Now that you listened to me gush for almost an hour now, you’ve probably decided that I must think that manga and anime are the greatest new literary form to come along since the invention of blank verse. Wrong. Much of manga and anime are still made up of eye candy, full of formulaic and cliched storylines, presenting stereotypical characters and unimaginative ideas. In short, manga and anime are just as subject to Sturgeon’s Law as everything else. Have you ever heard of Sturgeon’s Law? It comes from the American science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon who was once asked what he thought of currentscience fiction. He said that 90% of it was crap, but then 90% ofeverything was crap. Not a bad rule of thumb when you stop to think about current movies, music, television, art, best selling books, etc. Of course this has led one wag to come up with the corollary that "no one can ever agree on which 10% is the good stuff".
Well, one thing that everyone in the anime and manga community, both the creators and the fans, all agree on is that the 10% of the "good stuff" includes the work of Hayao MIYAZAKI.
Miyazaki was born 1941 during the war. He was the son of the owner of a factory which made wingtips for the Japanese Zero fighters in WWII. He grew up surrounded by airplanes which explains his love of flying. Because of his family’s status and relative wealth, he grew up fairly well off and insulated during the war (something he has felt uncomfortable about later on). His mother had spinal TB and was an invalid for much of his childhood, an idea that shows up as a motif in one of his most popular films My Neighbor Totoro. As a teenager he fell in love with manga (remember, this is during the 50s as Tezuka brought about the boom in manga) and later he fell under the spell of animation after seeing some of the early movies from Toei Animation Studios. He attended Gakushuin University and graduated in 1963 with a degree in economics and political science. From there he went to work as a rank and file animator at Toei Studio doing TV shows where he met his mentor and future collaborator, Isao Takahata. He worked on a variety of projects and at different studios through the 60s and 70s on animations such as Horus: Prince of the Sun (TV) 1965; Puss in Boots (film),1968; and Flying Ghost Ship (film),1969.
In the early 70s he was the director for a popular TV series based on the Lupin III manga I mentioned earlier. Lupin follows theexploits of a charismatic international thief created by a manga artist who goes by the pen name of "Monkey Punch". After that he and Takahata worked together again for two years on the World Masterpiece Theater series. World Masterpiece Theater was a tradition on Japanese TV for over 30 years. Each year they would take a classic of children’s literature from outside of Japan and then make a series of 30 half-hour episodes based on it. To give you an idea of the power of this series, the most popular season of all of them was based on Anne of Green Gables. Today over half the visitors to the "Anne" museum in Nova Scotia Canada are Japanese tourists who love the TV series, and most of whom have never read the book. The seasons Miyazaki worked on the show were Heidi (Swiss) in 1974, Dog of Flanders (Flemish) in 1975, 3000 Miles in Search of Mother (Italian) in 1976, Rascal the Raccoon (US) in 1977and Anne of Green Gables (Canadian) in 1979. During this period he was asked by NHK (the Japanese equivalent of PBS) to develop a year long series based on the American book The Incredible Tide by Alexander Key. (Key is best known here in the US for some of his other children’s fantasy books: The Forgotten Door and Escape toWitch Mountain.) Miyazaki greatly expanded and changed Key’s novel about a small group of survivors after a global war and ecological catastrophe and created Future Boy Conan which ran in 1978. Conan remains one of the all time favorite anime TV series in Japan and was rebroadcast widely throughout the world. (For some reason it was a tremendous hit in Saudi Arabia. And of course, it has never been broadcast in the US.) With his success in TV anime, Miyazaki was hired to direct a Lupin movie. (Lupin films are like James Bond or Star Trek movies here, there are a whole series of them, but they vary wildly in quality depending on the story and the director for each one.) In 1979 Lupin III:: The Castle of Cagliostro appeared in the theaters. While it won Miyazaki more fans and was hailed as the best of the Lupin films, Cagliostro was not a financial success, so he decided it was time to do something else.
