A Miyazaki Upbringing

A Miyazaki Upbringing

by Karenna Umscheid

I remember the first Hayao Miyazaki movie I ever saw. It was Spirited Away, with subtitles, in my middle school Japanese class. From the first frame, the film is ensconced in color, creating a world of beauty unimaginable to my dim mind before. I was forever changed, wishing that I had been watching these films sooner. We’d later watch Ponyo repeatedly, so much so that I grew tired of the story, but never of the entrancing beauty in the animation. 

Kiki’s Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro are undisputed classics, exploding with familial love and a world of beauty. I wish I had watched both at a younger age, I wonder what I would have absorbed, what capacity for imagination I would have gained. 

Nausicaa hit me profoundly hard, a film so rife with danger as much as it is with beauty. Miyazaki has never been shy about chronicling the ways we are destroying the Earth, and in Nausicaa, as well as Princess Mononoke, he depicts vividly the immense beauty our world holds and the destruction we have unleashed upon it. His work marries guilt and melancholy surrounded by gorgeous settings, the battles we must fight with optimism, the work we must do to maintain our histories, and our environment. 

Whisper of The Heart is such a favorite of mine, a film about the intimate glory of desire and determination, marked not by physical achievements but by the love we share between our goals and motivations. Miyazaki shows us everything we can be – optimistic, empathetic, passionate, hardworking – in the face of chaos and havoc, everything the cruelty in the world wishes we would succumb to. 

I will always proclaim The Wind Rises to be my favorite Miyazaki film. Watching these films at an older age has caused me to become detached from the magical elements, and hit more deeply look into the narratives instead. Along with From Up On Poppy Hill, The Wind Rises is a Miyazaki film with no magical elements. Maybe it’s because I’m older now, but I prefer the ones without magic; they carry more weight, they mirror the horrors of our world without any gorgeous escape. The Wind Rises is heartbreaking. It grapples with the intersections of our dreams and the unintended consequences of our desires. Miyazaki is as critical as he is imaginative – and we are not kids anymore, we can’t hide in the magic forever. 

The Boy and The Heron, Miyazaki’s latest film, doesn’t feel like any sort of swan song. It follows a young boy named Mahito, who moves from Tokyo to the countryside during the Pacific War, and follows a mysterious gray heron to an old tower in the woods. It’s majestic and enchanting, but it isn’t a mere celebration of one’s body of work. It doesn’t feel like any sort of bow of achievement — it feels like a renewal. It instructs us to leave our pasts behind, however abrupt or painful, and to just keep going. In a world marred by destruction and peril, we must persist, we must trust ourselves and our dreams, and live as colorfully as possible. The future is more than bright, it is beautiful and imaginative and more expansive than we can ever comprehend before we see it. But in order to reach it, we must first let go. 

The Boy and The Heron opens everywhere on December 4, 2023. 

Until next week,

Karenna

Photograph: Nerdist