Here’s the problem, as Princess Mononoke sees it: in the forest, wolves are wolves, boars are boars, apes are apes. They have a nature, they have a role, and they are ruled by their tribal gods. Wolves kill prey; boars are stubborn; apes are creepy. Simple.

Then we get to people, who have no set and specific place in this world. They are neither predators nor prey. They can be anything—they can even be wolves. Since there is no special place for human beings, they make their own place. Like any animal, they extract what they require for their own needs and their own ends, but those needs and those ends are not related to anything other than themselves. Making iron from sand is not like a wolf killing its prey. The unnaturalness of the weapon so derived poisons the gods and makes them into demons.1

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Human beings don’t have a god of human beings and they can’t become demons. They are always both. Unlike other animals, human beings can change their own nature. This multifacetedness is what makes them so destructive. It would be fine if human beings were simply cruel prey animals; so are wolves. Instead they are something less predictable, with priorities less easy to understand, which is great if you are a human being, and bad if you are anything else.

When Ashitaka, the hero of our film, asks why the ironworks and the forest can’t live in harmony, it’s not a stupid question, but it is the wrong question. People and the forest could live in harmony. Ashitaka knows this to be true because it’s true where he comes from. The ironworks extracts resources from the forest and does not give something back to the forest in return. It has no place in the forest’s ecosystem. It will only take until it has nothing left to take.

The mistress of the ironworks, Lady Eboshi, exemplifies the way human beings can be many things: she is a hero to her village, a thorn in the side of the emperor, and a villain to the forest. Part of the genius of Princess Mononoke is that this destructive person is also so admirable and brave. Lady Eboshi takes in lepers and she saves women from slavery. She is a singular anti-heroine who is somehow both noble and ruthless, who is willing to take big risks and accept responsibility. She’s not like Muska or the evil Count or even Kushana, her closest counterpart in Miyazaki’s previous movies. She’s not power mad in the same way. You don’t want her to lose, because if she loses, it doesn’t save the forest—it just means all those women will get sold into slavery again.2 Eboshi’s big sin, in her own terms, comes when she decides to pursue the Deer God when the ironworks are under attack. She gambles with the safety of her people here and I wonder if this is part of why she accepts her arm being bitten off with a kind of equanimity.

Ashitaka and San do not possess Eboshi’s mutability. San is single-minded: kill humans. Ashitaka, as the observer whose task is to see with “eyes unclouded,” and dying from a curse nobody can lift, does not make judgments about the sides in the conflict, which is why people keep demanding to know what side he’s on. Ashitaka clearly accomplishes something over the course of this movie—he is not just a passive onlooker—but it’s honestly hard to say what. The movie ends in a stalemate. Nobody wins. The Deer God leaves the forest, the ironworks are destroyed, and the emperor doesn’t get the head of a god to give him eternal life or whatever it was he wanted it for. Lady Eboshi finally wins her long battle against the wolves, but loses her arm. San will stay in the diminished forest because she hates human beings and Ashitaka will stay in the rebuilt ironworks and visit her.

I didn’t get this movie the first time I watched it (previously), which was probably around the time Howl’s Moving Castle came out.3 I know that “I didn’t really get this, then I did” is a recurring motif in my commentary in this newsletter, but it’s true. I often don’t get things and then I do. A certain kind of pure negative judgment is unlikely to change—sometimes you do get things right off and you hate them. But if I feel a little lost or bewildered by a piece of art, it’s usually a sign to go back to it again. Is it weird for somebody who is, to the extent such a thing exists anymore, a “professional critic,” to advertise the flexibility of my own judgements? Oh well.

In the case of Princess Mononoke, what I did not grasp is that the conflict in this movie does not involve “villains.” Like the characters, I kept demanding to know what side Ashitaka was supposed to be on, so that I would know who to like. There are bad people in this movie, and they intensify the conflict, but the central conflict of the ironworks and the forest is about survival on both sides. (It’s hard to imagine an ending to this story where everybody talks it out and decides to take on the real enemy, the emperor.)4 So the question the movie poses through this conflict, but cannot answer, is about what survival can justify. It poses this question on multiple levels, including Moro revealing to Ashitaka that the infant San was thrown in her path by fleeing humans hoping to distract her.5

And the basic pessimism here is that while there are actions we can say value survival too highly (“tossing a baby at a wolf”), it’s hard to say there should be limits on the basic will to live, and harder to place those limits, and even harder when human beings’ desires are so unfixed. Even Ashitaka’s village is a kind of special enclave. It won’t be left alone forever by other human beings. He represents a way of life that has already become impossible to imagine. Princess Mononoke is a movie that offers a lot of short-term hope but long-term despair. After all, Eboshi is going to rebuild the ironworks there at the end. Even though nobody wins this round, we are products of an industrialized world, and we know who wins eventually.

