The Radical Pacifism of Hayao Miyazaki
The king of Japanese animation can’t stop thinking about war.
**Spoilers for lots of Miyazaki films — the majority of them are now streaming on Max in the US and Netflix in Europe**
Animation is really, really hard. The challenges of creating a feature length animated film are difficult to overstate. It’s one of the most labor-intensive, expensive and complex visual mediums in existence, a fact that often confuses people who (wrongly) perceive it as nothing more than simplistic children’s entertainment. The one nation in the world that seems to truly understand just how complicated animation can be is Japan, which is a large part of why it has become such a cultural touchstone there.
Japanese anime and its written counterpart manga are not simply forms of entertainment to the people of Japan, they are an essential part of the nation’s export economy, generating billions of dollars worldwide every year. This is no small feat, especially when you consider that in any given year, Japan is consistently in the top 5 economies in the world, despite its population falling just outside the top 10. It’s even more impressive when you begin to understand just how essential anime and manga were in helping to transform Japan’s economy into a global superpower after the nation was completely decimated in World War II.
Hayao Miyazaki — my personal favorite filmmaker, and widely considered to be the greatest Japanese animator of all time — was born in Tokyo on January 5th, 1941. His birthday was just shy of one year before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and approximately 4 and a half years before the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Despite being most well-known for his fantastical creatures and plucky child protagonists, the themes of strong work ethic and wartime destruction are inescapable through-lines across his entire body of work, showing just how much he was shaped by growing up in post-WWII Japan. Miyazaki’s films often lack traditional villains, but when they do appear, they are typically either governmental bureaucrats or extreme capitalists who are attempting to control elemental forces beyond their understanding. While the narratives sometimes go to extremely dark places, many of these antagonists are redeemed when they repent after coming face to face with the destructive power they have unwittingly released in their quests for resource manipulation and/or political power.
Ghibli, the studio founded by Miyazaki and the late Isao Takahata along with producer (and current studio president) Toshio Suzuki, have proven to be an essential part of Japan’s economic and cultural landscape for almost 40 years now. At any anime or comic book convention, Miyazaki’s signature glasses, goatee and apron are almost as common a costume as any of the characters in his films. According to the most recent data available on Wikipedia, 7 of the top 20 highest grossing Japanese films worldwide are Studio Ghibli releases, with 6 of them being directed by Miyazaki himself.
In Matt Alt’s book Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered The World, Miyazaki pops up multiple times as a near-elemental, sometimes antagonistic force. He picks fights with other animators, he shows up at labor union protests, but most notably, he writes a “scathing obituary” to the “Godfather of Manga” Osamu Tezuka after his death. Although Tezuka helped to pioneer the very art form that eventually brought Miyazaki his success, he also set precedents for unreasonable deadlines and low budgets that still haunt the industry today, and would have profound effects for Japan’s export economy for decades to come. Miyazaki has expended considerable effort in his career to overrule these paradigms, and while he has had mixed success on that front, he has certainly helped do one thing Tezuka was never able to truly pull off — bring worldwide attention to Japanese animation as a legitimate and respectable, occasionally Oscar-winning art form.
Despite maintaining a reputation as a stern boss and overbearing father, Hayao Miyazaki is infinitely quotable in ways that are simultaneously hilarious and profound, offering unique insight into his perception on topics such as environmentalism, industrialization, and perhaps most interesting of all — post-war Japan.
Cursed Dreams
“I know I shouldn’t glorify them, but they were really cool planes,” Miyazaki says to director Mami Sunada in the 2013 documentary The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, as he stifles a laugh. “What to do?” This conundrum is an essential part of the documentary and its investigation into the making of The Wind Rises, which was at the time marketed as Miyazaki’s final film. Rises tells a fictionalized version of the life of Japanese engineer Jiro Horikoshi, who designed the Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter plane, which became an essential part of the Japanese arsenal in WWII. The film caught a lot of people off guard upon its announcement, as every one of his films up until that point had had at least some fantastical elements, and very few of them dealt with real historical events, let alone something as heavy as WWII. Some people were even concerned that the movie would somehow be pro-war, or at least express some kind of Japanese nationalism.
