Howl's Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki, 2004).
I returned to the films of Hayao Miyazaki last year because the kids I nanny in Brooklyn—A, eight, and J, six—happened upon Studio Ghibli Fest while they were away over the summer in Upstate New York, visiting their grandparents in a town where they had spent the early pandemic. Of the two, J’s infatuation with Miyazki is least surprising: his interests include black holes, rare crystals, and mushrooms, especially the poisonous varieties. Through his eyes, I rediscovered Miyazaki, rewatching once-familiar films with a new attunement to their strangeness. In the process I was reminded of first meeting J, when he was four years old and still reeling from his family’s relocation from a house Upstate to their apartment in Brooklyn. He was particularly incensed about having to wear shoes, which I imagine crystallized the totality of the transformation: in that passage from grass to concrete, from an unstructured existence to the 9 to 3 at Pre-K, he had irreversibly moved from one world into another.
Now I wonder if J sees himself in Miyazaki’s protagonists, who experience similar dislocations: consider the titular witch in Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), who leaves her pastoral home for a faraway city, or the goldfish princess in Ponyo (2008), who flees her ocean kingdom to live on land. Spirited Away (2001) is one of J’s favorites, in part, I speculate, because it dramatizes these transitions as both physically and psychically disruptive. In the film, ten-year-old Chihiro becomes stranded in a spirit realm in the course of her family relocating to a new residential development. Gazing across a river at the human world from which she came, Chihiro turns translucent and almost disappears altogether: as if by losing one’s sense of place, one also loses any sense of self.
For the eleven-year-old Mahito of Miyazaki’s latest, The Boy and the Heron (2023), that upheaval follows the death of his mother, whose Tokyo hospital was firebombed three years into World War II. One year later, Mahito evacuates to the countryside with his father, Shoichi, whose new wife, Natsuko, is the sister and spitting image of Mahito’s late mother. While Chihiro’s strange surroundings in Spirited Away facilitate her spontaneous disappearance, Mahito is driven by this new reality to bring about his own disappearance: walking home from school one day, he smashes a rock into his head.
The injury confines him to the estate, which is overwhelmingly green and almost hermetic in its silence: a pastoral idyll that in the aftermath of Mahito’s self-inflicted violence—as well as curious visitations by a heron—channels the eerie, unsettling ambience that is singularly Miyazaki’s. Though his style is often described as imaginative and sometimes dark, it might be understood in terms of Freud’s theory of the unheimlich, or the uncanny. The concept describes the kind of dread evoked by something familiar to us. The literal translation of das unheimlich approximates “the unhomey,” which lends the term a paradoxical texture: when the familiar registers as terrifying, we realize that we no longer feel at home.
The Boy and the Heron (Hayao Miyazaki, 2023).
Miyazaki’s imagery isn’t just visually striking but uncannily so, often estranging us from the familiar in a series of escalating disturbances. In his new film, the heron opens its bill to speak to Mahito and—through a row of unnervingly humanoid teeth—claims that his mother isn’t dead, only trapped in the ruined tower that was built on the estate by his granduncle. Despite his initial resistance, Mahito eventually follows the heron underground through the tower in search of Natsuko, who goes missing one day. In that subterranean spirit world—where he is almost devoured by a swarm of pelicans—Mahito encounters more unsettling echoes of the world above, including a sailor who resembles a maid from his father’s estate. Yet the most alarming similarity is the one obscured by its mundanity: as in Mahito’s world, everyone here is just trying to eat. When a fish is carved up, hordes of roly-poly creatures called Warawara toddle closer, hoisting plates above their heads. Newly fortified, they drift into the sky to be reborn above as human souls—only to be snapped up by the pelicans. The carnage is stalled, but the brief sense of triumph is undercut when a pelican, scorched half to death, discloses to Mahito that its kind have been forced to feed on Warawara since the fish population disappeared. “We didn’t choose this life,” the pelican insists, coughing up blood. “The sea here, it is cursed.”