• Moro rags on Ashitaka about how human beings are terrible and how he can’t save San and then turns right around and tells San “there’s a life for you with that boy.” Wolves, man.…

• I did not see a standalone post on Princess Mononoke from Animation Obsessive, but here are some relevant newsletters:
  

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• I don’t really feel “done” with this movie, to be honest. This post feels more like notes toward something… well… I guess it is a notebook. Like that is the name. Of the newsletter.

• After I rewatched the movie I thought of putting the dubbed version on in the background while I did some housework and shut it off before Ashitaka even got out of his village because I found it incredibly annoying. Then I found out the script was written by Neil Gaiman… my annoying detector never fails.

• Next movie is My Neighbors the Yamadas, August 29.

Whisper of the Heart is my personal favorite Ghibli movie. It’s a great movie about love, it’s a great movie about ambition, it’s a great movie about the passion and the amount of hard work it takes to be really good at anything. It’s also about how choosing something and committing to something often looks a little bit crazy. For instance: proposing marriage to your girlfriend when you’re both just exiting middle school and you are additionally dropping out of school and leaving the country. That looks pretty crazy. Possibly, is pretty crazy. On the other hand… what if you and your girlfriend are just two people who figured out who you were earlier than other people?

Shizuku Tsukishima is a middle school student whose life is spent going from exam to exam. She checks out books from the library and begins to notice that there’s a boy who has checked them all out before her. His name is Seiji Amasawa. She begins to develop a little bit of a crush on this fictional boy. Unrelatedly, this other guy has popped up in her life. He is really annoying! It would be terrible if he were Seiji!

Yeah, yeah. You know what’s up there.

Eventually Shizuku gets to know the annoying boy and before she puts two and two together on the Seiji front she’s learned about his dream to go to Cremona and learn how to become a master violin maker. When he leaves Japan for a two month trial apprenticeship, she decides she’s going to do something, too. She’s going to prove, to herself, that she cares about something as much as he does. During those two months, she’s going to write a novel. To hell with studying for exams!

One of the great things about Whisper of the Heart is the way it takes certain things that were already established in the Ghibli playbook—a sense of light and of beauty, an interest in stories about breaking from and embracing tradition—and did them in a distinctive way. The result is something that’s distinctly a Ghibli movie without feeling like an faux Miyazaki movie.1 The romantic landscape in this movie is the city, not the country. The playful synths in Yuji Nomi’s score replace the kind of sweeping orchestral music Joe Hisaishi wrote. The romanticized European culture you see in Kiki’s Delivery Service or Castle in the Sky or Porco Rosso is still present, but as charming antiques. Instead, what you love in this movie are the items in Shizuku’s cluttered apartment, like the rice maker, or her headphones. Whisper of the Heart is about a recognizably contemporary Japan and not some other time or other place.2

In their first couple meetings, Seiji teases Shizuku about her version of “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” which she’s called “Concrete Roads.” (Later, he claims not to remember doing this.) Shizuku goes back to the song’s original love of the country, and in the opening lines of her novel she also invokes the woods, but I think what’s special about her initial attempt at “Concrete Roads” is just that she is thinking about her actual life, not some woodland she’s never seen. Sure, she is defeated and falls back on more familiar literary objects, but she’s not satisfied with the draft of her novel, and when I watch the movie I feel like she’s going to keep working at it until she knows how to capture the romance of her city life. Even the glimpses we get of the book show something that is not some forest fantasy, but a floating city made up of “planetoids.”

Whisper of the Heart isn’t an ode to modernity either. Maybe one of the things I like the most about this movie is its gentle embrace of everything old and new: listening to music on your headphones and impromptu singing with strangers even though you consider yourself “tone deaf.” The technology that allowed Seiji to flirt with Shizuku before they’d actually met—i.e., the physical library card catalog—is on the way out. I think there’s a suggestion that this change to a computerized card catalog system is a little regrettable, because it removes one way for people to surprise and meet one another. The great thing about city life is the way everybody’s on top of each other, forcing encounters and coincidences that can become something else, and the last shot of the movie, as the credits roll, is just watching all the people and animals who walk up and down a road. We can even watch a new romance start up.