Instead, The Wind Rises is almost like a proto-Oppenheimer, about a driven young airplane engineer whose passion is to create beautiful flying machines, but happens to exist in a time where the only way he can excel in his field is to contribute his expertise to a wartime economy. During The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, we see Miyazaki’s producing partner Toshio Suzuki giving a press conference explaining how The Wind Rises is an attempt to reconcile Miyazaki’s own lifelong internal conflict, where he is staunchly anti-war yet endlessly fascinated with the aesthetics and engineering prowess of military aircraft. Miyazaki himself, of course, is nowhere to be found at the conference, as he is off toiling away endlessly on the film itself.
Flying machines have always been an essential part of Hayao Miyazaki’s movies. From the sky pirates in Castle in the Sky to massive warships with flapping wings in Howl’s Moving Castle, Miyazaki’s aerial steampunk creations are just as iconic as his creatures and mystical spirits. The entire middle act of 1992’s Porco Rosso is essentially an extended sequence of an airplane being rebuilt, ending in the plane being put to the ultimate test in a thrilling escape. But Rises was a significant shift, as though it does feature an imaginary friend and some dream sequences, it’s the first of his films that is set firmly in our own reality with no supernatural goings-on whatsoever.
The name of the film is actually taken from a famous Japanese novel, The Wind Has Risen, written by Tatsuo Hori. The book tells the story of a nameless protagonist and his doomed romance with a woman who is suffering from acute tuberculosis and confined to a sanatorium. In The Wind Rises, Jiro Horikoshi’s wife Nahoko deals with a similarly severe case of the disease, and dies before WWII — which was not the case for her real life counterpart, as the couple lived together for decades and went on to have two children. While combining this novel with the real-life story of an airplane engineer might seem unnecessarily convoluted, the reasons were clearly deeply personal. Hayao Miyazaki’s father Katsuji ran an airplane parts company that built rudders for the Zero fighter, and his mother Yoshiko had tuberculosis (although she lived through the war and into her 70s). Yoshiko’s illness has a heavy influence on several of Miyazaki’s films, notably My Neighbor Totoro, but it wasn’t until The Wind Rises and its PG-13 rating that the gravity of both of his parents’ lives fully found their way into his work.
Back at his home, Miyazaki speaks with Mami Sunada after a long day of work. “I need to hurry and finish this film”, he says, before laughing. He is about to light his cigarette, when he says, “You know, people who design airplanes and machines, no matter how much they believe what they do is good, the winds of time eventually turn them into tools of industrial civilization. It’s never unscathed. They’re cursed dreams. Animation, too.” Like many of his most penetrating quotes caught on film, he delivers it not to the camera or interviewer, but staring off into the distance. Later in the same conversation he explains himself a bit more, saying “What I mean is, how do we know movies are even worthwhile?”
Angry Ghosts
In the English translation of 1997’s Princess Mononoke, the character Jigo at one point says “These days, there are angry ghosts all around us, dead from wars, sickness, starvation — and nobody cares. So you say you’re under a curse? Well, so what? So’s the whole damned world.” This photo will occasionally make the rounds online as some sort of proof that Miyazaki is a misanthrope, or that he has a disdain for modernity. However, there’s a strong case to be made that rather than hating today or any other period of time, he’s far more interested in themes of human conflict that are inherently timeless in nature.
Princess Mononoke, after all, is set in a fantastical version of feudal Japan, yet its antagonists’ desires to conquer the forest spirits for industrial gain seem strikingly modern. Many of Miyazaki’s films take place in some sort of mystical world, with vaguely defined societal rules and nebulous magical realism. Some take place in Japan, some take place in Europe, most of them seem to take place in some unnamed fictional land, unstuck from time, where futuristic technology and archaic weaponry exist side by side. One of the few constants in these worlds is a heavily militarized state and various warring factions. Miyazaki is often less interested in discussing the details of how these conflicts arise than he is using them as a backdrop to show how characters (frequently children or adolescents) are able to still have joyous adventures and learn important lessons as adults rage around them, destroying each other and their homes in the process.