He turned back to his first love of manga and was approached by the monthly animation magazine Animage and asked if he would be interested in doing a monthly manga serial for them. He agreed to do so on the one condition that the manga not be turned into an anime. This time he wanted to be free to do the manga story he wanted to do without the fear that he would have to change the story to make it more commercial for an anime series. He also didn’t expect it to run for more than a year or two, so he had no idea how the story would end when he started. So in the February 1982 issue of Animage appeared the first installment of the manga of Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind.
You notice right away that the style here is quite a bit more detailed than most of the other manga I have shown you already. Miyazaki takes great care to make not just a story, but a complex and detailed background to show the world that Nausicaa and her companions live in. The truly amazing thing here is that Miyazaki drew all of it himself. Most manga artists in Japan have several assistants who do most of the real artwork. As far as anyone has been able to determine, not once did Miyazaki use an assistant in any of the Nausicaa manga. I have here an issue of Animage from August 1984 which contains an installment of Nausicaa. As you can see, this is a oversized magazine about 11-3/4 by 8-1/4 inches. Those of you who have been complaining of eyestrain trying to read the small print in your books can now see how large the it was supposed to be in the first place. In Japan they did publish a full sized edition of the complete Nausicaa manga; I hope that someday they’ll do the same for the English edition. The other thing to realize here is that while you get the whole story (or at least the first quarter of it) in a single volume here, the readers in Japan had to put up with only about 16-20 pages coming out once a month.
The manga was more successful than anyone dreamed. After only 8 monthly installments, the publisher of Animage came to him and asked him if he would reconsider and make a film version. Eventually he agreed, but only if he could be the director and Takahata would be the producer. They contracted with a company called Topcraft Studio to do the animation with Miyazaki as the director. (A side note: although Topcraft was a Japanese animation studio, Nausicaa was the first film they did which was shown in Japan. Prior to this all their work had been for the US animation company Rankin-Bass and the films were released only in the US and Europe . The best known of the Topcraft animations here in the US are The Hobbit and The Last Unicorn.)
But if he was going to do a movie, he wasn’t going to be able to continue the manga series. Here is a cartoon that he drew and which ran in Animage announcing the halt in the manga.
You read the cartoon from right down to the bottom, then back to the upper left, and then down again. (The translations here are by my friend Ryoko Toyama and are, by her own admission, "quick and dirty" just to give you the general ideas, not the word for word meaning.) So the first panel is the one at the upper right: It is during the "pastyear" and Miyazaki is thinking "I want to make a film." And there are voices all around him saying things like "Miyazaki has been talking a lot, but not making any anime." "Aren’t you going to make any more anime?" "It’s time for the new generation of animators." "Haven’t you finished that mangayet?"
Next image down and Miyazaki is very hurt by these comments while someone off panel (presumably his wife) says: "Your stomach is getting fatter these days."
Bottom right panel shows Miyazaki meeting with the financial backers of Tokuma Publishing (the folks who bankroll Animage and Studio Ghibli) and he’s saying: "You mean, you’ve decided to invest themoney [in his film]?!?" "Well, but....you mean....I have to do the manga and the movie at the same time?"
Upper left, Miyazaki is smoking and worrying as he recalls all the things he had said in the past: "I’m not writing Nausicaa to make it into a movie!" "Manga and animation are two differentthings!" Meanwhile his friends are behind him saying things like:"Stopping the manga is irresponsible, though I don’t caresince I’m not reading it " "It’s too early, we don’teven know what the story is about yet." Meanwhile he’sworried about the lack of the "three S-es": staff, stamina and schedule.
Finally in the bottom left panel he is bowing very deeply to the reader and apologizing: "I’m sorry. It is totally impossible for me todo the manga and the anime at the same time. Please let me take timeoff from the manga." And you see the bottle, apple core and paperwad that readers have thrown at him.