About that marriage proposal.… Whisper of the Heart is adapted from a manga, the marriage proposal is, as far as I can tell, original to the movie. Here’s an interview with Kondō and Aoi Hiiragi (the mangaka)3:

Kondo: Another difference with shoujo manga is the depiction of romance, right? While I fundamentally viewed it as a love story, as Miyazaki’s storyboards progressed, there seemed to be a stronger emphasis on the message of “introspection and self-improvement.” Despite the tagline, “I’ve found someone I like,” I wonder if this can truly be termed a love story in the conventional shoujo manga sense. In your original work, rather than the two immersing in their own world, they are depicted as “standing side by side, looking far ahead.”

Hiiragi: I see. Even so, the last line from Seiji had quite the impact.

Kondo: That line was Miyazaki’s idea. He said it would be weak if Seiji simply told Shizuku, “I love you.” The line is more of a resolution, looking beyond that white haze and deciding to walk forward together. That’s why it works.…

“That’s why it works” is maybe an overstatement. The first time I watched this movie I thought the ending, where Seiji asks Shizuku to marry him when he’s done with his studies in Cremona, was insane. I thought everything leading up to it was great, but that moment was so crazy it made the rest of the movie feel like it wasn’t really engaged with reality. Whenever I rewatch the movie, though, the ending feels a little less strange. Some of that is probably just because now I know it’s coming, so I’m emotionally prepared for it. When it comes out of nowhere, it’s almost shocking.

However, I also think it has to do with what I said at the beginning of the newsletter—that Seiji and Shizuku both have a strong sense of who they are by the end of the movie. They support each other in ways that don’t hamper the other’s independence. It’s not that they’d be ready to get married right then and there, of course, but now when I watch this movie, I think, when would they be more ready to say, yes, you’re the person I want to go through my life with? When you know, you know.…

Ultimately the decision to have the movie end with a marriage proposal mirrors the way both Seiji and Shizuku make serious choices to commit to their work. Seiji is dropping out of school and studying in another country. Shizuku risks her chance at getting into a good high school by staying up all night writing and neglecting her studies. When she finishes her novel she knows it’s not good, that wanting to write a novel isn’t actually enough to do so, a realization that causes her to burst into tears. But she’s not giving up, and that’s why we can sense, watching the movie, that she will really become an artist one day.

There’s also a story within Whisper of the Heart—not the one Shizuku’s writing—about how Seiji’s grandfather loved a woman and promised to reunite with her after what was meant to be a brief separation, but the unexpected advent of war meant he never found her again. Obviously, he moved on with his life (otherwise, Seiji would not exist), but this story is a reminder that even serious and sincere promises sometimes cannot be kept. We don’t really know what will happen to these two kids, but we know what will happen if everything works out for them the way that they want. So while the ending still feels like a lot to me… I’m convinced these days that it’s the right ending for the movie.

What will always be bittersweet about Whisper of the Heart is that it was meant to be the first of many movies that Yoshifumi Kondō would make for Ghibli. Unfortunately, though, Kondō died three years later. He never made another movie. The light-filled city landscape of this movie remains singular. It is one beautiful movie that doesn’t lead anywhere. Still—what a movie!

• This is a day early because I’m supposed to have something go out “this weekend”… if that doesn’t happen well… you never saw this bullet point.

• My impression of the Japanese school system from watching anime: you are always in school. If you are bad at school, you get more school. But if you are good at school, you also get more school. If you go on vacation, it’s a school trip. If you are really bad at school, you drop into some pit of eternal fire, where you still have to go to school. It may seem as if there are adults who have graduated from school, but in fact, there is no point at which you stop going to school. Even Shizuku’s mother is in school.

• There’s a kind of flexibility to the faces in this movie that I really like and which feels distinctive. I can’t quite put my finger on what does it—it’s partly that they’re a bit more cartoonish at times, but I don’t think that’s the only reason.

• Shizuku has been immortalized as the lo fi beats girl.

• Seiji pretending to be a jerk to impress the girl he likes… a mistake many have made before him and which many will make again. The cat fixed it though. By the time he gets back from Italy he knows that what you do is give her your coat and also fail to bike her up a hill.

• Seriously… that biking scene is so cute.

• There is a spinoff movie, The Cat Returns. I have seen it once and my memory is that it is mediocre.