If the uncanny is irrepressible in Miyazaki’s grisliest, most fantastical scenes, it also courses through his depictions of everyday life. His films often follow a protagonist reckoning with the sense of the unheimlich that sets in after leaving home for the first time. The titular witch of Kiki’s Delivery Service, for example—whom Miyazaki modeled after the young women who moved to Tokyo in the 1980s with dreams of becoming manga artists—travels with her feline companion, Jiji, to pursue an apprenticeship in the city of Koriko. The bustling European-style seaport reflects how an asset price bubble from the mid-1980s through the early 1990s exposed a historically insular Japan to internationalization. Its clock tower, adorned with a painted sun, imposes organized hours upon solar time, alluding to the commercial rhythms that will dictate Kiki’s newfound independence.
There is more opportunity for economic mobility in Kiki’s new life, but also new occasions for jealousy, kindled by the inequality that industrialism made possible. Walking to the grocery store one day past a group of teenage girls—one in bubblegum-pink capris, another in an orange miniskirt—Kiki is stricken by the ugliness of her black, formless dress. Contemplating her dwindling savings, she stops to covet a pair of vermillion pumps in a window display: a literally elevated version of her own red flats that, like Dorothy’s ruby slippers, promise head-to-toe transformation.
Despite these pressures, Kiki soon establishes her delivery business, transporting goods from a bakery whose owner, Osono, provides her lodging above the shop. With this gesture, another film might have painted a rosy picture of the modernizing world. But Kiki was committed instead to depicting the alienation of urban life, even among well-meaning strangers. When Kiki heads downstairs to the bathroom one morning, for example, she almost falls over to avoid being seen by Osono’s husband in her nightgown. Though the film is structured around her business, these menial vignettes—airing out the attic, scrubbing the floorboards, shopping for household supplies—are just as essential to its vision of survival in an industrializing society. It takes all kinds of work, suggests Miyazaki, to feel at home amid the strangeness, and strangers, of contemporary life.
Kiki's Delivery Service (Hayao Miyazaki, 1989).
In an essay for the New York Review of Books, Lucy Jakub details how Miyazaki’s films “have all turned on a Marxist view that the human spirit is expressed in work.” But their depictions of domestic labor, in particular, reflect the effort it takes to feel settled or literally at home in the world when pitted against a persistent sense of unheimlich. In Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), Sophie is driven to the mountains by a mysterious curse, leaving the home where she worked as an unpaid apprentice in her family’s hat shop. Desperate for shelter, she poses as a cleaning lady to take cover at Howl’s castle. By keeping house—and taking charge of it—she creates a home from what was once a dilapidated bachelor pad. But that domestic bliss quickly unravels when Howl expresses his gratitude to Sophie: he transforms the castle into a family home, and in doing so reconstructs the bedroom where she was exploited by her own family. He clearly assumed that a familiar setting would help Sophie feel settled; instead the space feels uncanny, terrifying precisely because it “leads back to something long known to us,” as Freud writes. In Sophie’s case, this room leads her back to a life defined solely by her productive value, as a free laborer and a woman of childbearing age.
In My Neighbor Totoro (1988), domestic labor similarly provides a temporary balm to ten-year-old Satsuki and four-year-old Mei, who move from Tokyo to a weathered bungalow in the countryside. Helping their father maintain the property, the sisters find in their new chores a welcome distraction from the fact that their mother is recovering from tuberculosis in a nearby hospital. But they can never entirely erase all traces of their anxiety: while they wipe the floors and stamp the dirt out from laundry, soot sprites swirl among the rafters and stain the soles of their feet with grime, preventing them from feeling completely at ease. That sense of apprehension also resurfaces by the end of Kiki, whose optimism feels tentative rather than absolute. Though she gets what she wants in the end—not the pumps, but the social and material security they represented—Kiki also loses her ability to communicate with Jiji. This might be a sign of her maturation, a transformation only made possible by leaving the comforts of home. But Miyazaki is ambivalent about the disruptive aspects of the passage into adulthood. By folding this loss into the film’s otherwise sunny ending, Miyazaki expresses his anxiety about the sacrifices made in the name of progress: namely, the stability that came from being rooted in community and nature, for which material gains are empty substitutes.
