The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On

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M I Y A Z A K I L O V E S T O D E S I G N V E H I C L E S , and all sorts of cars, boats, and planes figure prominently in his films. He is obviously not a mere technophobe. Castle in the Sky marks a turning point in his animation,

however. After Castle in the Sky, Miyazaki would make two films geared largely to younger children (in contrast to Nausicaä and Castle in the Sky, whose worlds, in his thinking, appealed more to older children and adolescents): My Neighbor Totoro (Tonari no Totoro, 1988) and Kiki’s Delivery Service (Majo no takkyūbin, 1989). These two films move away from the large epic and adventure worlds that had brought him into the limelight. Although these two films also center on bod- ies that fly and the joys of flight, they move resolutely away from an overt engage- ment with the modern technological condition that characterizes Nausicaä and Castle in the Sky, almost as if Miyazaki had gained his free relation to technology in Castle and began to inhabit it. Later, in his third film after Castle in the Sky, Porco Rosso (Kurenai no buta, 1992), Miyazaki self-consciously plays for laughs his prior engagement with adventures centered on technologies of flight—in fact, when you finally glimpse the face of the pig pilot, he looks like Alexander Key, the novelist whose book inspired Conan as well as Nausicaä and Castle in the Sky. It proved difficult for audiences to share the joke in its entirety, however.

Miyazaki’s three subsequent films—Princess Mononoke (Mononoke hime, 1997), Spirited Away (Sen to chihiro no kamikakushi, 2001), and Howl’s Moving Castle (Hauru no ugoku shiro, 2004)—brought him unparalleled box office suc- cess in Japan and won a long-overdue broad-based theater release of his films in North America as well as greater acclaim internationally. Yet, as many commen- tators have pointed out, Miyazaki’s vision of technologies and the technological

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C H A P T E R 5

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condition in these films seems more deterministic and less nuanced than in his earlier films.1 In terms of Miyazaki’s thinking technology in animation, Castle in the Sky is truly a turning point. It was also Miyazaki’s first film with Studio Ghibli, which he established in 1985 with his longtime friend and collabora- tor Takahata Isao, also a director of animated films. Takahata first served as Miyazaki’s producer on Castle in the Sky and ever since has produced Miyazaki’s films. The history of Miyazaki’s collaborations with Takahata prior to Castle in the Sky and the foundation of Ghibli is crucial to understanding Miyazaki’s changing relation to bodies that fly.

Takahata Isao was born in 1935, and Miyazaki Hayao in 1941, which meant that, in 1959 when Takahata was graduating from Tokyo University, Miyazaki was graduating from high school.2 Takahata began working at Tōei Studios in 1961, working as an assistant director on their fourth feature-length animated film, Anzu to Zushiomaru (Anzu and Zushiomaru). Tōei Studios referred to its animated films as dōga, literally “moving pictures” or “animated drawings,” and the animation studio is known as Tōei Dōga.3 Tōei’s first three dōga enjoyed international success, gaining prizes at film festivals and appearing in English dubs (usually re-edited). Hakujaden (Legend of the white serpent, 1958) became in English Panda and the Magic Serpent. Shōnen Sarutobi Sasuke (The youth Sarutobi Sasuke, 1959) was dubbed in English as Magic Boy. Saiyūki (Journey to the West, 1960) was distributed as Alakazaam the Great. Yabushita Taiji directed these films (and subsequently a number of others), and it was under Yabushita’s direction on Anzu and Zushiomaru that Takahata learned the trade.

Miyazaki began as a temp at Tōei Dōga in 1963, at a time when the studio’s success with feature films was allowing them to expand into television anima- tion. Takahata (direction) and Miyazaki (in-between animation) both contrib- uted to a television series called Ookami shōnen Ken (Wolf Boy Ken, 1963), but the dōga that has become legendary in the Studio Ghibli annals for bringing together the dream team is Taiyō no ōji Horusu no daibōken (Prince of the Sun: Hols’s great adventure, 1968; released in English as Little Norse Prince). This film combined the talents of Takahata as director, Miyazaki as key animator and scene designer, and Ōtsuka Yasuo as animation director. Understanding Ōtsuka Yasuo’s style of animation is especially important to understanding Miyazaki’s. In fact, in 2004, in conjunction with its traveling exhibition on the manga film, Studio Ghibli produced a documentary on Ōtsuka Yasuo entitled Ōtsuka Yasuo no ugokasu yorokobi (Ōtsuka Yasuo and the joy of making movement). In this documentary Takahata and Miyazaki highlight the impact of Ōtsuka on Japanese animation in general and on their own animation in particular. Later I will write more about Studio Ghibli’s insistence on referring to their animations

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as manga films, a term that does not mean that these animations are adapted from or even inspired by manga. The term manga film indicates something like feature-length animated films for children or general audiences, often (as in this instance) stands in contrast to anime or animated television series.