• “It’s not easy to walk your own road. You’ve got only yourself to blame” is one of those lines that’s always rolling around in my head, like “everything’s temporary! that don’t excuse nothing!” from Moonstruck.

• You can tell that Shizuku’s family is significantly less well off than her friends’ families, and it’s implied that’s because they’ve made slightly off-the-beaten-path decisions, which I think gives that moment a little more weight.

In the nineties, there were many children’s movies that conveyed the message that the worst thing you could do—not only as a caretaker of the Earth but perhaps as a human being period—was build something, particularly if “building something” involved (for instance) cutting down a tree. Even if that wasn’t the intended message, it was the message. Some of these stories were gratingly preachy (Ferngully), some of them were horrifying (Once Upon A Forest), and there were many whose names I can’t remember that were just about heroic children facing down evil building projects.1 In retrospect, maybe there could have been other environmental morals to hammer home, but we went all in on “don’t build anything.”

Pom Poko is this kind of movie, sort of. It is a much much bette…

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Taku, a college student, sees a woman at a Tokyo train station who looks like Rikako, a girl he knew in high school. He reminisces to himself about how he and his best friend met Rikako, how his best friend was in love with her, how everybody hated her, and so on. Over the course of this trip down memory lane, and with a little help from others, he figures out he himself is in love with Rikako and that she’s been in love with him for a long time. He sees her again at the train station and runs to catch her. He catches her. They smile at each other. Roll credits.

There’s nothing wrong with this movie but there’s nothing that right with it either. Ocean Waves is a movie you watch once and if anybody asks you about it afterward you say, vaguely: “it’s fine.” There…

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An admission before we get started: films that are made of a procession of surreal images are opaque to me. I haven’t done the kind of work that would let me appreciate them, and something about me is too verbal to get into them without some education. I’m always going: what is that? what is that? what is that?

Angel’s Egg is certainly composed of surreal images, and so I think in many ways I am a poorly suited critic for it, but here we are. Threaded through its imagery is a narrative, however, which I’ll summarize this: a nameless girl carrying an egg wanders a mostly deserted landscape and town, encounters a man with a sword, runs away from him, encounters some fishermen who try and fail to capture shadow fish, is reunited with the man, and listens to him tell the story of Noah’s Ark. She falls asleep and he takes the egg and breaks it. When she wakes up she kills herself. In the proce…

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Despite featuring multiple dogfights, a fascist government, pirates, pursuit by the secret police, an economic depression, and what is surely cinema’s longest fist fight, Porco Rosso might be the Miyazaki movie in which the least happens. If I try to distill this movie into “a plot,” I come up with the following series of events:

• Porco is a bounty hunter who thwarts air pirates. We witness him rescue some school girls being held for ransom (though it’s clear the girls were never in any serious danger).

• The air pirates hire a hotshot American named Donald Curtis to defeat him.

• Donald Curtis defeats him.

• Porco fixes his plane and comes back for round two.

• This time, he wins.

• The end.

Now I am doing this summary partly to demonstrate what I mean when I say not much happens. What’s at stake in the on-screen conflicts in this movie is pretty low, because everybody’s broke, except for the American. Al…

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Most of the films under discussion in this series involve elements of the fantastic—or, at the very least, the unrealistic. A flying witch on a broomstick, a giant robot: these are natural choices for cartoons. (Even Grave of the Fireflies is narrated through ghosts.) But what about Only Yesterday, a film in which Taeko Okajima, an unremarkable woman in her late twenties, takes a trip to the countryside and remembers being ten years old? Why should this movie be a cartoon? In a previous post about Mamoru Oshii’s Beautiful Dreamer (1984), I commented that “the strength animation will always have over live action film making is that everything in an animated film is exactly as real as everything else.” It’s easy to see how that’s true when we’re watching a movie in which things are depicted that are not real and do not happen. Trips to the countryside, on the other hand, do happen. You co…

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Kiki’s Delivery Service is a movie about growing up, which means it is also about what to do when things stop working. People understand and navigate the world through tradition, magic, technology, and art, but these practices will break down. Your electric stove stops working. Your paintings don’t come out right. Your broom won’t behave. Your dirigible crashes into your clock tower. These are the kind of failures all of us deal with every day as we try to fulfill our responsibilities toward others.

