#then again with lady eboshi & that scene with the lepers

[dorminchu]

For the fun asks, number 1!

"What are three things you’d say shaped you into who you are?"

Reading voraciously as a kid (still do!), watching America's Most Wanted with my mom, and watching Princess Mononoke for the first time during sixth grade (it was for anime club).

[lady-of-the-spirit]

ohhh please tell me your thoughts about Princess Mononoke, i've only seen it once (fairly recently) but i'd love to hear someone's thoughts other than my mom who didnt "get" it

anon I've had this in my inbox for a couple of months now because I've been trying NOT to go on a whole rant about the movie and have something coherent to say. but I was thinking about it last night as I was answering other asks and I've got something to say.

the post that I think inspired this ask was a result of me watching Brother Bear for the first time with some friends and one of them (knowing I love the movie) called it the American Princess Mononoke which (even based on my basic knowledge of BB) I called bs on. (I loved the movie don't worry but it was wildly different from Princess Mononoke). But anyway, after the movie was over we kept talking about Princess Mononoke and we started on Lady Eboshi and I remembered that some people have different interpretations on her than I do (and the movie itself does).

The way the movie deals with morality is so interesting, especially in how it intersects with the theme of nature vs civilization. Because it could be seen as a kind of standard, "save the forests, civilization is bad and evil" lesson. And that would be valid. the plot kicks off because Lady Eboshi brought in her guns and rifles and killed one of the forest gods and Nago ended up cursing Ashitaka. the massacre led by the samurai, killing off all those villagers. Iron Town itself, destroying the entire mountain and Lady Eboshi eventually killing the Forest Spirit. It's demonstrated over and over again that humans are Shit and destroying nature. it would have been so easy portray humans and their civilizations as the villains here.

Except it's more complicated than that. Because the people who are making up Iron Town are essentially refugees from the rest of civilization, people who have been forgotten in the rest of the world - brothel girls, lepers. Lady Eboshi comes along with her warriors and her rifles, and she destroys the mountain, kills the forest and the boars, but she also creates a safe haven for the people who were at risk. she creates a society where these people can live freely and also where they don't have to live in fear of whoever is in charge. everyone respects her but also they don't fear her, the women and lepers can joke and talk freely as much as they want.

And what's more, is that Lady Eboshi is shown to not just be using them, she actually wants to help them. She wants to heal her lepers and keep their town safe, training her girls to use the rifles so they can defend themselves when they need to. I think the scene that shows this best is the scene where she introduces Ashitaka to the lepers for the first time. They walk into the building and Ashitaka - himself carrying a sickness, shown to be kind and compassionate contrasting Eboshi's ruthlessness - is immediately on guard when he sees the lepers inside, while Eboshi walks straight inside and interacts with them without a care in the world, and apologizes for working them so hard and gives them wine. She cares about these people and she wants to give them a cure, and failing that, then a place where they can live their lives safely. Even the ones who can't help - Osa, the one with the "life is suffering, but you still find reasons to keep living" speech, is shown to be very sick and resting, and when he speaks it's treated as a surprise - are treated kindly, they aren't kicked out because they can't do anything for her.

And this still doesn't change the fact that she and her civilization is destroying the land, but it does change the tone. She's not doing it for no real reason, or simply for power. She's creating a safe haven for people ignored or downtrodden by society. She kills the forest spirit, she destroys the forest - even if she encourages a path with no loss of (human) life, she intends to destroy it slowly and surely - she leads to Ashitaka being cursed and could have lead to who knows how many other demons being born. She stands for civilization itself and what happens when it expands without concern for nature.

But she also creates this moral conundrum of what you do in a situation where you and the people who follow you - who you care about - don't have anywhere else to go and live freely. And it brings up the question of what things you're willing to do to get you and your people that safety. And I love the complexity of the situation because it turns the movie into more than just man vs nature. I mean, it still is, but it becomes so much more complicated in how we solve the problem. And the answer isn't one or the other, it has to be both.

(I have a concern that people are going to take this as me defending colonization or something and I just want it clear that I don't.)

[kdcomm450]

Messages from Miyazaki

What Studio Ghibli has done to spread positive messages about human relationships to the natural world around us. 

Hiroshi Yamanaka attributes Spirited Away’s massive international success to several factors, including high animation quality, family-friendly content, great promotion, and material that is for children but also conveys deeper, more serious issues. Spirited Away was so immensely successful that 1 out of 5 Japanese citizens have seen the film! While Yamanaka focus more on the idea of the “power to live” and how Studio Ghibli movies empower young girls with their frequent female protagonists, this is just one of the several messages that is present in almost every film by Miyazaki. These movies delve into themes of environmentalism, pacifism, feminism, love and family, personal transformation, and traditional values (Schellhase).

In this post, I’d like to elaborate more on the “shiny leaf culture” that Yamanaka touched upon in The Utopian Power to Live and talk more about the environmentalist messages, often in line with Shinto beliefs, contained within many of these films.