The same unease is expressed in Spirited Away through the arc of Chihiro’s companion, Haku, an anthropomorphic spirit who forgets his real name after losing his way home. Eventually Chihiro recognizes that he is the spirit of the Kohaku River that she once visited, recalling that it has since been filled in with apartment buildings—like the one that her family is about to move into. This detail, overshadowed by the joy of Haku recovering his true identity, explains why he lost his sense of home in the first place: not because of his choice to leave it behind, but because it was physically destroyed by government-sponsored development, intended to invigorate the post-bubble economy. The unsettled state of unheimlich, Miyazaki suggests, is not just a phase of life, or an indicator of maturity: it is an inescapable, existential condition of the modern industrial world.
Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001).
Miyazaki has spent decades pondering a question that emerges explicitly in The Boy and the Heron, when Mahito discovers the 1937 novel by Genzaburo Yoshino from which the film takes its Japanese title: How Do You Live? Yoshino was a professor imprisoned for his socialist politics while Japanese authoritarianism surged between world wars. Upon his release, he channeled his idealism into this children’s book, in which a boy and his uncle discuss and consider its titular question through a range of subjects and scenarios. Miyazaki’s films all pose different versions of this question: how do you live when your home is paved over? When you run out of money and food? When your family is afflicted by tuberculosis, by war? In other words: how do you live in a fundamentally unsustainable, destabilizing world?
While Disney films envision the kind of universe where heroes prevail over villains, Miyazaki’s characters live in their worlds: their triumphs and failures aren’t only consequences of their individual spirits, but also of their broader conditions. In The Boy and the Heron, Mahito realizes that the ravenous pelicans aren’t malicious, only desperate to survive. The same is true of the Tolmekians, the clan from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) whose livelihood is threatened by the poisonous Toxic Jungle. Nausicaä, the sixteen-year-old princess of a neighboring village, believes that humans can learn to live in harmony with the forest. The Tolmekians insist that both groups’ survival is mutually exclusive, and plan to dominate Nausicaä’s kingdom with their God Warrior, a subterranean creature that remained dormant until it was unearthed, like fossils for fuel.
Princess Mononoke (1997) also depicts an enchanted forest under siege, this time by the ironworkers of Tatara, who plan to take it over with their firearms and mine the earth. They, like the Tolmekians, have turned to their weapons as a shield against precarity. This is evident in the actions of their leader, Lady Eboshi, who employs sex workers and lepers: she isn’t evil, but she can’t imagine how to ensure her community’s survival without resorting to warfare. In doing so, both groups suffer from what the American cultural theorist Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism,” a condition “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” Berlant draws a tacit distinction—and even conflict—between short-term survival and “flourishing,” an enduring, enriching existence for human and non-human life alike. Self-preservation drives Miyazaki’s characters toward certain objects: a stockpile of rifles, a God Warrior, a pair of vermillion pumps, a feast of helpless Warawara. But even if these secure some kind of survival, they ultimately stifle flourishing by reinforcing the precarity created by capitalism. A life comprising these pursuits feels “cursed,” as the dying pelican in The Boy and the Heron recognizes, because self-preservation is entangled with self-destruction.
Princess Mononoke (Hayao Miyazaki, 1997).
Those terms of survival are exposed to Mahito by a colony of compulsively homicidal parakeets. Unlike the pelicans, the parakeets have aggressively adapted to thrive in the face of food scarcity by arming themselves with oversized utensils. Their leader stages a coup to control the subterranean realm, which only destabilizes it and accelerates its collapse. This is the challenge Miyazaki finds with any transformative change: the pressure to survive, and thus adapt to the world, paradoxically leads us to reproduce those familiar, but destructive, behaviors, which only limits one’s sense of what is possible—and with it, the prospect of “flourishing.” When Mahito rushes to his mother’s hospital in Tokyo, he clumsily doubles back home to change his yukata for pants and sneakers; but when he runs from the estate after Natsuko, he instinctively grabs a knife and his bow and arrow before pulling on a replica navy officer’s hat—this is just a twelve-year-old boy who was raised in a violent world and has learned to respond to it accordingly. The question, then, is not just “how do you live,” but how do you do so without perpetuating destruction?