Here is a diagram that I’ve put together showing the history of Miyazaki’s career from 1982 when he started the Nausicaamanga through this year (1999). I’ll go through the main points as we go along, but the first thing I want you to notice is the black bars. These show the times the Nausicaa manga was being published in between film projects. In all it took him almost thirteen years of off and on publication to finally finish the entire saga! Not that the readers were always sympathetic to these breaks. When he stopped to do the Nausicaa film he left the readers with a cliffhanger where Nausicaa had just been swallowed by one of the large insects. Part way through the making of the film Animage ran another cartoon that Miyazaki drew.
You see in the upper left a giant insect with Nausicaa lying in its mouth. The bug is asking "How long do I have to stay like this? My jaw is getting tired." and a bored Nausicaa replies "Go ask theauthor..."
In the upper right panel you see Miyazaki is working feverishly (smoking four cigarettes) and thinking things like: "storyboard", "Give me more time", "Limit of my talent".
In the panel below that, a staff member comes and dumps all the letters from the readers of Animage on top of him while saying "Letters to Animage."
In the middle you see Miyazaki (with the cartoon knives sticking out of his head) reading the letters which say: "Irresponsible!","I won’t go see the movie!" "Don’t stop in the middle[of the manga]!", "Stop making the movie!","Die!"
In the bottom left Miyazaki has gone crazy screaming "I will die!" "Kill me!", "Storyboards!" "Stop themanga!". Meanwhile in the background the Animage staffer looks at the reader and says "He has gone mad. Please don’t bother him for a while."
Now of course as you’ve noticed, your book ends with the words" to be continued". That’s because you’ve only got the first quarter of the saga, if you want to know how it ends, you’re going to have to shell out another $60 to get the other three books in the series. But what you have in Perfect Collection 1 here was most of what Miyazaki had done at the time he stopped to make the film. He wanted to make the film cover most of the same story, but since itwas a film, he couldn’t just leave it hanging like this, so he had to have the story come to a conclusion. So next week you will see how he redid the story to "force" an ending.
The best way to introduce Miyazaki to you is to show you some of his works, so I have assembled a chronological set of clips from his movies. We’ll start with a clip from the film Nausicaa and, if you’ve already read the manga, you’ll recognize this scene as one that isalmost straight out of the manga.
(show clip of Nausicaa from where she takes off, Yupa comes running out ofthe forest chased by the Ohmu and Nausicaa drops the flares to stop the Ohmu)
The film of Nausicaa opened in theaters in Japan in March 1984. It wasn’t a megahit, but it won the hearts of the fans in Japan and made enough money that Miyazaki and Takahata could start their ownstudio. With financial backing from Tokuma and with many of the key personnel from Topcraft Studios who followed them they formed Studio Ghibli. Ghibli is an Italian word that comes from Arabic. In Arabic it means "in the direction of Mecca (east)" while in Italian it has come to mean ‘fresh wind from the desert (eastward)". Miyazaki and Takahata chose the name because they wanted the films from their studio to be a breath of fresh air in the anime industry.
The first official Studio Ghibli film was Castle in the Sky: Laputa released in 1986. Miyazaki recycled some of the elements from his TV series Future Boy Conan and created a tale of a young boy and girl who are searching for a magical floating castle in the sky: Laputa. The name and idea of the floating castle are taken from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travel, but Miyazaki’s story is set in an alternative early 20th century Europe where there are giant flying zeppelins and small "flaptors",tiny airplanes which fly by flapping their wings. The sequence I’m about to show you is where Sheeta, the young girl, has been captured by the evil government agents and held hostage in a castle. The young boy, Pazu, with the help of Mama Dola and her air pirate gang come to the rescue in their flaptors.
(show sequence from where Dola is knocked out, through rescue of Sheeta, stopping as the flaptor fly off releasing a smoke screen.)