Before Howl’s Moving Castle, and later The Wind Rises, Miyazaki had claimed that he planned to retire after Princess Mononoke’s release. Whether or not the record-breaking success of any of those movies had anything to do with him continuing is up for debate. His return in 2023 with the Oscar-winning feature The Boy and The Heron is significant not just because it’s at least the third time he has returned after announcing his own retirement, but according to Toshio Suzuki, it is also the most expensive Japanese film ever produced. On the Heron episode of the film podcast Blank Check with Griffin and David, it’s mentioned that Miyazaki (who famously never wanted his films on streaming), only agreed to license the studio’s catalog to streaming services in order to help fund the film.
Although he’s hinted that he wants to come back and do yet another film, it’s very possible The Boy and The Heron really is the finale, for real this time. Miyazaki is now a year older than his mentor and Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata was when he passed away in 2018. And as cathartic as The Wind Rises must have been for him, Heron feels much more like a proper farewell. It’s not insignificant that Miyazaki spent his entire career inventing fake wars to finally do two WWII movies back-to-back right at the end. Rises was jarring to many as it felt like a hard left-turn in terms of style, but Heron was finally able to finally ground the fantasy elements in a post WWII world. We get a horrific depiction of the firebombing of Tokyo and we get to see a kingdom of giant parakeet men.
Miyazaki didn’t show up to pick up his Oscar for The Boy and The Heron, just as he didn’t show up in person to pick up his Oscar for Spirited Away. Apparently his resentment to going to pick up an award in America in 2002, so soon after the invasion of Afghanistan, was a large part of why he chose to make Howl’s Moving Castle so staunchly anti-war.
In The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness we get a sequence where the prime minister gives a radio broadcast, one in which he discusses the impacts of the Fukushima nuclear meltdown. The radio plays in the background as everyone in the Ghibli office (notably devoid of computers), continue drawing their art for The Wind Rises, barely paying any attention. Miyazaki brushes past the camera, almost smirking. “It was the 21st century revealing itself,” he muses. “I’m a man of the 20th century. I don’t want to deal with the 21st.”
But it’s not as if the 20th century ever really “made sense” to him either. The concept of time has always been complicated in his work. Nearly every film of his has anachronistic technology, as well as some element of torch-passing between generations. Miyazaki’s movies are full of elderly people who both help and hinder the protagonists, offering cutting insults and warm heartfelt wisdom, as he does in real life. They believe, as he does, that the world is and always will be full of suffering, yet we must continue on anyways.
At one point during Kingdom, he contemplates the nature of Studio Ghibli after he actually retires, and says it will simply cease to exist one day. He claims the name is nothing special, “a random name” that he got from an airplane. He then marvels at how pretty his garden is, and wanders off to get a closer look at the plants.
We Have Work To Do Now
In The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, it’s mentioned early on that Miyazaki comes to work every day at 11am and works until 9pm. Not long after, Miyazaki tells us more about his schedule, saying “I don’t take holidays or Saturdays off, only Sundays. And Sundays are very busy for me. Every Sunday morning, I go to clean the river”.
For those who have seen Spirited Away, you’ll know that cleaning a river is a very important plot point. That 2001 film, still the 2nd highest-grossing Japanese film globally of all time with just under $400 million, is ranked as the 32nd best movie of all time by IMDB users, and was the second movie in history to win the Best Animated Feature Oscar (the first was Shrek). It was also probably the first non-English language film I saw in theaters, and I remember it to be a completely overwhelming experience. I had some experience with anime growing up, watching old dubs of Speed Racer along with Pokemon and Dragonball Z on TV, but I had never seen anything with quite as much sensory overload as Spirited Away. It wasn’t until years later that I realized it was the same director as My Neighbor Totoro, a classic rainy day movie from my childhood.