Miyazaki worked closely with Ōtsuka in 1964 on the film Garibaa no ūchū ryokō (Gulliver’s space travels, 1965), and impressed with his work, Ōtsuka used Miyazaki’s ideas for the last part of the film. When asked to make Prince of the Sun in 1965, Ōtsuka made his only condition the appointment of Takahata as di- rector. Miyazaki began voluntarily to participate in the project at that time, only to be pulled away on another project. But then, with the key animator suddenly hospitalized, Miyazaki returned to Prince of the Sun.

Loosely borrowing elements from Norse myths and tales, Prince of the Sun tells of a young boy, Hols (often called Horus because of the Japanese pro- nunciation of Hols), who must defeat the ice demon Grunwald who is intent on destroying the human settlements. In the opening sequence, Grunwald’s pack of wolves attacks Hols, and he defends himself with only an axe. When the wolves appear about to win, Hols unknowingly awakens a stone giant. Hols pulls a blade from the shoulder of the giant and learns that, once forged anew, the sword will transform him into the Prince of the Sun. Soon thereafter, upon the death of his father and after an encounter with Grunwald, Hols takes up residence in a fishing village. Hols discovers and kills the giant fish responsible for the dis- appearance of their fish, earning the gratitude of the villagers. The gray wolf, a minion of Grunwald, continually appears outside the village, seen only by Hols, who frequently leaves in pursuit of the wolf. On one chase, Hols encounters the young girl Hilda in an unpopulated village. Hilda’s beautiful voice endears her to Hols and the villagers, but gradually we learn that Grunwald controls her ac- tions via the jeweled pendant around her neck. Hilda spurs the villagers to grow suspicious of and to expel Hols, which clears the way for Grunwald’s full attack. Subsequently, however, inspired by Hols’s kindness and the love of an orphaned child, Hilda chooses to sacrifice herself to save the child. Hols returns to the vil- lage, forges the sword with the villagers, and defeats Grunwald in a final battle. Hilda, too, returns to the village, with the return of sun and spring.

Miyazaki apparently contributed to Prince of the Sun some of its most mov- ing scenes (the villagers listening to Hilda’s song) and innovative devices (the ice boats and ice mammoth). What is more, in the documentary on Ōtsuka, Miyazaki cites Hilda’s magical pendant in Prince of the Sun as the inspiration for the flying stone pendent in Castle in the Sky. There is indeed an affinity be- tween Sheeta and Hilda, as girls who suffer under the burden of a pendant that controls their relation to the world, from which they must free themselves.4

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The 1960s were a tremendously productive time for Tōei Dōga and also a time of labor strife. Miyazaki, Takahata, and Ōtsuka also sealed their friend- ship through their participation in the animators’ union (Miyazaki as chair and Takahata as cochair), and the three stuck closely together through a series of projects and studios. In 1971, Takahata and Miyazaki left Tōei to join Ōtsuka at A Pro, in order to make an animated series based on Pippi Longstocking. Among numerous other projects, the three adapted Monkey Punch’s manga into an ani- mated television series also called Rupun sansei (Lupin III, 1971–72). Received poorly when it first aired, Lupin went on to become one of the most touted and inf luential television series in Japan. Soon after (in 1973), Ōtsuka, Miyazaki, and Takahata moved on to Nippon Animation, where Miyazaki worked espe- cially on the World Masterpiece Theater television animation series, contributing as key animator and director for animated adaptations of such children’s classics as Anne of Green Gables and Heidi. At Nippon Animation, Miyazaki also created an animated adaptation of Alexander Key’s novel, The Incredible Tide, under the title Mirai shōnen Konan (Future boy Conan, 1978). Takahata directed some ep- isodes, Ōtsuka served as animation director, and Miyazaki directed and worked as key animator. Even though Takahata’s and Ōtsuka’s contributions are evident, you also see in Conan the emergence of something decidedly Miyazaki.

