英語で紹介する日本文化Ⅱ 2009年10月9日
Lesson 2: Hayao
Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation : Films, Themes, Artistry 1
(Citation from Helen McCarthy, Hayao
Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation: Films, Themes, Artistry, Stone Bridge
Press, revised edition 2002)
Miyazaki’s Life
and career
Hayao Miyazaki was
born into a well-to-do family living on the outskirts of Tokyo in January 1941. His father, Katsuji, who
was then twenty-six years old, was a director of the family firm, Miyazaki
Airplane. Headed by Katsuji’s elder brother, the company was active in the war effort,
making parts for Zero fighters. The war had an early impact on the young Hayao's
life―he was three years old when the family was evacuated to safer districts, and he started school as an evacuee
in 1947. It was another three years before the Miyazakis moved back to their
old hometown, and then he changed schools again after only a year, moving to
one of Japan’s brand-new, American-influenced elementary schools.
But the biggest
impact was probably the long illness of his mother, which commenced in the same year he started school. She was a woman of very strong
character and intellectual interests. Although he says that he cannot trace his
parents’ influences on him, and that as a teenager he consciously sought to find
his own path rather than follow his family’s, the legacy of her powerful personality lives on in his work. His
youngest brother once commented that the determined, no-nonsense character of Ma
Dola in Castle in the Sky reminded him of their mother.
Mrs. Miyazaki
suffered from spinal tuberculosis. She was bedridden from 1947, two years after the birth of her fourth
child, to 1955. The first few years of her illness were spent largely in the
hospital, but she was able to be nursed at home thereafter and lived to old
age. Despite her absence from home and her long illness, she played a huge part
in forming her son’s view of the world.
Like many children
in postwar Japan, the youngster decided he wanted to become a comic artist while
in high school. His abilities at that time were limited―he
couldn't draw people well, having (like war babies all over Europe) only drawn
planes, tanks, and battle-ships for years. It was an exciting time to be a young
comic reader in Japan, and there was plenty of encouragement and inspiration.
The teenage Osamu Tezuka had leapt to comic stardom in 1947 with his seminal manga New Treasure
Island and started a powerful wave of enthusiasm. Established artists began
to try new styles and techniques, and throughout the fifties there was an
increase in comics consumption.
Like comics,
animation enjoyed a peacetime renaissance. The experimentation of the early years of the century had brought
Japanese animators into contact with their Western counterparts. Interrupted by
war, this contact was now resumed with the active encouragement of the
occupying American authorities, and Japan’s animation industry once again began
to produce entertainment for the cinema audience rather than overt
war propaganda. From the 1960s this mass entertainment included material for
the new medium of television.
Miyazaki's
youthful interest in animation was kindled by the first Japanese color animated feature, Taiji
Yabushitd’s Legend of the White Serpent.
He had been considering a career as a manga author, a path that he was not to
reject entirely.
It seemed his
career path was moving away from the arts when he entered Gakushuin University,
a prestigious institution with imperial connections, to study
political science and economics. His final-year thesis was on the theory of
Japanese industry. He could easily have been another pioneer of Japan’s economic
revival, but he wanted to find his own path in life and his interest in graphic
entertainment and its possibilities was still strong. Among the many clubs and
societies on offer at the university was a children’s literature research
society, which he joined. The group read children's books and comics, including
many European texts. When he left the university in 1963, he did not take up an
academic post or a business opportunity. Instead he joined Toei-Animation, the
animation studio of the Toei Company, moved into an apartment near the studio,
and after three months training did his first professional work.
My
Neighbor Totoro
The dominant image of the movie is the largest Totoro, called O-Totoro (King Totoro) in Japanese and Big Totoro in the existing U.S. release. There are elements of a number of creatures of nature and folklore in its make-up. It is related to the tanuki, the Japanese raccoon, with its playful spirit and magical powers. There are also links to the owl―its round eyes, its arrow-marked chest, and its hooting song, which was rescored by composer Joe Hisaishi onto the film soundtrack, played on the ocarina. The cat, long credited with shape-shining ability in Japanese legend, lent some genes to the Totoros and their companion the Catbus. Lewis Carroll, creator of Alice in Wonderland, threw some elements into the mix for both―the ability to vanish at will and the huge, infectious grin. Many adult Tororo lovers also find that Big Totoro's comforting bulk and warm, uncritical nature bring back delightful memories of their favorite childhood teddy bear.
With My Neighbor Totoro, more than any other of his works, Miyazaki is his own strongest influence. Reaching back into his youthful memories, he accessed both the most painful and the most joyous portions of childhood. He also paid homage to some of his favorite scenes from children’s literature. Little Mei’s fall down the tunnel in the camphor tree into Totoro's nest is another homage to Lewis Carroll. The two rides in the Catbus strongly reminded me of C. S. Lewis's description of Susan and Lucy's ride through Narnia on Aslan’s back in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I can never see the sisters swaying happily on the fur-covered seats with the rhythm of the Catbus’s twelve-legged stride without thinking of Lewis’s passionate evocation of rough fur and soft footfalls padding through the blossoming glory of summer woods. Yet the magic that suffuses Narnia is different, more a subversion of nature than a celebration of it. Mei and Satsuki are not a pair of princesses riding on the back of Christ in a neo-Dionysian post-sacrificial celebration; they are a pair of ordinary children on a bus ride to see their mother and go home again. Miyazaki’s magic does not need to take us into a hidden kingdom to show us wonder.
Lewis placed religion at the heart of his created universe; My Neighbor Totoro's plot deliberately sidelines religion in favor of nature. Because it’s set in Japan, the trappings of rural religious tradition are clearly visible, but as far as the plot is concerned, they’re decorative, not functional. Miyazaki uses religious iconography to send one clear signal, which will be lost on most American audiences: when Mei is lost, she sits at the feet of a row of statues. They are dedicated to a traditional Japanese deity who protects children, and this sends a subliminal message to the audience that she will be safe. Elsewhere in the movie are roadside shrines to which the characters pay the respect that good manners and tradition demand. There are statues of foxes and protective deities, Shinto shrine gates, and ritual cords of rice straw and paper streamers around the trunk of the camphor tree, but none of this affects Totoro and the Catbus or the daily life of the forest creatures. Religion is a human construct and has nothing to do with nature. Nature spirits live outside it, creatures of simple goodwill who mean no harm.
Though nature and its spirits can express themselves in hurricanes and howling winds, the struggle and spite of human society are unknown to them, and the natural cycle of life and death is essentially a cycle of goodwill. No harm will come to our two heroines in the forest’s sunlit glades and mysterious shadows. They may be afraid sometimes when they glimpse the power and majesty around them, but it is the scale of the power itself they fear. They know instinctively that nature has no malice.
Like Satsuki's and Mei's childhood, the delicate balance of forest and farmland cannot last. The adult in the audience knows that in few more years Tokyo will swamp the small fields and quiet lanes, while the child in the adult is glad that Miyazaki has kept them alive and beautiful, giving us, whatever happens to our world, the key to the door into summer.