Spirited Away starts out like a classic fairy tale film, with a character who is cursed by a witch and whose parents are turned into animals. But rather than some mythic quest and an epic fantasy battle, she resolves her issues by… getting a job and cleaning a river. It’s not a tale about a character learning she is special, in fact she matures and grows by learning exactly the opposite. It’s a lesson that feels distinctly Japanese in nature and goes directly against the themes of exceptionalism that are so prevalent in much of today’s western young adult fiction.
The second Miyazaki film I saw in theaters was Ponyo, a film that is elementally similar in comparison to the dense Spirited Away. Ponyo is essentially Studio Ghibli’s spin on The Little Mermaid, but with an even better soundtrack. Rather than having a control-obsessed monarch as a villain, the closest thing we have to any kind of antagonist is an overbearing sea-wizard father who has very real concerns about his fish-princess daughter falling in love with a human boy Sosuke, considering how much humans have poisoned the oceans they live in. Their love threatens to throw off the entire ecosystem, pulling the moon out of orbit and almost drowning all of the cute little seaside town with water filled with giant prehistoric fish. Eventually, love conquers all, and we get one of the most absolutely banging theme songs of all time to close things out. But this isn’t before Sosuke’s mother speaks maybe the most quintessential Miyazaki line of all time, telling Ponyo and Sosuke, “Life is mysterious and amazing, but we have work to do right now.” She then sets off to try and salvage what’s left of her job as the flood continues to grow in severity.
In his 2013 speech for a press conference announcing his retirement after The Wind Rises, apparently the first line Miyazaki wrote was “I hope to continue working for another ten years”. Ten years later he won an Oscar. In a very brief glimpse into his life as an actual human being towards the end of Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, we see him at home in his kitchen as his wife stands in the periphery, while he waxes poetic about the value of hard work. “This notion that one’s goal in life is to be happy, that your own happiness is the goal… I just don’t buy it.” And then, turning to the camera for once, he continues, “I’ve heard that from several people now and I wonder… is that what postwar democracy has amounted to? I don’t get it, so I’m curious.” And then he bursts into laughter, lights another cigarette, and continues to rant about how “filmmaking only brings suffering”, before casually admitting that he actually does want to direct another one.
Kosuge’s Jeep
In January of 2024, Hayao Miyazaki turned 83 years old. Since the release of his debut film The Castle of Cagliostro in 1979, just after his 38th birthday, his films have generated billions in revenue for the Japanese economy, with a significant portion coming from the massive amounts of Totoro merchandise that he has so reluctantly authorized. But to run a film studio sometimes referred to as “Japan’s Disney” and not sell merchandise would be impossible. Commercialization of media and the production of trinkets have been part of Japan’s economy ever since the end of WWII, since cheap metal toys were some of the only things they could afford to manufacture (sometimes using recycled metal found in the wreckage of explosions).
In the face of rampant firebombing, followed by nuclear armageddon, and then occupation by the United States, the Japan of Miyazaki’s childhood was a haunted one, but also one that felt that it didn’t fully have time to reckon with the implications of their decision to join with the Axis powers during the war. They were far too busy trying to get their economy back on track by any means necessary — including merchandising the enemy’s vehicles and selling them as toys.
In Pure Invention, Matt Alt writes about an entrepreneur named Matsuzo Kosuge who quickly turned a serious profit selling toys of the very same U.S. Army Jeeps that were patrolling Japan daily in the wake of the war. “Every time a new batch arrived, customers queued in lines around the block, seemingly oblivious to the December chill. In a land where children had been stripped of their heroes and everything else, Kosuge made the occupying army his brand.” Miyazaki may have taken something from this approach, growing up around these lucrative and ubiquitous army toys. He knows that although he hates war, army vehicles look really cool, and therefore will make for good cinema.
Hayao Miyazaki’s films aren’t enduring masterpieces simply because they feature gorgeous landscapes, delightful creatures, and lovely music. It’s because they feature characters who embrace notions that are often deemed too radical for western society — nobody is special, nothing lasts forever, and peace, like many of the best things in life, is hard work.
