The Conflicting Ideals of Hayao Miyazaki

I’ve seen a lot of criticism for Howls Moving Castle saying the War gets in the way of the story, which really confuses me because I thought that was the point. What should have been a love story about two people bringing the best out of each other is interrupted and made messy by a pointless war. It’s what war does, it comes in and destroys lives and interrupts everything for everyone. But despite all the chaos Sophie and Howl break each other’s curses and get to live happily ever after.

Miyazaki’s movies show you that there is both good and bad in the world, and everyone’s got a little of both. That what makes us human.

One thing I love about princess Mononoke is how it doesn’t necessarily demonize industrialization. Most of the iron town citizens are genuinely nice people and the fact that they’re mostly outcasts paints lady Eboshi in a morally gray light. It even clarifies (not justifies) why they’ve advanced into the spirits territory. With that said, it does put a limit on How much one should take, demonstrated as Eboshi loses an arm after decapitating the Forest spirit. One reason I thought the spirit doesn’t side with the gods is because it knows humanity is a part of nature, albeit in a predatory/parasitic way.

I don't know Miyazaki but the fact that he's 81 and he's making his possibly last animated movie to leave behind for his grandson feels like losing a grandfather all over again. Unrelated, but this vid made me cry several times in several points of the vid.

"I'd rather be a pig than a fascist" is my favorite line from a Miyazaki movie

I like Miyazaki's work but had never really looked into his own views very deeply. I really relate to many of his thoughts, especially about being torn between deep cynicism and the yearning for optimism and concerns about the role of art in a consumerist society.

Well Totoro is my 5 year old daughter’s favorite movie. She has watched it multiple times. And she also loves to go outside during good weather to look for Totoro’s tree and find acorns. She also loves to pick up trash that people throw on the ground and puts it in the garbage where it goes. She really loves going camping and stuff. You’d think she had won the lottery whenever we mention going camping. And we do the real camping with a tent. And she probably wouldn’t get so happy about nature and stuff if it wasn’t for Miyazaki and the Studio Ghibli library of films.

"I see no point in living if I can't be beautiful" is one of my favorite quotes because it is so absurd

This was such a thoughtful exploration of Miyazaki’s work. I feel like I just came out of a therapy session… feeling so introspective about the world and my place in it lol

It's really interesting how Miyazaki changes the plot of Howl's Moving Castle without changing the overall meaning very much. In the book, Sofie grows from a quiet, insecure girl resigned to what she believes is her fate as an eldest child, to a power witch who puts her lived ones first, so much so that she tries to save a woman she dislikes because she believes Howl loves her. The books have a lot more characters and plot but Miyazaki used it's themes perfectly.

I finished watching Princess Mononoke and and just sat there thinking "now what?" For a while. Because I understood that my actions had to be different.

This work should be consider as an official documentary to show in Animation institution/Academy purely for the purpose of education and get to understand the ideas/visions behind the work of a specific director as well as an act of inspiration. Thank you for putting so much work in this lengthly but worthy video. Cheers, from Vietnam :)

31:40 this right here. If nature doesn’t matter to you, and if only your survival does, then think of this. We are only destroying ourselves permanently by harming nature. Nature will live on in some shape or form, with or without us. We as a species are insignificant to this force and should appreciate it more, for its beauty and its uncaring ruthlessness. I love nature. I love hiking, backpacking, swimming, exploring and growing my own plants. I love observing the animals around me. I can’t fathom how anyone can’t see what I see. We are a part of nature, we are animals, and we harm ourselves by trying to separate ourselves from it.

I’ve always had an especially soft spot for The Wind Rises, perhaps because it is never among the most regarded Ghibli films my peers bring up. From the first time I watched it, it felt like a love letter to the passion of devoted artists and to the tragedy of how creation is weaponized. The criticisms cited in this video fall flat for me, because it’s impossible to accuse Miyazaki of apologism or feigned ignorance of the consequences of fascist warmongering given his personal history with those consequences. I think it was necessary for the film not to visually dwell on the aftermath of the War, because the audience knows perfectly well what came of it. The Wind Rises is heartwrenchingly bittersweet, even more so on repeated viewings. The protagonist is swept up in the demands of a nation and world that has lost its way, and in the end even his own dreams cannot remain free of the senseless destruction of war. The human story in it, however dramatized or fictionalized, is a reminder of the perseverance of beauty in the world.