Although Miyazaki’s films are just now starting to gain mainstream notice here in the US, professional animators here have known about him and his work for years, and quite a number of them have borrowed elements, scenes and ideas from his animations. Probably the best known of his admirers here in the US is John Lasseter, the writer and director of Toy Story and A Bug’s Life. Lasseter has said repeatedly that whenever he and the animators at Pixar got stuck as they were developing Toy Story, they would go pull out their copies of Miyazaki’s films and the other Ghibli movies and watch parts ofthem to get inspiration. If the rescue scene you just watched looked vaguely familiar to you, then you probably saw A Bug’s Life. The scene in A Bug’s Life where Flik rescues Princess Dot by hanging off the back of a flying bug was done as a homage to Miyazaki and this scene.
You’ve probably noticed a common theme here: flight. As I mentioned, Miyazaki’s father ran an aircraft parts factory and he grew up with airplanes around him. This led to a life long love and fascination with flying and it shows up in some form in all of his films. Forthat reason, most of the clips I have selected here come from the flying sequences of his films.
Miyazaki’s next film was My Neighbor Totoro (1988), a gentle fantasy set in the Japanese countryside in the early 1950s about two young girls who discover tree spirits called Totoros. This film was dubbed into English and released commercially here back in 1994, so you’ll notice this is the only clip tonight that is in English. Here you’ll see the two girls go flying with the Totoros in what may or may not be a dream sequence.
(show clip from the girls jumping on Totoro to where they are sitting on the tree branch playing the ocarinas)
Looks like fun, doesn’t it? Who wouldn’t want to go flying with Totoro? I mentioned that a few of Miyazaki’s films were available here in the US, but it’s been an uneven history. The first of his films to be released over here was Nausicaa in 1985. However the US company, New World Pictures, decided that two hours was too long for an nimated feature, and American kids only wanted a straight action adventure story. So they cut about 30 minutes from the movie, rewrote the dialog to change the story so it emphasized the action aspects and released it on video under the horrible title Warriors of theWind. Just looking at the cover art shows you how bad a travesty this was.
Ironically, Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli had no idea what had happened to their film until over a year later when one of the US translators ofthe manga version of Nausicaa asked them what they thought aboutit. After that debacle Miyazaki put strict limits on the oversea sales of his films: no cuts, no changes in dialog, no compromises. Several film companies negotiated getting the US rights, and Fox Home Video was allowed to release a previously done and Ghibli-approved English dub of Totoro on home video in 1994, (the one I just showed the clip from). Despite an anemic ad campaign, the video sold over half a million copies and is still available today. But Ghibli films are box office hits in Japan and Ghibli wanted a more serious distributor here in the US. And in 1996, they got one: Disney. Yes, the Mouse House bought the worldwide (outside of Asia) rights to dub and distribute all of Miyazaki and Ghibli’s films and made the unprecedented agreement to let Miyazaki and Ghibli have final say in how they dub them.
And the first of the Disney-dubbed Miyazaki films came out last fall was Kiki’s Delivery Service. When Kiki premiered in Japan in 1989, it was the biggest box office hit that year and the first blockbuster hit for Ghibli. Usually the biggest hit movies in Japan each year are blockbusters imported from the US, but in 1989 Kiki even beat out all the US movies released in Japan that year. Kiki tells the story of a young 13-year-old witch who must live on her own in anew town for a year in order to become a full-fledged witch. Her only magical ability is flying, and she’s not all that good at that. But she sets up a delivery service in her new town and then starts on the harder job of making the new city her home. The clip I’m going to show is where Kiki first flies into the town of Colico and decides thisis the new city for her. Miyazaki says that Kiki takes place ina fantasy Europe where World War II never occurred, so the city is a strange mixture of Italian and Scandinavian cities along with parts of San Francisco thrown in for good measure.
(show clip where Kiki leaves train, flies over the bay, stop just before she reaches the clock tower)
For the US dub version they used the voices of Kristin Durst for Kiki and Phil Hartman for Jiji, her black cat. Tragically, this was the last role that Hartmann performed, he was killed by his wife shortly after he had finished recording Jiji. Because of this, they dedicated the English release of the film to his memory.
