This essay on Hayao Miyazaki’s evaluation of Japanese culture is fascinating. Fascinating, that is, provided you know Miyazaki – if not, drop what you’re doing and go find out!
It’s interesting to me seeing confirmation that Miyazaki is a believing animist. This only deepens my appreciation of the extensive continuities between Christianity and the higher paganisms. While the overlap with other “world religions” like Islam or Buddhism comes in formal thought – ethics, philosophy, even theology – the overlap with something like animism comes in the narrative. Consider Princess Mononoke: The world is under a curse; the great spirit is killed by men, yet also can’t be killed, because he is always all around us.
Miyazaki says his goal is to draw people’s attention away from fantasy to what is real. This is a deeply ironic statement when you think about the fantastic content of his films, yet the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. The real point of My Neighbor Totoro is not forest spirits and magic trees, but two little girls whose mother has cancer. The real point of Kiki’s Delivery Service is not the broomsticks and black cats, but a thirteen-year-old girl who needs to find her purpose in life. The real point of Princess Mononoke is not the gods and demons, but the tragic fact that human beings can neither transform nature nor refrain from transforming it without killing a part of their own humanity. It is very much the real world Miyazaki wants us to live in.
Trying to get us to see the real world is, I suspect, the goal of all religious people who are engaged with culture. The very considerable cultural edification produced by Miyazaki’s films might very well be classified in the “first they must convert to serious paganism” file. Shame on us that there’s no Christian Miyazaki.
Even more interesting, though, is his analysis of what ails Japan. He describes what he sees as a vast distortion of desire; the opportunity to use technology to shape desire has been used to alienate children from what is real:
The desires of many—if not most or even all—Japanese children, Miyazaki believes, have been hollowed, stretched, inflated for the false, and, thus, deflated for the true. The beauty of woman for man and man for woman, especially, has been supplanted by the cartoonish, pornographic, robotic, and monstrous. This is what he meant when he called animated films “the source of the downfall of a people.”
But although Miyazaki has never fully extracted himself from his Marxist past, he does not (as so many tiresome people do) equate this distortion of desire with capitalism and place his hope in central planning. Quite the contrary, his hope is exactly where it should be – in entrepreneurs who take the opportunities that only capitalism provides and use them to produce a better culture:
His animism may explain the content of his films, but not necessarily his approach to film craft. His criticisms of Japanese culture and the manga industry offer a better starting point. The largest problem facing the manga industry is that the people running it are anime fanatics, known as otaku in Japan. These “sickly otaku types,” as Miyazaki called them, were reared on manga and Japanimation, and developed an inordinate desire for them—their shape, scale, motion, symbols, and narrative tropes. Such children, “locked in [manga’s] own enclosed world,” became illustrators themselves, reinforcing the enclosure. With their arrival in the industry, characters became boxier, eyes ballooned, and, to be frank, breasts grew larger. The expressiveness of the manga industry was further attenuated, a cycle that cheapens and thins the general taste of Japanese society. These otaku, “raised amidst the clamor,” Miyazaki said, “probably can’t be the flag bearers for new images.”
To bear “new images,” to make films that liberate, the filmmaker must himself be liberated, free of the customs of the genre. That’s why Miyazaki frequently stresses that he does not “watch film at all” and describes his own career as an ongoing effort to escape the yoke of his great forebear, Osamu Tezuka, the father of manga, creator of Astro Boy, and Miyazaki’s greatest influence. That’s also why he strongly urges that, if an illustrator is to spur audiences to seek and love the world, he must himself be filled with its riches. That is, he must gain an intelligent understanding of it by cultivating “a constant interest in customs, history, architecture, and all sorts of things.” Otherwise, he “can’t direct.” And if he doesn’t have time to study, he must “look carefully at what is right in front of [him].” If he fails to do so, no matter what he makes, “it turns out to be a film we’ve seen somewhere, or something we’ve seen in manga.”
Verily, freedom and economic development create opportunities for people to distort their desire. But to contract freedom and development would only deliver us into the hands of an elite formed by that cultural decay, locking in the distortion of desire, freezing in place the present decadence. The solution instead lies with those who not only make responsible use of their opportunities, but inspire others to follow them in doing so (“to spur audiences to seek and love the world”).
I would argue that Tolkien was the Christian Miyazaki of the 20th Century. But the Japanese have a considerable advantage on us when it comes to imaginative paganism; let us not too quickly sell off the residuals of Christendom!