Yamanaka talks about the disconnect Miyazaki felt with Japan and its nationalism, which led him into something of an identity crisis. In fact, Miyazaki considers himself more along the lines of a Europhile, according to the recent documentary The Kingdom of Dream and Madness. However, dissonance was alleviated when he read a book called The Cultivation of Plants and the Origin of Agriculture, because this brought on an epiphany that Japanese is not as isolated when one looks to nature and forests common with other cultures. This common culture, not limited to borders, was coined by the author of the book as “the shiny-leaf culture”, and Miyazaki felt relieved of his depression and guilt when he imagined himself as part of this culture instead (Yamanaka). He was awakened to the beauty of the environment, which knows no borders or nations. 

His view of nature also aligns and is influenced by Shinto: one of the main beliefs being that everything in the universe, include non-living objects like rivers or stones, have their own spirit. Perhaps this view feels so refreshing to a Western audience because we are so used to “a Judeo-Christian tradition, in which nature is an impersonal object created by a transcendent God and given to humanity to be conquered and controlled” (Yamanaka).

I have grown up watching many of Miyazaki’s films, and almost every movie includes themes about the coexistence of humans with nature, and our mistreatment and destruction of the natural world and how humanity owes nature our respect. Often set in gorgeous natural backdrops, characters make friends with spirits of nature like the tree spirit Totoro, the river spirit Haku, wolves and boar from Princess Mononoke, or tales are even told from the perspective of these animals like shape-shifting raccoon dog “tanuki” in Pom Poko.

In My Neighbor Totoro, the father of two young girls tells them that the great tree near their house has“been around since long ago, back in the time when trees and people used to be friends.” This contains a nostalgic notion that humans and the environment are not on the same good terms they once were in the past, as humanity continues to carve out so much of nature for their own gain.

Pom Poko is one of the movies that sends the strongest message of environmentalism. In this movie, raccoon dogs with shape shifting powers try their best to frighten humans away from encroaching on their land, then expend their last ditch effort to create a gigantic visual mirage that shows what an older, less urban Japan looked like, trying to convince the humans to bring this type of world back. They fail each time to stop the development, and at the end of the movie, those who cannot shape shift perish, and the raccoons who have the ability take on human appearances to live in the city that sprang up all around them.

In the last scene, the raccoons shed their human disguises and meet again at night in their true forms to dance on the last remaining patch of green land: a manicured golf course. The protagonist and all of the main characters in this movie are non-human forest creatures, and watching the destruction of these animal’s homes from their perspective over many years is both heartbreaking and eye-opening.

Miyazaki often weaves personal experiences into his films, and it’s clear that seeing the pollution, exploitation, and disrespect of nature has affected him deeply. In Spirited Away, Chihiro helps to escort a ‘stink god’ to be cleaned up at the bathhouse, and this creature actually turns out to be the spirit of a highly polluted river. Miyazaki was inspired for this scene from a personal experience, when a river near his house was excessively polluted. They finally made an effort to clean it, where junk and objects like a bicycle were discovered and removed (GreenShinto).

Even if the whole movie doesn’t center around ideas of environmentalism, it is a recurring trope that we can see hinted at anywhere. Sophie from Howl’s Moving Castle lives above a hat shop right next to train tracks, which spews out smoke and exhaust frequently over her window.

Nausicaä navigates a “toxic jungle” of fungi and mutated plants after a nuclear fallout. What you see in this GIF aren’t snowflakes: they’re actually toxic spores, and she wears a gas mask to protect herself against them, a foreboding warning against how nature could turn against us as a result of humanity’s own bad decisions. Nausicaä has been collecting samples and experimenting on the poisonous plants, and she found that plants grown with clean soil and water are not toxic, but it was the humans who destroyed the soil to make the plants grow that way. The humans in the story fear and even hate the toxic jungle, not realizing it was actually them who led to its creation in the first place.

One of the main characteristics of the majority of the villains or antagonists in his films are that they are “exploiters”: “people who attempt to dominate nature in pursuit of political domination, and are destructive to both humanity and nature.” (Schellhase)

However, one device that is also present in many of these films is the idea of the grey area that exists between good and evil, and that maintaining a balance is often for the best. This balance is demonstrated within Princess Mononoke several times. One example would be the highly complex character and antagonist Lady Eboshi. On one hand, she rescues prostitutes and takes in lepers to run the factory-village Iron Town, but the iron production is bad for the surrounding environment and she does not care about the damage it brings to nature and the animals. She is very complex in her morals, as we can see with this tumblr thread here, titled “Lady Eboshi is Awesome”.

Nature is not shown as the perfect option either, as the wild animals are not without their own faults. Both movies do not urge for domination on either end, but rather coexistence. The environmentalist message calls for coexistence of all living things, and perhaps for humans to stop seeing themselves as the dominators and instead as equals to all things we share this world with.

Works Cited

http://www.greenshinto.com/wp/2014/12/11/miyazakis-shinto-themes/

http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/11/conservative-vision-hayao-miyazaki.html

Hiroshi Yamanaka (2008). “The Utopian “Power to Live”: The Significance of the Miyazaki Phenomenon” in Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime (pp. 237-255).