Beyond Good and Evil: Animism and the films of Hayao Miyazaki
Animism is the belief that gods and spirits — and the anima (“breath”) that they exude— inhabit things both living and inert. Eurocentric anthropologists originally used the term negatively, believing animism to be a stage in the evolution of religion from primitive belief to more “advanced” monotheism. This view should be rejected.
I am definitely an animist. I don’t mean that as some kind of poetic characterization of my love for nature. No, I definitely believe nature — rock, animal, and tree — is animated by more than just the material sum of its parts.
Take these hills and trees near my home. Should I get a good death, they may be the last thing I see as I lay dying at home as an old man. The hill is North Hill in Malvern, Worcestershire, and it looms both over the house I was born into and the house in which I now live.
I believe that this hill is more than its granite and grass. It is “North Hill,” the animation of that granite and grass. It — and the things that live in it and around it — has, to borrow a Japanese idea, kami-nature (more on kami below).
The same goes for this old oak tree. I touch him every time I see him. I greet him as an old friend. My kids swing on him. He was here before me and will be here after me. He is beautiful and he is definitely “Mr Oak” and not just “oak tree.”
Is this Age of Aquarius madness? I don’t think so. Consider Japan. Japanese animism is not some modern neo-pagan, pantheistic revival but a deeply embedded consciousness of the yaoyorozu no kami, the “8,000,000 gods.” 70% of the Japanese may not be part of institutional religion, but there remains a deep spirituality in Japanese culture nonetheless.
You know Japanese animism through the films of Hayao Miyazaki [1] who has said that, “animism is in me.”[2] Consider some features of pantheistic animism displayed by his Studio Ghibli work and see if it resonates:
- The kami inhabit circular not linear time, emerging as they do from the circle of the day and of the seasons. The Deer God in Princess Mononoke becomes the Night Walker at night, every night or at least until that cycle is broken by humans (with disastrous consequences).
- The kami are often attached to particular places or objects. For example, Totoro resides in the forest behind the Kusakabes’ house and in particular the giant camphor tree at its center.
- The kami are transformative, oscillating between good and evil depending on human attitudes toward them. Again, consider Mononoke’s Deer God’s transformation into a raging god of death after his head is cut off by Lady Eboshi.
- Good and evil are therefore malleable concepts. In Spirited Away, Chihiro does not return to her world because she is good and has conquered evil. Chihiro learns to co-exist with nature and helps nature, via the bath house, co-exist with itself. Compare this with the Manichean (good vs. evil) world-view of stories popular in the West (Harry Potter, Star Wars).
- It is the forest and its trees that are the summum bonum of the animist impulse and it is the loss of the forest that will see the world de-animated in awful ways (see Nausicaa).
- The kami are both personified and frequently syncretized with other things. For example, Ponyo’s mother, who is both the sea itself and Kannon, a female Buddhist deity/bodhisattva.
I don’t have a concrete view on the metaphysics of the kami and I certainly do not take them literally. I just know that they are real in some deeply important sense. Concrete views probably kill the kami anyway.
Perhaps most importantly, I know the effect of kami-reverence is real: the felling of one oak would barely register with me but the felling of Mr Oak would be heartbreaking. This makes me so much more likely to protect him.
And here is what I think for certain: where the kami perish, so will humans.
- Eriko Ogihara-Schuck, Miyazaki’s Animism Abroad. A really interesting discussion of how Miyazaki’s animism is toned-down in western translations.
- Hayao Miyazaki, The Starting Point, 341.