Conan takes place in a postapocalyptic world and deals with the aftermath of weapons of mass destruction, for, even though technologically advanced industrial society has come to an end, the weapons linger on. The adventure begins when a preternaturally strong youth, Konan (or Conan) meets a young girl Rana (or Lana). The girl, who possesses psychic powers, becomes caught up in a struggle to regain the secrets of solar energy that powered the “old” WMDs. Lepka, the villainous head of Industria, knows that Lana’s grandfather possesses the secret and pursues her in an attempt to wrest the secret from him. Conan and Lana together f lee and do battle with the bad guys. As even such a brief summary suggests, there is more than a passing resemblance between Conan and Castle in the Sky.5

In 1982 in Animage, a magazine devoted to anime published by Tokuma shoten, Miyazaki began to serialize a manga, Kaze no tani no Naushika (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, 1982–94), which also draws some of its inspiration from The Incredible Tide and Conan, spinning a tale of the young girl Nausicaä, who struggles to save the world from its technological condition, and who, like Key’s heroine, has the power to communicate with animals. Nausicaä, too, lives in a postapocalyptic world in which industrial civilization as such has vanished after devastating the earth with WMDs. Yet the WMDs linger, inviting men and women hungry for power to recover and reactivate them. The film adaptation,

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which Miyazaki reluctantly agreed to make when the publisher Tokuma shoten insisted that it would only fund a film based on his manga, consists of mate- rial largely reworked from first quarter of the manga. (It would take Miyazaki thirteen years to complete the manga, working on it in starts and stops between films.) 6 Significantly, although the Nausicaä manga has a mysterious stone that is the key to activating the giant robots who once destroyed the world, the film version of Nausicaä eliminates the mysterious stone, but Miyazaki would use this segment of the Nausicaä story in Castle in the Sky. In sum, there is a great deal of overlap thematically from Conan and Nausicaä to Castle in the Sky, as if Miyazaki were consistently, even obsessively working through his concerns about modern technology in animation. Even his Lupin III film, Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro (Rupan sansei: Kariosutoro no shiro, 1979) works with similar themes and devices, albeit in a more playful manner.

In light of Miyazaki’s prior projects, then, Castle in the Sky appears as a summation. The nineteenth-century look of the film recalls the period feel of Miyazaki’s television animation adaptations of Anne of Green Gables and Heidi, which Miyazaki renders in Castle in the Sky with generic ease. The story, es- pecially its magical flourishes, recalls both Tōei feature-length dōga (especially Prince of the Sun) and Miyazaki’s previous postapocalyptic epics (Conan and Nausicaä). I don’t wish to imply that Miyazaki’s prior work merely served as prepa- ration or apprenticeship for Castle in the Sky or for his subsequent films with Ghibli. It is not a question of straightforward continuity or direct influence. From his Tōei Dōga animations to his television animation to Castle in the Sky, we see a dazzling array of animated worlds. Nonetheless, in Castle in the Sky, Miyazaki gathers those worlds into one epic world with a distinctively Miyazaki look and story arc. Castle in the Sky marks the emergence of a distinctive Miyazaki-Ghibli world and worldview, and in a stable and marketable form.

Significantly, however, that world and its worldview are in crisis even as they emerge. In effect, the crisis comes of the conf licting stances toward tech- nology that appear in Miyazaki’s animation.7 By the time of Castle in the Sky, the delight in speeding vehicles and action sequences—so carefree and playful in Lupin and Conan—is proving awkward for Miyazaki to sustain alongside his critical take on techno-scientific modernity. It is difficult to play with speeding vehicles and launch a critique of the modern technological condition. In my opinion, Castle in the Sky succeeds precisely because Miyazaki launches his critique of technology even while playing with speed and machinery. Castle in the Sky succeeds precisely because it manages to gather and focus our manner of interacting with technology, not by rejecting technologies but by bringing them into focus differently. In his interviews about the film, however, he expresses

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discomfort about Castle in the Sky, speaking of his general discontent with boys’- adventure films, as we have seen. Maybe Miyazaki sensed that he had, in fact, summated or finished the genre—“finished” in both senses of the word, at once polishing it (giving it a beautiful finish) and closing or completing it. In any event, he turns away from it after Castle in the Sky.

