I've been a Studio Ghibli fan for years, the appreciation--and later admiration--first beginning at age thirteen when I first saw Princess Mononoke. I was awed by the film. The story telling was captivating, the animation beautiful, and the score moving. I was entranced, and ten years later, I still am.
The film centres around Ashitaka, a man living during Japan's Muromachi period, who finds himself cursed by a dying boar demon. He leaves his home village for the boar's homeland, hoping to find a way to lift the curse and prevent his death. What he finds, however, is not a cure, but a struggle between the human village of Irontown and the gods, demons, and animals of the forest they threaten to destroy.
The film's environmental message is a powerful one, and one of the things about it that interests me is that there is no victory for either humanity or nature. While characters such as Lady Eboshi do change their former outlook (deciding to stop ravaging the forest to make iron), there are also ones like Jigo, who, despite almost dying at the hands of a deer god, still appears unrepentent towards his destructive actions. There are no winners and no losers, which is a great mirror of what actually happens in life, and one not often seen in any film, let alone an animated one.
One of the things writer and director Hayao Miyazaki does in this film that I adore, is his use of characterization as juxtaposition. There are two extremes in the film: those who hate humans (as encompassed by San, the titular princess), and those who hate nature (as encompassed by Lady Eboshi). In the middle, is Ashitaka, who represents a balance between the two. Of course, this is an extreme oversimplification of the characters. San may hate humans, but the only ones she knows having been trying to kill her animal friends and family, and as the story progresses she does come to care for Ashitaka. Lady Eboshi, who for the majority of the film only sees the forest and its animals, spirits, and gods as an obstacle in her path to bettering the industry of her village, is extremely generous to humans. She takes care of lepers, and frees prostitutes, and puts her trust in Ashitaka only hours after meeting him. Both women are complicated characters, and their status as polar opposites is not completely static. I find it fascinating how Miyazaki structures their motivation, and slowly and subtly changes them.
As an older, more overtly environmentally conscious writer, Miyazaki's use of nature in his films has been--and continues to be--a great inspiration to me. Princess Mononoke and his first Studio Ghibli film, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, are two of his more overtly environmentally conscious films. However, just because the environment isn't the central theme of the film does not mean he doesn't encorporate it elseware.
In Spirited Away, the protagonist Chihiro, working in a bath house for spirits, serves a massive,
foul-smelling, filthy spirit that is nothing so much as sentient mud. During the spirit's bath, she discovers what at first she thinks is a thorn, but turns out to be the handle of a bicycle. Pulling out the bicycle results in dislodging a small mountain of human garbage, and once it's clear, Chihiro discovers that the spirit is actually a river god. It's a relatively small seen in the film, and the personification of the human pollution of the natural world goes uncommented on by any of the characters, however, it's things like that that have greatly influenced how I structure my own work.To be honest, writing stories solely about global warming and melting ice caps can get rather dull. But Miyazaki has taught me that I can still have my environmental message present--that I can still say what I want to say about how I believe we should treat our planet better. It will just be done quietly. A sentence. A paragraph. A line of dialogue. It doesn't have to be big to make an impact, it just has to be there.
Next on my Studio Ghibli viewing list is Pom Poko, a film about tanuki (Japanese raccoon dogs). Written and directed by Isao Takahata, it also appears to have an environmental message, the plot centering around human development encroching on the natural habitat of animals. So I guess Miyazaki isn't the only environmental buff in the studio, eh?
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