After all, in order to get to the point where we long for a Christian Miyazaki for the 21st Century, we must first have lived through nearly three centuries of renouncing, evading, and apologizing for the generations of holy imaginations by whom God entrusted us with the patrimony we so shamelessly squandered.
This, by the way, is why I disagree with some who see “magical realism” as automatically the same as “magical thinking” and therefore decadent primitivism. Sometimes it takes considerable imaginative effort to see through the illusions we have accepted from our culture and actually encounter the world as God created it.
“What is right with the world is the world. In fact, nearly everything else is wrong with it. This is that great truth in the tremendous tale of Creation, a truth that our people must remember or perish. It is at the beginning that things are good, and not (as the more pallid progressives say) only at the end.” ( http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/What_is_Right_With_the_World.html )
I would argue that Tolkien was the Christian Miyazaki of the 20th Century.
I wasn’t asking about whether we doing this well a century ago.
But the Japanese have a considerable advantage on us when it comes to imaginative paganism
And that would be an outstanding excuse if I were complaining that they were beating us at imaginative paganism.
I really think there is much to be praised in Miyazaki. I’m not sure how someone would try to replicate it, though.
William Blake–no friend to grace, he–liked to speak of three stages in the development of an imagination, or of poetic vision: Innocence, Experience, and Second Innocence. I think he was on to something. (It’s something he cribbed from Milton’s vision of the Fall as a Fall from “knowing good” to “knowing good through evil”; Second Innocence would be the response in Book 12, when Adam assents to
…………………………………………have my fill
Of knowledge, what this Vessel can containe;
Beyond which was my folly to aspire.
Henceforth I learne, that to obey is best,
And love with feare the onely God, to walk
As in his presence, ever to observe
His providence, and on him sole depend,)
I *love* the language Miyazaki gives us, here, of rediscovering reality–and of the effort this requires–and I am a great admirer of all things Ghibli.
I am not sure we help the process, though, when we long for an Innocence that we could only have by renouncing the Experience that we receive from our culture–the truth it has received, and the errors that it has lapsed into, being both forces that move us away from Innocence. Just like Princess Mononoke teaches us, we live in a world where Innocence *must* give way to Experience, and thus we have to discover ways to achieve Second Innocence.
I agree that American cultural product today is pretty bad, and that the distinctively Christian contributions are often *especially* bad. I just don’t think that we *can* be Miyazaki, at least not in a sense that working in the traditions of Tolkien or others that are still current in our culture doesn’t fit the bill. I want to believe Christians can speak unironically about reality, but when they use the genres and tropes and languages of our culture, “reality” always already comes with scare quotes.
When I teach Lit, I teach my students to look for the elements that establish “normal” and “normative” perspectives in each POV, and how those differ. The hardest thing is just getting students to recognize that these are not the same thing. With an audience like that, it will be very hard to speak with the innocence of an intentional animist speaking with the official sanction of his culture’s principal religious tradition.
Instead, we will need to evolve a manner of speaking that (1) retrenches within the Christian tradition and (2) sees whatever is real, whatever is True and Beautiful and Good that is *actually* presented, even in fiction, even in secular work, for our appreciation. That will be the Second Innocence of Christendom, but it is a great deal harder to achieve than another generation of post-Romantic aspiration (I would contend that we have been cycling and recycling, culturally, since at least 1778).
I do not know how to do it, but from the time I began studying literature in order to learn how to write poetry like those Greats that I read and copied as a junior high student in love, I have been intent on finding the way.
Have you read C.S. Lewis’ “Talking about Bicycles?” It gets at this problem quite well. It appears to be one of the very few Lewis articles that has not been illegally posted on the web, but you can read it in your copy of Present Concerns. (You do own a copy, don’t you? All decent people do.)
I wish my first reply had highlighted how much I liked the formulation “to contract freedom and development would only deliver us into the hands of an elite formed by that cultural decay, locking in the distortion of desire, freezing in place the present decadence.”
Thanks! This is why Distributism is, in the long run, either capitalism for people who despise the word “capitalism” or socialism for people who are embarrassed by the word “socialism.”
Distributism is a set of aspirations searching for a coherent expression, and at this stage of history it is unlikely to achieve this under that moniker.
I freely grant, by the way, that I prefer feudalism to capitalism. 🙂
As WFB once said, I will not insult your intelligence by taking that comment seriously.
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