Nostalgia is a powerful elixir. I suppose I could say that it fulfills a need we all have to recapture a moment in our past to which we attribute a magnified significance, a coherence that would seem to escape us in our present which is filled with so many challenges. It is hindsight that is filtered through desire, and we fix on these moments precisely because they belong to the past, because they are wafting away like the pollen of a wildflower, scattered by the cool breezes of time. Were things ever the way we imagined them to have been? Of course not, we change and romanticize these episode in our lives, and no two people can come to an agreement about what they both experienced, but in this act of fiction we render them in a more beautiful light, one that intoxicates us.
Such is the case with the film From up on Poppy Hill, by the father and son team of Goro and Hayao
Miyazaki. The father is well-known for his many animé films, and is a master of
the genre. Working with Ghibli studios, he has produced films that frequently
evoke a sense of innocence, many times with an element of sentimentality, but
also, with an understanding for the hidden psychic energies that are always at
play and that are characterized by our an adult sensibility. We aren’t talking
about the energies of youth, the exuberance of the everyday, but instead, of
the sense of loss what we as adults feel, and the conflicts that we have come
to understand are intractable and are indicative of a more pervasive state of
affairs. These films speak to us because they reflect the disappointment that
we adults feel with the sense of stories that lack the sense of novelty, we who
work chained in dreary cubicles or penned up in classrooms or by the relentless
burden of what has become routine, living lives of incredible drudgery. Did we
ever think we would end up this way? These Miyazaki films thus respond to a
very real adult sensibility, a need we feel to recapture a sense that we
associate with our childhoods, leaving aside all the other unpleasant aspects.
We yearn for novelty, for first discoveries, for faraway places and open
landscapes, for seas and cloudscapes and protagonists who fly through the air
and who speak to magical creatures. We yearn for an age of open possibilities.
I have enjoyed these films produced by Studio Ghibli throughout
the years, although I have to admit that I am a relative newcomer. I first
heard about Miyazaki when his film Spirited
Away was up for consideration for an Academy Award a few years ago. I had
seen animé films before, and had thought that they were adept and visually
enchanting films, known for their own formulas. The protagonists who always
have big and round Caucasian eyes, and are always sleek and young, and who live
in impossibly antiseptic landscapes, and who seem so innocent and earnest it
would burst their hearts if not for the fact that this genre also reflects
understated sexual energies that seem somewhat prurient, like the short dresses
and the long legs of a Sailor Moon. Many of these animé films, after all, come
from long-standing manga comic books that are omnipresent in Japan, and are
required reading by old and young alike.
But the film Spirited
Away convinced me that I was viewing the work of a master story-teller, one
who was able furthermore to incorporate a commentary on social as well as moral
issues. His work reminded me of a fairy-tale but with a modern edge, without
the roughness of a Grimm fairytale and the exotic tortures that are experienced
by characters, but instead, with an elegiac note that was furthermore enhanced
with visual elements that had a magical and sweeping note. It is like a symphony
that can carry one away, an element of grandeur.
Goro is the son, and as such, I understand he has not always
met with the approval of his father. The son, for example, didn’t have the
support of Hayao when he undertook to adapt Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic A Wizard of Earth Sea. This is a work that
I prized very much from my childhood, and that is filled with poetic qualities.
The father, Hayao, early in his career had approached Ursula to try to obtain
her permission to film this work, but was evidently rebuffed. (Maybe Ursula had
the same prejudice that I had about animé films, something that derived from
the inexpensive cartoon series that were imported into this country in the 60s
and 70s.) The son’s version was not exactly true to the author’s original work,
and as a story, it seemed to deviate from the original story line and to
introduce episodes that seemed, quite frankly, redundant. There were too many
deviations, and a focus on action sequences and genre elements, and it lost
much of the poetic quality I had seen in the original work. Apparently, the
father had also thought that the son was not prepared to undertake this
project, and in an open letter published on the web, the author, Ursula K. Le
Guin, expressed her dissatisfaction.
This film is the product of a later stage in the career of
the son, and is collaboration with his father who, evidently, prepared the
storyboards. It benefits from the strong storytelling that characterizes the
work of Hayao Miyazaki. It is set in the port of Yokohama, in the year 1964, shortly
before the start of the pivotal Olympics which were to be held in Japan. It is
a time of reconstruction, one in which the Japanese economy has emerged from
the ravages and destruction of war, and there is an air of optimism. The
evocation of this period is tantamount to the suggestion of another golden
spring, a period in which the plenitude of summer was awaiting, and the harbor
that is visible from the hill of the title is filled with ships that are arriving
and leaving with cargo. It captures as such the pride of the Japanese people
during this episode, and of course we are treated with a vision of society that
seems, at times, much too pristine and without any obvious jarring notes. It
is, once again, the distillation of innocence and harmony, a simpler life, so
to speak.