Miyazaki’s take on the boy’s-adventure genre was always unusual in its sensibility, showing a tendency to question and even undermine goal-oriented actions. Working with Takahata, who seems equally intent on hollowing out adventurism, albeit in different ways, encouraged Miyazaki’s tendency toward a sort of antiadventure adventure film that asks viewers to question their delight in treasures, magical powers, or thrills and to transfer that interest onto other broader technological concerns. We have seen how Castle in the Sky presents a stance toward technology that is close to that of Heidegger. If the goal is not to accept or reject technology but to change your relation to it, the central issue becomes that of how you get caught up in the film, how the film gathers and focuses your practices of perception in relation to technology. This is where Miyazaki draws on his experience making Tōei dōga. This is where Miyazaki’s insistence that his animations are manga films not anime comes into play. At stake is developing in animation a different perception of technology.

Miyazaki’s films strive to shift our perception of technology at three differ- ent but interrelated levels. First is his use of open compositing of the multiplanar image, that is, his manner of rendering movement, speed, and depth by empha- sizing the sliding of layers within the image. He avoids and deemphasizes the ballistic optics of cinematism because, for him, these constitute a “bad”—that is, merely correct or accurate—relation to the modern technological condition, one that tends toward optimization for its own sake. This is not to say that he never uses ballistic modes of perception. In Castle in the Sky, for instance, the chase sequence on the train tracks over the gorge is full of images of things rushing out of the screen at you, and while Miyazaki mostly generates thrills with lateral views of motion, there are nonetheless many views down the rails that exploit perceptual ballistics. Yet Miyazaki undercuts such effects with humor: Sheeta decks two burly pirates with a shovel in the face, they grimace and slowly col- lapse. The timing and the interactions are almost slapstick, slightly loony, and always harmless, and jolts and slams are rendered theatrically, in the scale of human bodies (a fist in the face) and at the level of bodily knowledge.8 In addi- tion, as in the fistfight between village men and pirates, Miyazaki not only brings ballistic optics back to the level of the human body but also associates them with a preening yet harmless machismo. Just as this film is still able to play with tech- nologies even as it critiques them, it is also able to play with masculinity even as

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it questions it. Nonetheless this film largely marks the end of Miyazaki’s willing- ness to render overtly masculine behavior with humor or affection.

Second, Miyazaki’s films abound in whimsical, implausible-looking con- traptions that nonetheless fly through the skies or move over the earth. Usually such vehicles appear too voluminous and weighty to move at all. In Castle in the Sky, especially in the title sequence, there are the aircraft that seem to combine dirigibles, bicycles, and propellers, and one has to wonder how they could get off the ground; like the castles in the sky, they appear to hover or float rather than fly in the sense of speeding through the skies. While the gunships of Nausicaä seem not entirely unlike our airplanes, the flying jars and large airships defy our sense of aviation. Miyazaki seems to like bulbous entities with lots of spindly legs or propellers; vehicles as different as the catbus in Totoro and the mobile castle in Howl’s Moving Castle are such entities. Miyazaki’s giant insects in Nausicaä and insect-inspired planes in other films (like the flaptors in Castle in the Sky) also seem at once preposterous yet oddly coherent; they are large and many-limbed, yet swift. Sometimes familiar vehicles occur in anachronistic combinations: in Kiki’s Delivery Service, the dirigible appears in conjunction with televisions, to- gether with the boy Tombo’s transformation of a bike into a plane. All in all, such funny and eccentric vehicles, often with lots of flapping legs or spinning arms that make them whimsically accessible to the human body, seem calculated to avoid streamlined ballistic-designed craft. Miyazaki studiously avoids jets and rockets, and when he cites such designs, they are closely associated with the evils of war (in Howl’s Moving Castle in particular).9 Miyazaki uses humorous and ec- centric designs to open the technological ordering of our modern world to other possibilities, by generating vehicles that look implausible yet somehow accurate, thus refocusing our perception of technologies of flight and movement.

