Screen Machine

Feature: Learning about love and other things with Miyazaki

Miyazaki is more than he appears. Because his films are generally so positive, charming and cute I feel like he gets written off as a lightweight. Indeed some have written about Miyazaki’s latest film Ponyo as just for kids, pointing out the film narrative’s seeming disregard for cause and effect. But to watch Ponyo and insist on cold adult logic is to really miss the complexity of Miyazaki’s vision.

Take the theme of ecology which you find comes up a lot in Miyazaki’s films (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind). If you were to listen to David Stratton’s take, you’d imagine that Ponyo’s environmental message is a barely there subtext to a sweet, toothless love story between a boy and girl. But Miyazaki’s vision is so much more sophisticated than your average episode of Captain Planet. In some ways, Ponyo reminded me of Slavoj Zizek’s take on ecology.

Zizek sees the ecology movement as a conservative movement, stubbornly insisting on an unrealistic ideal of a perfect state of nature. Miyazaki seems to agree. In Princess Mononoke the forrest warriors were dominated by buffoons, angry Gods waging war on the humans who they viewed as encroaching upon their perfect ecosystem. Similarly in Ponyo, the antagonist Fujimoto (if you can even call him an antagonist) is a former human who has magically transformed his DNA so that he may live in the ocean and always comments on how disgusting and filthy humans are.

Fujimoto’s daughter, Ponyo, is a fish that yearns to be human and Fujimoto spends most of the movie attempting to keep Ponyo from being a human. To keep her “pure”. Miyazaki’s obvious sympathy with Ponyo is a declaration to let go the idea of “nature” as an ideal state of unity, to come to terms with how the world changes as humans go about their business and to learn to love the world as it is. That’s not to say that I think Miyazaki is advocating acceptance of all the advances in human industry. There is a great quote that originates from a New Yorker interview where Miyazaki declares:

Modern life is so thin and shallow and fake. I look forward to when developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer and wild grasses take over.

Miyazaki’s point as I see it is not that “nature” is right, but that humans have become alienated from nature. That is, humans live their lives and consume with complete disregard for the animals and the plants, those things within which modern life undeniably exists. Ponyo is obsessed with reforging that connection. When Ponyo first arrives at the house of her human boyfriend’s house, she is absolutely delighted in the details of how water comes into the house and how they get electricity from a generator. And like many of Miyazaki’s past films, nature does kind of rise up. In this film the seas quite literally rise until the town is completely submerged. But the point is not that nature destroys man. The point is that nature fantastically asserts itself in Miyazaki’s film so that we may fall in love with her again.

The link between Zizek and Miyazaki is even more fascinating when you hear Zizek link his ideas on ecology with his ideas on love. Zizek’s “Real love is when you love someone throughout their permutations and without idealising them” fits like a glove with the boy protagonist Sosuke’s pledge to love Ponyo “whether she’s a fish, a human or inbetween”. This is certainly real love, especially when you consider what Ponyo looks like when she is inbetween.

May I also add that the love between a boy and a mutant creature (like the interspecies relationships of Hellboy) invite a range of interesting queer readings? A thought for another day. Anyway, here’s some Japanese people being cute:

May I also add that it’s just amazingly cool that a filmmaker like Miyazaki whose films attract blockbuster numbers is so singlemindedly devoted to making the world a better place through his art? Even the Japanese MTV videoclip is amazingly cool. Not at all glossy and shallow like a lot of kid’s entertainment. It actually follows through with the film’s theme by showing the girl falling in love with nature. You know, stopping to marvel at a snail etc.

Of course you should see the Japanese dub but I must admit that the American dub is not bad. Originally I was morbidly curious in hearing how badly they fucked up the American dub after hearing that Disney had cast the littlest Jonas brother and the littlest Cyrus sister in the lead roles. Imagine my surprise to learn that all the performances were very much in the spirit of the original dub. I even got a Peanuts-vibe at certain stages of the American dub which, in this era when commercialism rules, is something of a marvel. So yeah, I was pretty happy with the contribution that Disney made to bring Miyazaki to a wider audience. That is, until I saw this:

Brad Nguyen is a co-editor of Screen Machine. He studied Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne, was the film reviewer for Triple R Breakfasters and has written for Senses of Cinema.

→ more articles by Brad Nguyen