We have a young woman, Umi Matsuzaki, who is still attending school and
yet is loaded with responsibility. She is yet another example of the typical
Miyazaki protagonist, a young adolescent mature beyond her years, earnest and
wistful, and able to project her incorruptibility in a way that enchants fellow
characters as well as the audience. I am struck, over and over, by the fact
that these characters seem so much alike. They haven’t been damaged by
bitterness, they haven’t lost hope, they aren’t the sort of children who
withdraw into the sustained effort to satisfy their appetites, nor lash out in
destructive ways against their societies. They fundamentally share in the
values of their culture, and they represent always an opportunity to preserve
and refresh what we know is evidently in danger of being corrupted by the
outside world, by war, by ecological damage, by a culture of consumerism, by
greed and unbridled appetites. In short, by the wages of adulthood.
In this case, we get back to the economy. We are in a
veritable building boom, and the hallowed hall that is a meeting ground for the
picturesque society of diverse clubs is being threatened with destruction. The school
needs a new building, and the forces of progress entail what would seem to be a
necessary destruction razing of the old and the construction of a new idol, the
building of the future. Change is in the air, and it is unsettling.
This creates one source of conflict, but as with almost all
Miyazaki films, there is also another source, one which is more internal. There
is also a story of first love, in this case, with an enterprising student
journalist. He is a brave and forthright young man, Shun Kazuma, a "prince" from a working
class background, but one who also perhaps too innocent to be believed (from what I recall, they don't even use contractions when they speak!). This
is, at the heart of it, one of the qualities I find most appealing about
Miyazaki films, that seem to be guided by fantasy. No children are truly as
well-behaved and innocent as these adolescents, nor as noble and valiant.
There are conflicts that intersect, and a complication that
comes down to a question of parentage. But throughout it all, the two
protagonists remain firm in their commitment to each other, and we have comical
misunderstandings as well as pathos as it relates to the personal wishes of
these characters. A sweet form of melodrama.
And throughout it all, we have the metaphor of messages that
are sent out, of calls that are placed and that traverse immense psychic
distances, of a need to reconnect with the past, with father figures, with a
romantic boy with a sense of duty, and with a nation’s sense of continuity.
Messages that are sent out and lost, at times, although they may be reimagined.
The emotional fragility at play in so many of these Miyazaki
films has to do with this sense of a future that is looming threateningly, that
like a tidal wave, or like time, will sweep away the past. Soon these adolescents
will have to leave the refuge of their school and of an innocent life in
Yokohama, and they will enter college and then start families and careers, and
become the salary men (and women) who will fuel the Japanese economic miracle
that will shock the world in the 80s, threatening to overtake the American
economy, before it subsides into the doldrums of stasis, to give way to the new
challenger, that posed by a rising China. And with these economic forces at
play, can sentiments remain pure and innocent?
As adults we have been thought to cherish the myth of an
innocence that has been lost. It underlies our notion of Adam and Eve, but I
would venture to say that maybe it is a myth that is present throughout human
culture, the idea that as we grow older, we lose something, and we spent the
rest of our lives looking back wishing we could regain it. This is, once again,
the power of nostalgia, and it has the ability to cleanse our memories as it
constructs a narrative about a period in our lives that was much simpler and,
yes, potent in symbolic power. It is certainly the case that in many of
Miyazaki’s paens to innocence and adolescence we don’t see the vicious bullying
and the rejection of prudence and tolerance that I remember so ruefully from my
own childhood, having been bullied so mercilessly.
This movie is enchanting, precisely because it is a fantasy. It is a
celebration of nostalgia, one that would seemingly heal the wounds of separation.
I enjoyed as well the comical touches, and the presentation of a society of
quirky adolescents who band together in clubs that don’t shoot as each other
the way our modern gang do, but that instead pursue an earnest quest to belong
to a unit and to dedicate themselves to something that will guarantee them
recognition. Would that we had all had such quirky but ultimately amiable set
of friends, and would that all our childhoods had all been characterized by a
single-minded determination and the support of nurturing adult figures and not,
as I suspect was the case with the overwhelming majority of us, an unknowable series
of experiences that were puzzling, threatening, but that did have much of the
magic that is evoked in these Miyazaki film.
OGRomero © 2014
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