Thoughts on Miyazaki - Howl’s Moving Castle

Howlsmovingcastle_poster

The first element to impress was the element of fable to his story.  These plot points feel like very old tales, like to you seeing a fairy tale being told.  The subtle things, like “once upon a time…” that cues your emotions for an experience of sentiment, wonder, childlike simplicity.  Miyazaki has that element in the childlike simplicity of this story, but at the same time there is this incredible psychological insight expressed in the lives of his characters, where their process of growth is not this sanitized, simplified process of “overcoming fear”, “learning to accept oneself” that Don Bluth and Disney animation established as the American standard.  Instead, as Pixar is sought to emulate, there is this psychological complexity that creates characters that even adults can identify with.  Howl’s looks at the question of safety at a very deep level, what does it mean for me to be safe as a person, what does it cost me, what do I give up in the process, and is it a good sort of safety, or the kind that I regret choosing later on.  Again, these questions were presented, grappled with at such a deep level, so as to really affirm the power of storytelling, the way it gets beyond our defenses and touches us in a way that direct awareness does not.

Howl4

Another novel theme M explores here is creating this fantastic world of magic, and placing it within a decidedly modern context.  You have traditional fairy tale elements of witches and sorcerers, deep spells and bitter oaths, set against this context of steam engines and railroads.  It’s not a present day setting a la Harry Potter, but this very specific Victorian past: proper dresses, sensible bonnets, walking to market to buy fresh produce and fish.  What is strange about this is how un-Japanese this seems.  Westernization arrives mid-19^th century, and introduces an eventual craze for all aspects of European culture, but that is not the reality seen here.  What we are seeing is a stylized England, elements of France, the storybook setting for traditional European fables.

A digression: when I went to Europe in college, I remember flying over France, preparing to land in Paris, and thinking “oh my goodness, this is the land where all the fairy tales happened!  I was looking at all these fields, non rectangular, winding around roads and hills, picturesque little villages and hamlets.  It seemed too idealized to be real, and I was shocked at my good fortune.  I literally felt like I was stepping into a fantasy world, a place where only magical things happened, like Indiana Jones’ university or a Star Wars hanger.  This bizarre “through the looking glass” sensation of entering a landscape that had been the backdrop for all my childhood thrilling tales of adventure.

It’s exactly this world that M is using in Howl, placed a bit newer, in a post-Industrial Revolution context.  Think Merlin the Magician, working in his home, across the street from Thomas Edison’s lab, and that is literally the strange, unique feeling of the setting for this movie.  I’ve heard a term, “steampunk” that seems to describe this genre.  I haven’t the inclination to look it up at this point.

So there is this unique setting of fantastic magic taking place against a post-Industrial backdrop, so to speak.  On top of that, there is this other level of the movie as a moral fable, like Aesop or the 1,001 Nights.  There are all these human impulses at play within the story: questions of desire; political power; hungry, consuming love; and the prospect of true, self-endangering, self-sacrificing love.  The story progresses as a sort of comedy/morality play, where people are receiving just desserts in the end.  Things out of whack are eventually being set right, the underpinning for any happy ending. 

What struck me in this was again the sense of complexity in representing the lives of characters.  It is not simply a good versus evil context as in Beauty and the Beast.  There the moral lines were so clearly drawn: Belle and the Beast while having some minor character issues to resolves, were essentially good, while Gaston was such a broad, boorish almost comically absurd picture of bad, bragging about his hunting exploits, his handsome good looks, and other feats of strength.  We laugh at him, but then comfortably place him in the “bad” column of our moral scoresheet, and root against him the rest of the movie.  Charming, but predictable.

Contrast Gaston with Howl (the title character).  Interestingly, H is marked by a pronounced sense of personal vanity, going to pieces at having a bad dye job for his hair.  “I must look beautiful!” he laments, and we are meant to see it purely in terms of vanity.  He then process to throw a temper tantrum and literally fall apart.  Yet we are not meant to stop seeing him as a heroic character, the one we are rooting for.  This complexity, nuance is completely absent from traditional western fairy tales or morality plays.  Vanity is not the central issue within the story, it’s just part of what makes Howl human, which illustrates precisely the merit of the character descriptions within the story, and how Miyuzaki’s storytelling is worlds apart from traditional children’s animated movies.

Much more could be said of other interesting themes within the movie. 

The transforming, deformed self, the monster within, tamed by female tenderness/true love, leading into other interesting questions of the Japanese male view of self/carnal desires as monstrous.  The need for the feminine stabilizing, humanizing presence.  Female softness versus male hardness.

The eastern spiritual pantheon of gods and demons, this comfort with the supernatural, lack of surprise at the presence of spirits and deities, even more surprising in light of the shared presence of techology (flying machines, modern bombs).  Ancient mysticism interacting within modern scientific sensibility.

The idea of creating an accessible story, without making it cloyingly sentimental.  Again, Pixar has tapped into this, and John Lassiter, Pixar CEO speaks often of his admiration of Miyazaki, presumedly for modelling this characteristic within storytelling.

The question of Western influences on the Eastern imagination.  Whether that fixation could be seen as slavish rather than sensible.  I’m reminded of a M.A.S.H. tv episode where a young Korean wants to have eye surgery to look Anglo.  Other films by M have been thoroughly Eastern in their setting, Mononoke being one example that I’ve seen.  I guess it just raises the larger question of how Western values integrate within Eastern sensibility.  Even the idea of remaining separate from the West long after the possibility of interaction was historically present.

Again, Miyuzaki tapping into the full potential of storytelling: seeing it for all the ways it can function, all the levels at which it can access human emotion: childlike wonder to complex psychological recognition of self, true human behavior, and they way that he, like some energetic master organists, simultaneously and with great dexterity works all the channels together, like the pipes of the organ, creating this thundering symphony of sound and sense, tapping into multiple channels where so many storytellings content themselves with just one (I’m looking at you Disney, major studios, every boring movie I’ve watched/skipped in the last year or so.  Rob Schneider, Brother Bear, Just the 12 of Us, Pink Panther remake, Cars, and on and on and on.)

Howl_5

Such a sensitive vision of the significance of domestic space, the role of a home “coming to meet you,” receiving people back into it’s embrace, and even growing and changing with the family.  There was such a warm and resounding sense of this within Howl’s, and with that…

The sense of family, joined by need, belonging to one another, adopting, choosing to stay, nucleizing around a shared need, forming community.  A strong sense of this made even more convincing by the care invested in creating complex individual characters, so that the way they come together seems even more believable.

The sense of the grotesque, bizarre, macabre.  Meeting the Witch of the Waste very early in the movie, profound sense of the unnatural, supernatural, non-familiar entities and places, disorientation in seeing and absorbing that.  It’s a profoundly offputting part of acquainting oneself with his work.  You just do not know what to expect.

Finally, the image of magician as genius, the tortured creative bringing wonderful things to live, but living a tumultuous (and solitary) existence.  The need to be not merely gifted but also made human, the need to balance giftedness with caregiving, and finding someone to meet those needs, be a resource for restoring the vitality that demands of life take from you.

The capacity of animation for a density of meaning, excessively deliberate storytelling made possibly partly by the labor intensive creation process.  Think Albrecht Durer.

All these and other themes, very sensitively portrayed, great fodder for conversation.  Have you seen this movie?  Share thoughts comments, etc.  If you see it later, come back and talk about it here.

Other Miyazaki movies I’ve seen: Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away.