At the same time, the paragons of flight are those that stay aloft with the mini- mum of technology: Nausicaä’s seagull-like glider Meeve (or Mehve or Möwe), Pazu’s glider, Kiki’s broomstick, or Totoro as a gust of wind. Such vehicles are closely linked with animetism, because it is in sequences of gliding, floating, or soaring that the sliding layers of the image can be emphasized to their best ef- fect. These minimal flying technologies are thus associated with a third register of animation—the animation of human bodies, that is, the animation of the charac- ters who inhabit these worlds.

Miyazaki’s animations highlight youthful bodies and children’s energies, too. Generally the characters on whom Miyazaki lavishes his attention tend to be chil- dren, old men or women, with an occasional adult woman, often in a role character- ized as masculine. With the exception of Lupin, his animation generally does not devote much attention to adult men, and even his version of the character Lupin

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the Third is more youthful and sweet-hearted than usual. Interestingly enough, in Studio Ghibli’s documentary on Ōtsuka’s animation, Ōtsuka and Miyazaki stress the importance of the youthful energies that young animators can impart to move- ment as in-between animators. They see the energies of young animators translated directly into vigorous and vital animation. Harnessing youthful energies plays an important role in Miyazaki’s attempt to produce a free relation to technology in animation.

In sum, Miyazaki’s thinking of a free relation to technology in anima- tion relies on a gathering and focusing of attention on bodies that fly—at once vehicles and human bodies. He does this at three different levels: (1) emphasiz- ing animetism and avoiding (or comically deflating) cinematism by stressing the movement between multiple layers of the image; (2) designing whimsical vehicles and/or minimizing flight technologies while avoiding streamlined bal- listic structures; and (3) harnessing or channeling the energies of young bodies. These three impulses already come together beautifully in the scenes of the young Nausicaä on her glider in Nausicaä and appear again with Kiki soaring on her broomstick. But it is in Castle in the Sky, which from the outset until the end is a film that dreams a world of clouds and winds, that Miyazaki’s animetism reaches its fullest expression in sensations of flying, soaring, gliding, or wheeling through the clouds or along the earth. In contrast to the scenes that humor- ously def late ballistics or ridicule the streamlined biases in f light design, the scenes that open the sliding of layers of the image evoke sensations of awe and wonder, sensations of a world whose vastness and depth is somehow ungrasp- able. Miyazaki’s animetism is, to some extent, an experience of the sublime, an aesthetic experience of the world in which the world exceeds our ability to grasp it rationally or to order it hierarchically. Yet, insofar as flying and animating do not deny recourse to technology, however minimal, Miyazaki does not embrace the Romantic sublime that tends to repudiate the technological. Nor does he produce a technological sublime.

The sensation of sliding layers is entirely different from speeding into depth. Rather it is a sensation of induced movement or relative movement, such as that you feel when you are on a train stopped in a station, and the train next to yours begins to move forward or backward. You feel that you are moving, your train is moving. Or when your car creeps forward at a stoplight but you are not aware of lifting your foot from the pedal, you feel that the car ahead is backing up or even that the world is moving. This is how Miyazaki begins to imagine a free relation to technology: when movement is rendered with sliding planes, the world is not static, inert, lying in wait passively for us to use it, in the form of a standing reserve, to evoke Heidegger’s term. The world is not “enframed” or

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made into a picture.10 On the contrary, Miyazaki assures that when we move, the world moves, and vice versa. Opening a relation through animation technol- ogy to the dynamism of the world promises a way for us to gain a free relation to our modern technological condition, to save ourselves from it. Yet for all that it seems rather simple to formulate, such an experience is difficult to render. After all, Miyazaki doesn’t want to embrace the art of the engine. He thus takes the “big” or “high tech” vehicles of flight and transportation (planes, cars, trains) and deflates or deforms them, and at the same time he gravitates toward “small” or “low tech” vehicles (gliders, bikes, broomsticks). The result is vehicles that fit perfectly into a world of sliding layers. Vehicles associated with ballistic percep- tion are defanged, while other wind-powered vehicles feel ideally suited to move in a multiplanar, movement-full world. Yet the question remains of what kind of human bodies are suited to these flying machines, to these gliding, wheel- ing, soaring, and sliding machines. I have indicated that Miyazaki, following Ōtsuka, stresses youthful energies in his animators and in his animated charac- ters. This is where another art of animation comes into play, the art of animating characters, which has a profound impact on the imagination of a free relation to technology.