightful elements of the back half of the movie.
None of these inclusions are ever truly explained or justified beyond vague references by the characters. Often, a conflict is explained as it’s happening—”you weren’t supposed to enter that room, now the magical stone is angry”—where none of the elements of the conflict were even mentioned beforehand. It’s chaotic, it’s confusing, and it’s AMAZING.
Western fantasy films have become obsessed with explanation and plot holes. In Star Wars, Jedi went from having force powers because they just did, to having them because of midichlorians, and Rogue One exists pretty much entirely to justify the Death Star’s exhaust port (although it’s a good movie anyway). Superhero movies have paralyzed themselves making their interconnected movies fit perfectly into each other. JK Rowling takes a break from being transphobic every once in a while to over-explain every aspect of her fictional world, like how wizards used the bathroom before modern plumbing.
While these explanations and interconnections are supposed to make the world feel more real, their effect is usually to make the universe of the story feel small. If everything has a neat and tidy explanation, there’s no space left for wonder or mystery. And that shrinking affects every aspect of our enjoyment. The result of the logistical consolidation of fantasy is not just to remove any tension or grandeur in our thinking about the worlds of the stories, but in our thinking about the emotions and journeys of the characters within those worlds.
Miyazaki rejects neatness. He embraces the chaos and the inexplicability of fantasy, which mirrors the chaos and inexplicability of our own lives. His worlds feel endless and wondrous because of that chaos, not in spite of it. And the chaos allows him to weave a tapestry of emotionally resonant and challenging images and metaphors and creations that require deep and thoughtful reflection to even begin to understand or piece together, resisting clarity and cheap satisfaction. When he comments on environmental destruction or the generational trauma of war and violence or family conflict through the lens of his bizarre imagination, he doesn’t deliver a bite-sized message we can easily forget and discard. He forces a deeper reflection on the nonsensical realities we live with and within. His work is effective rather than forgettable, provocative rather than appeasing, demanding rather than satiating. He captures a fuller range of experience by requiring the participation of his audience.
Fantasy is powerful because it mirrors the wonder and confusion and fear and joy and awe we experience when we allow ourselves to be present and truly notice the world around us. At its best, it’s not distraction. It’s illumination.
Thinking about The Boy and the Heron has made me excited to keep watching more Miyazaki, as well as the documentary about his creative process. I’m sure the better-educated Miyazaki lovers reading this will have a lot to add and expand and correct me on, here, too. But I’m excited to keep being challenged by his fantasies.
And Now, A Musical Break
Because I’m obsessed with movies (especially romcoms), when I listen to music I always think about what part of a romcom each song would be the soundtrack for.
This originated in the car with one of my best friends, on the way to a job conference. We were both in transitional stages of our lives and wondering where we were going to end up living and working. Maggie Rogers’ “Light On” came up on Spotify, and we instantly knew: it’s the song that plays about two-thirds of the way through a romcom when the protagonist has decided to do what they’re supposed to do but not what they want to do—when they’ve given up on the complexity of love and a more challenging but fulfilling life to accept the simplicity of more money doing something they hate—and they’re going through the motions, knowing they should be happy but staring vacantly out the window wondering what their love interest is doing.
I think my friend and I were caught up in the simultaneous excitement of possibility and the overwhelming terror of making the wrong decision that come in moments when you see a crossroads ahead of you. Romcoms are inherently about a certain kind of crossroads moment, about giving up something in order to get to or become something better—and the fear that comes with that. This song speaks to that fear very effectively, I think.
A more obvious example: this song by Upsahl would play in the moment a romcom couple kiss for the first time, and everything briefly seems really great.
And this song by July Talk would happen as enemies-to-lovers began to soften towards each other, started feeling just a bit of longing, but are still too afraid of getting hurt to make a move.
I could go on. I have a playlist of songs I can imagine at specific moments of a romcom (and I have specific moments in my script in mind for many of them). I’d love to hear if you have any you think I should add, and where their needle drop would happen in a movie.
A Rare Puppet Scene I Did Not Enjoy
Unfortunately, my number one potential romcom song might have been taken, and ruined forever, by one of my favorite shows.
I am a huge fan of the band Wolf Alice, and their song “Don’t Delete the Kisses” has been the soundtrack in my head for the final scene of the romcom I’m writing pretty much since I came up with the story.
Cut to me watching Gen V, the excellent but extremely graphic college spinoff of the also excellent and graphic superhero/capitalism/American hegemony satire The Boys.
Late in the season, two characters sleep together while hiding in an abandoned arcade. One of them, Sam, has spent his entire life imprisoned and experimented on by the evil corporation at the center of the show, and frequently hallucinates that people in his vicinity are puppets while he’s talking to and/or brutally killing them (it’s a very weird show).
At the moment of climax, Sam sees his partner Emma as, you guessed it, a puppet.
And guess what song is playing throughout the entire scene? You can take my word for it, or you can click the extremely upsetting link below.
I can never hear the song the same way again, and if you watched that video, now you can’t either.
A Quick Break
This coming Monday is Christmas, and because I’m planning on being with family and being as lazy as possible, next Tuesday will not herald the arrival of a new edition of Confidently Wrong. I’ll be back blabbing about whatever pops into my head on Tuesday, January 2nd, 2024.
No matter what you celebrate, I hope you have a spectacular end to 2023, a year that has been probably the most eventful of my life and was never uninteresting. I think that’s about the best you can hope for these days.
Happy New Year.
One day I will gather the three Studio Ghibli films I still do not have. I have been following Hayao Miyazaki and his studio partner Isao Takahata since the late 1980s. Miyazaki is to be admired first for his obsession with everything he does. He is a true film auteur who invents, draws, writes, storyboards and directs. Most of his stories are wholly original. If not they are from Books no one has ever heard of. I also love now each of his films pull the viewers in and that not one of them really has a true villain. Plus all of them suspend belief which makes them captivating. OK, that’s enough. Miyazaki has directed 11 films for Studio Ghibli and my four favorites are: Kiki’s Delivery Service for the design and the storyboards; Spirited Away for it’s terrific originality; Princess Mononoke for its myth and fable; and My Neighbor Totoro for the cat bus, the Totoro figures and the trees. Of the four films directed by Isao Takahata, my favorite is Grave of the Fireflies.
Although animated it is one of the very best war and anti-war films ever produced in my view. incidentally “ghibli” is an Italian word Italian pilots once used to describe winds blowing from the Sahara Desert.
I have 21 Studio Ghibli films in my animation collection. Comments on Miyazaki to follow in a day or two.