As an academic, thinking about the amount of research you'd have had to do for this video makes me appreciate it even more. Probably one of my all time favorite directors. Great job on this video!

As far as I'm concerned, Miyazaki's films are the absolute gold standard of anime 😊

On topic of conflicting ideals, it would've been nice if the video delved into his experiences as a labor union leader in the animation industry (which is plain impossible in today's conveyor belt of an industry spewing out seasonal shows), his fallout with his Marxist beliefs to his more well-known animist and environmental beliefs (which was touched upon), his nightmare scenario of him ending up becoming one of the drivers of consumerism (ala Evangelion *becoming the ironic rallying cry for modern otaku culture) which was touched on briefly, and his life as a father: his shortcomings and eventual warming up to Goro - to juxtapose his own experiences with his father.

I don't imagine anyone's gonna read this but the criticism about the Wind Rises I think is probably missing the point - the film is based on Jiro Horikoshi but at no point does it ever purport to be a straightforward bilography of his life (generally, biographical films rarely are and almost always take degrees of liberty with their subject matter, the person's actual life - Tolkein is a great example why you should pick up a book if you want to know about his life). When you sat down to watch a Miyazaki film featuring Jiro Horikoshi, if you expected a lesson in his life as it was lived then that's on you. What Miyazaki does, as far as I'm concerned, is use Jiro's life as a jumping off point - the general thrust of the narrative is loosely accurate, but the main idea is of course the contrast between this "beautiful dream" of aviation - which is lavishly depicted in the scenes of planes in flight and literal dream sequences - and the harsh reality of the world we live in in which those dreams are co-opted by modern society and humankind's inability to just live in harmony. If the film had tried to make this a vehicle of criticism about how Jiro "profited" off the war, it would not only serve virtually no purpose or use to anyone but would also obscure the the deeper issue that Miyazaki is trying to shed light on: all our dreams of progress and invention, even those that come from the best possible places, are ultimately tainted so long as we as a species remain the same. A relevant case in point of precisely this issue would of course be Einstein and the nuclear bomb which was the direct result of his research and something he devoted a great part of his life to campaigning against. It's quite clear that to make this point, he also needs to depict the main character's tenderness towards his dying wife, and draw him as a man torn between his love of planes and an instinctive dislike of conflict. In many ways, the Jiro in the film is more like Miyazaki than Horikoshi himself. Anyway, the main point of the film (and an idea familiar to anyone whose made it far enough in One Piece) is that the planes and the technology behind them is neither intrinsically good or evil - what serves in times of peace as a vehicle for opening up and connecting the world in times of war serves to close down large parts of the world through aerial bombing missions. It's up to humanity to do with it what they will, and that's the double-edged dilemma that the film presents us with. Also worth mentioning is the influence of Antoine de Saint Exupery on Miyazaki - like Miyazaki, Saint Exupery was an avid aviation enthusiast and he wrote very passionately about the joy that comes with flight and seeing the land unfold under your little plane as it sits alone in the sky. Exupery loved aviation so much he ultimately died in flight serving as a pilot in the Free French Air Force. Something of an irony of course is that, for Western readers, that would make him something of a tragic hero. However this probably isn't the time to get into whether we should be celebrating or vilifying participants in war...

The amount of emotion Miyazaki films make me feel is always overwhelming. Just always such a deep communication of the human condition in a way that often doesn’t even need the dialogue to get through .

I'm glad you mentioned the train scene from Spirited Away. I was unsure about the film when I saw it for the first time but when that scene happened, I really felt the weight of the moment and got what the movie was about.