Those scenes recall another, from Miyazaki’s original swan song, The Wind Rises (2013). Jirō, who as a boy dreams of flying planes—and of conversing with his idol, the airplane designer Giovanni Caproni—grows up to become the lead designer of Mitsubishi’s A5M fighter in the years before World War II. Midway through the film, Jirō falls in love with Naoko, who must recover from tuberculosis in Tokyo while he is stationed in Nagoya. When she suffers a lung hemorrhage, he scrambles toward the city with a desperation that we see shades of in Mahito. Naoko eventually dies, and the film ends in one of Jirō’s dreams: through a burning village and airplane wreckage, Caproni praises a fleet of Jirō’s fighters before gesturing toward an approaching Naoko, who encourages Jirō to live. The scene itself is soothing, but its implications are not: it suggests that recovery is only possible by surrendering to the delusion of dreams, the kind that enables you to turn away from the destruction of your creation and admire the elegance of its design instead.
This is bleaker than the outlook of Miyazaki’s earlier films, which, despite their darkness, eventually envision some form of recuperation. In Totoro, Satsuki learns that her mother’s return home from the hospital has been postponed—perhaps a sign that she is dying—which exacerbates a rift between her and Mei. Having been saddled with parental duties, Satsuki is frustrated when Mei protests that the delay isn’t fair, and commands her to grow up. But it is precisely because Mei is a child that Satsuki believes in the possibility of recovery. Mei’s sense of wonder is a conduit to a deep connection with the natural world: a pond full of tadpoles, a shiny acorn, and eventually the kodama Totoro, who transports the sisters to the hospital, where they learn their mother is only suffering from a cold.
That sense of possibility also emerges by the end of Nausicaä, which was inspired by stories of fish returning to Minamata Bay after it was purified of the industrial mercury that poisoned millions of humans and animals. Like Mei, Nausicaä communes with nature: while the rest of humankind plans to eliminate the remaining forest, she alone journeys to the heart of it, and even delights when the Mushigo Palms release their toxic spores. In the process, she discovers that the trees aren’t inherently toxic, and might eventually purify the blighted earth.
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Hayao Miyazaki, 1984).
Miyazaki isn’t interested in sentimentalizing childhood, but in the way that children rely on their imagination to navigate, understand, and engage with the wider world. They can bear witness to the world’s violence, or even be subjected to it, but they aren’t yet desensitized into accepting this reality as the only inevitable outcome. I am reminded of this whenever the kids I nanny update me on their newest obsessions—J’s latest, along with “cool-sounding chess moves” and particle accelerators, is portals. On the nights I tuck him into bed, he soon shuffles out of his room, complaining feverishly of hands reaching toward him from a nebulous gateway in the wall: a terrifying image, but one that contains the possibility of other worlds.
The Boy and the Heron has replaced Spirited Away as J’s favorite Miyazaki film, which surprised me a little, because I expected that he might find it too scary. When pressed about this, J simply replied—while practicing chess moves on his iPad—that he “likes Miyazaki’s style.” He should reserve the right, I think, to like what he likes without further explanation, though I do wonder if that gets to the heart of it: The Boy and the Heron feels quintessentially Miyazaki, saturated as it is in the uncanny terror that ebbs and flows through his other films. If The Wind Rises had been his final film, his career would’ve culminated with Jirō’s dream: a protracted sense of possibility buffered only by false comfort. But in The Boy and the Heron, Mahito finds his way back to reality. Running from the subterranean realm, which is rapidly caving in, he comes upon a corridor where doors lead to different versions of the world. He opens the door that will lead him back to the estate: to the war and to the loss of his mother, and surely other devastations. But after a moment of hesitation, he eventually returns to this life he knows—and with full awareness of the other possible paths, plants his feet firmly on the ground.