Wizard of light and shadow

At last American audiences are being spirited away by the wondrous and subtle visions of Hayao Miyazaki. He's more than an eccentric Japanese fabulist -- he's the greatest animator the movies have ever seen.

By Laura Miller

Jul 10, 2003 | Last year, when Western audiences watched Chihiro, the little girl in Hayao Miyazaki's animated film "Spirited Away," wander into a marvel-filled world she'd never known existed before, they couldn't help but identify with her. Many of them were stumbling for the first time into the domain of Miyazaki's imagination, so fully and ravishingly realized that it was impossible not to wonder: How long has this been going on?

The answer is, for decades. The 62-year-old Miyazaki's animated features routinely top the annual box office lists in Japan, and "Spirited Away" is the highest-grossing Japanese film of all time there. (Before that, it was Miyazaki's earlier film, "Princess Mononoke," something of a flop in the U.S., though beloved by critics.) This year, most of Miyazaki's earlier films are being released on DVD by Disney, letterboxed and with new top-quality dubbings. As the documentaries on the DVDs released so far reveal, American animators have known and revered Miyazaki's work for a long time. Now the rest of us have the chance to catch up with the man one of them (on the "Spirited Away" DVD) refers to as "our greatest living animator." That "living" qualifier is no doubt obligatory for anyone collecting a Disney paycheck, so take it from someone who can speak freely: He's the best, ever.

Of course, Western fans of Japanese animation ("anime," as it is called, rather than "Japanimation"), have admired and collected Miyazaki's films and "manga" (comic books) for ages, but anime's following in the U.S. still remains relatively small and cultish. Plenty of potentially interested parties have been put off by the form's persistent fascination with all the stuff that 9-year-old boys doodle in the margins of their schoolbooks: cars, planes, guns, rocket ships and (depending on how advanced the boys are) pneumatic babes. Even adult anime tends to be "dark" in the brooding, adolescent fashion of Anne Rice novels, or to revel in violence and sex -- or violent sex. There are exceptions, naturally, but they can be hard to find.

Beyond that, anime also suffers from certain limitations inherent in the form. From the birth of the movies, the human face has been one of the cinema's main attractions. A great screen actor can turn a simple close-up into something transcendent or heart-rending; we can see a half-dozen often contradictory emotions flicker there. Not all movie stars have beautiful faces, but they all have interesting ones. The same cannot be said of animated characters. Even when animation artists try to use expressive faces -- and that isn't often -- they just can't equal the eloquence of the real thing. Japanese animation, where all the "good" characters have nearly identical mugs -- heart-shaped, with tiny pointed noses and huge eyes -- can feel strangely stultifying and lifeless before you realize what's missing. One reason why Chihiro makes for such an appealing heroine is that Miyazaki deliberately chose not to make her "cute" or "pretty" in this highly conventional way.

Even classical Japanese art doesn't rely much on conveying complicated emotion through facial expressions. (Westerners often find the Japanese erotic art from that period peculiar, with its figures fully clothed, except for oversized genitals drawn in great detail, and its faces impassive -- ecstasy is indicated by curling of the toes.) But it would be a mistake to think that therefore this art portrays a limited range of feeling. Nature, environment and everyday objects are often used by Japanese artists and writers to limn sensations too delicate to describe directly. In the elaborately aestheticized courtly tradition of medieval Japan, for example, sending an estranged friend a haiku about ice melting in the mountains with the coming of spring would be a way to communicate that a chilled heart was beginning to thaw.

Even in his early films, before he co-founded Studio Ghibli, which produces all his work, Miyazaki was using setting and detail to create mood, to paint the subtler emotional tonalities that can't be gotten across via his characters' faces. After he gained more artistic freedom at Ghibli, he perfected that technique. In the sublime "My Neighbor Totoro," for example, a girl named Satsuki goes running through the farmland around her home, looking for her little sister, Mei, who has disappeared. As her search continues, the shadows on the fields and country lanes grow longer and the light turns buttery. There's a lovely shot of a sky full of purple clouds with birds wheeling in the distance, but as beautiful as these images are, they allude to Satsuki's increasing desperation as night approaches. This may sound simple, but the elementary, absolutely perfect touch is a Miyazaki trademark. Watching it with a friend, I asked, "How often do you see an animated movie with that kind of late afternoon light?"

"How often do you see any movie that tries to give you the feeling of that time of day?" my friend replied. "In movies, it's usually either just day or just night."

That's a precious thing, what a particular time of day feels like, and how sad to realize that most movies don't think it's important enough to capture. All Miyazaki's films feature visual spectacles -- the glowing riverboat and weird gods in "Spirited Away," the floating island kingdom in "Castle in the Air," the giant, translucent, nocturnal incarnation of the forest spirit in "Princess Mononoke" -- but he lavishes just as much attention on animating things we might see right outside our own doors. He gives these things back to us infused with a new beauty, which is really just the old beauty made visible to our formerly dulled eyes. He has a profound understanding of the romance of trains and streetcars, and the movement of flocks of birds. He loves the sky, blue or cloudy or rain-darkened, and water, still or gushing or dripping. The image of a breeze blowing silky ripples over a hillside covered with young grass might just be his chosen emblem of pure happiness.

Nature and landscape don't act as symbols for Miyazaki's characters' feelings -- that would be a too crude a correspondence. It's best to understand that a place, and some of the things in it, can be characters in their own right in his films. This jibes with Japan's ancient animist religion, which saw everything as inhabited by spirits, and also with Miyazaki's environmentalism. He is also a longtime union sympathizer and leftist, an advocate in general of the small and weak against the big and the strong. From the start, he meant "Princess Mononoke" to focus on, in the words of one Miyazaki scholar, "the common people of early industrial Japan, the traders and ironworkers and subsistence farmers," rather than the samurai and aristocrats who get most of the attention.

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