Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art
I picked this up on a 2 for 1 deal from audible. I was running out of things that I want to listen to, so I decided why not this book? Hayao Miyazaki is a huge part of my youth starting with watching nausicca, castle of cagliostro, then laputa, totoro, porco rosso, kiki’s delivery service, and finally spirited away. I have to admit i didn’t catch the last few like ponyo and howl’s moving castle, and unlike everyone else, i tend to find princess mononoke a bit of a letdown. I guess kid me and adult me have very different tastes, but after reading this book, I find its not so much my tastes have changed, but the director have changed.
Susan J Napier is both a professor of east asian studies at Tuft’s university and also an anime and manga critic. I wish I could have had the opportunity to take classes like this when I was in college, but it just shows how the times have changed. The book reads (and sounds) like a series of essays that the authoress has written and compiled into a book. There is a very light veneer of a theme that ties it all together, but by and large, the chapters are mostly composed into a critical reading of each of the movies, with a bit of a foreword about Miyazaki’s beginnings and his retirement. Of course his retirement ages very badly because he’s got yet another movie out (The boy and the heron), but that’s hardly the fault of the authoress. =)
Whether or not you have watched each of the movie, the critique is quite good. The authoress always gives you a bit of a background of the movie, the time when it was made, where Miyazaki was in his life, and then goes into a brief summary of the movie, and then takes some highlights to stress a point or three. Its quite enjoyable to listen to a masterfully written critique even if some of the critique is a bit too glowing (it gets quite old towards the end, because it doesn’t seem like she ever criticizes him). Becuase a lot of the focus is on miyazaki and his life and his viewpoints, not enough (in my opinion) material is on joe hisaishi, which to be honest, is about 50% of why the movies are as loved (although to be fair, I’ve seen Hisaishi’s works in other directors work and I’m not as enamored, so its probably a pairing that is awesome more than one person elevating the other’s work to greatness or vice versa).
You’ll learn quite a bit about miyazaki and why so much of his works are based in Europe, why his movies have gone from happy to generally sad as the director has aged, and quite a lot of tidbits that you won’t have gotten without doing a boatload of research.
You’ll get a lot of the why’s and how’s, of why things happened in some of the works but not others, such as why the original script of destroying the bathhouse in Spirited Away did not happen. You’ll find out that Miyazaki wishes kids would play outside more instead of watching his movies, and that Chihiro was based on a 10 year old daughter of a friend whom he wishes would be more proactive in her own life.
Like I said, a ton of tidbits, and quite relevant if you enjoyed even some of Miyazaki’s films. I’ll definitely go watch Ponyo and Howl’s Moving Castle now and probably even The boy and the Heron just so I can enjoy fully both of those works with the relevant annotations that I now have in my brain. =)
Highly recommended, but only if you’ve seen at least 3 or 4 works of Miyazaki’s. And if you haven’t, I shall highly recommend those as well. =)