As you can see on the timeline chart above, I’m skipping some of the Ghibli films. The way Miyazaki and Takahata worked was that they alternated doing movies; one would write and direct a film while the other one would serve as the producer for that film. So I’m not showing you the Takahata films that Miyazaki produced. Takahata’s films tend to bemore serious or satirical in comparison to Miyazaki’s. At the same time they released Miyazaki’s Totoro, they also released (on a double bill in the Japanese theaters!) Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies, a tragic film about two orphan children starving to death in the final days of World War II. Despite the subject matter, this is a film I highly reccomend, one that is often referred to as the Schindler’s List of anime, a film that is so powerful and moving that it is hard to watch it more than once. Later on in 1991 Takahata did Omihide Poro Poro (Only Yesterday) about a young office worker who had grown up in Tokyo but had always dreamed of living in the country. She goes off for a holiday in the country and discovers herself through her experiences there and through flashbacks to her fifth grade childhood. In 1994 Takahata did a Pom Poko, a satire about a group of raccoons who declare war on humans when a Tokyo suburban development threatens to bulldoze their forest. (A friend of mine always refers to this film as "the samurai raccoons movie".) This was the Japanese submission for the best foreign language film in 1995, but wasn’t chosen as one of the final five. This coming summer the latest Ghibli film will be another Takahata film. My Neighbors the Yamadas will be a comic spoof on the typical suburban Japanese family.
In 1992 Miyazaki released Porco Rosso (a.k.a. The Crimson Pig) set in the late 1920s or early 1930s Adriatic Sea about a formerItalian World War I flying ace who is working as bounty hunter fighting air pirates. The only fantasy element is that Marco (the pilot) happens to be a pig. The movie never really explains this, it’s just that Marco was so disgusted with humanity after the war that he decided to becomea pig. Hey, some people change religions, he decided to change species. It’s a fairy tale, so you don’t ask why. The story is about how Marco, who has lost his idealism finds in his middle age there are still things worth fighting for. In the sequence I’m about to show you, Marco’s seaplane has been destroyed and he has taken itto his friend in Milan who is a mechanic to repair it. Since this is Fascist Italy, Marco is wanted by the Italian authorities and when he leaves, he has to sneak out in the early morning and take off from the canals in Milan. Here’s you’ll see that he’s taking as a co-pilot his friend’s granddaughter, Fio, who is a mechanic and airplane designer. Again, you see a major theme of Miyazaki, he has strong, assertive young female in all of his movies. In fact, Porco is the only Miyazaki film since Lupine where the strong, assertive young female is not the lead character, but only the supporting character.
(show clip of Porco flying off from the hanger till they are flying into the sunrise)
And again, Porco was the number one box office hit of 1992 in Japan, grossing more money than even Disney’s Beauty and the Beast which was also released there that year.
In 1995 Ghibli released its first film directed by someone other than Miyazaki or Takahata. Whisper of the Heart was directed by Yoshifumi KONDO, one of the younger animators being groomed to take over as one of the directors at Ghibli after Miyazaki and Takahata retire. Sadly, Kondo died of an aneurysm three years later at the young age of 47. Miyazaki served as the scriptwriter for Whisper (based on a shojo manga series) and did direct a single short fantasy segment in the middle of the movie, so that’s the part I’m going to show you here. The film is about a 14 year old girl named Suzuki who dreams of being a writer someday, but doesn’t know what to write about. In this sequence she has just talked to the grandfather of a boy she has met. The grandfather owns a carved figurine of a cat in a top hat and coat that he got in Germany before the war and she wants to write a story about the cat. This is a fantasy sequence where the cat comes to life and gives her encouragement to write her story.
(flying sequence)
Okay, this is probably a good point to take our break. When we come backI’ll tell you about Miyazaki’s latest film.
(break)
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