Plus, there will be times when you can’t turn to your family or friends for help, but have to face it on your own. Maybe your beloved granddaughter has turned into a snotty tween or your best friend has stopped talking to you. There will also be times you are doing something nobody around you understands. For instance: you might be a thirteen year old witch who is on her own for a year—because that’s how witches come of age—in a world where other thirteen year olds are de…

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A proposal: Machines are great. We love machines. Software is creepy. We hate software.1 At this point in time, though, the distinction between machine and software has mostly disappeared into the vague world of “tech.” Even if you don’t work a desk job because you’re a farmer and you refuse to allow a “smart” device in your home, if you rely on John Deere products, well, they’re computerized. Software rules your life and the domains in which it does not intrude at all, or can be prevented from doing so, keep on shrinking. For instance: do you want to buy a car with no—or at least minimal—computer? Good luck.2

The introduction of software, of more computer-driven machines, does two things. First, it increases the user’s range of abilities. (For instance, you no longer have to turn around when putting your car in reverse, because there is a camera.) You are no longer limited to what you can see with your eyes; you can use cameras. You can perform more delicate maneuvers.…

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If you read this post and feel heartsick about real children who are starving and / or living in war zones at this time, please donate! If you reply to this email with a receipt for a donation to a relevant charity I will comp you for a year of Notebook. (If you already have a paid subscription, that means a year will be tacked onto your current subscription.) World Kitchen would be one possibility.

Let’s spread the love,
BDM

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A girl named Sheeta falls from the sky, pursued by pirates on the one hand and the military on the other. They want the mysterious blue gem she wears around her neck—after all, it’s the reason she can fall from the sky and live. She’s found by a boy named Pazu; Pazu works in the local mines, but dreams of flying and discovering Laputa, the fabled city in the sky that his father claimed to have seen. He’s smitten with Sheeta and tries to help her run away—but after successfully eluding the pirates, Sheeta is recaptured by the military.

Sheeta turns out to be a member of the Laputan royal family, and her gem is the secret to finding the floating city.1 She’s the captive of Muska, an ambiguous figure who does not seem to answer to anybody, not even the military official who seems to be the official head of the mission to find Laputa. Muska threatens Pazu unless Sheeta cooperates. She agrees, but while Pazu is off recruiting the pirates to their side, she idly activates th…

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In the future, the moon is a mining colony. All the colonists live and work on the dark side of the moon, where there is also a mysterious machine called “Dallos” that is a kind of local god. We are told it sucks to be a colonist because you are referred to by number and when you die your body is chemically destroyed, leaving only a ring that was implanted in your forehead. It’s not really clear that it actually sucks that much. I mean it definitely gets bad later but among Dallos’s various flaws is that it never really gets around to showing what makes living on the moon so dystopian.

Anyway, there are also rebels on the moon, led by a man named Dog. Dog kidnaps the military commander Alex Riger’s fiance, Melinda, as a bargaining chip. There’s a lot of fighting between Alex and the rebels, which involves Alex bombing Dallos in retaliation, but then Dallos a…

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In the far future, after what is clearly the aftermath of nuclear war, humans live in small cities and towns outside of the “Sea of Decay,” a forest full of toxic spores and gigantic insects, like the ohmu, which are sort of like gigantic rollypollies covered in eyes. Humanity retains some machinery from the past, like planes, but all the airships we see in this movie are so rickety it’s safe to say they aren’t building new ones. The Valley of the Wind is protected from the Sea of Decay by its winds, which the town also uses to operate windmills. Nausicaä, the princess of the Valley of the Wind, is drawn to explore the Sea of Decay, even though it’s dangerous. (Her father is bedridden and dying from the effects of accumulated exposure.)

One day a giant airship crashlands near the Valley of the Wind. There are no survivors, but one girl lives long enough to tell Nausicaä that the cargo must be burned and destroyed. Nausicaä assures the girl that everything is being bur…

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The Castle of Cagliostro might be the film of Hayao Miyazaki’s that I’ve actually watched the most. It’s just such a good time.1 I love this movie. It is one of my feel-good favorites; it’s a perfect adventure story that does everything right. There are no false notes. The tinge of romance sweetens the story but never takes over and the action stays in that specific thrilling fictional register where somehow it’s all very dangerous but you’re never really scared someone you like will get seriously hurt. And if somebody does get hurt, it can be fixed by eating a bunch of food.

We meet Lupin III, gentleman thief, and Jigen, his friend, as they pull off a heist at a casino. But the money is counterfeit, so they settle on a new heist target—the source of all this counterfeit money. They travel to the tiny country of Cagliostro (population 3500), which is the rumored source of the money. Scarcely have they arrived before they see a runaway bride being chased by a bunch of g…

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