The Long Take: Hayao Miyazaki's War
How The Boy and the Heron tells the story of anime's wartime roots, as well as Miyazaki's own experiences.
Anime is a relentless and dynamic art form, demonstrating the most immersive that visual storytelling has come to offer. Few countries rival its passion for animation as much as Japan and as a result, it has become one of the most popular mediums worldwide, catering to anyone, regardless of their age, gender, race, sexuality or any other facet of their identity. Like most pop culture mediums, the emotional origins of anime recall the historical legacies of its creators. Whether it's hip-hop speaking to the casual struggles of African Americans or classical music owing much of its sound to Western Europe’s traditions. While some academics have argued that the form has links to the aftermath of World War II, particularly when the US launched the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, completing the emotional transformation of Japan, fewer works of anime (except for Barefoot Gen) directly touch on the seismic event. Still, the medium owes a lot to that period, particularly with post-apocalyptic works like Akira and Neon Genesis Evangelion, both of which embedded themselves in youthful anxieties of survival and devastation. And it’s not unusual to find anime’s greatest artists bringing these dreadful experiences into their artistry.
Hayao Miyazaki is perhaps one of the most influential visionaries in Japanese animation. After ten years away from filmmaking, Miyazaki returns with his newest effort The Boy and the Heron, loosely based on the novel by Genzaburo Yoshino called How Do You Live? The film follows a young boy named Mahito who moves to the countryside, after losing her mother during the Pacific War. Right next to the munitions factory that is run by his father, is a tower that leads him to a world of madness, and he is guided by a mystical grey heron. Mahito hopes that this journey could reunite with his mother, as well as find her sister Natsuko, who is being taken there.
The Boy and the Heron is on par with what you come to expect from the high standards that Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli had already established in Japanese animation. It is a visually rich and whimsical feast, bringing attention to detail in the multi-layered world-building and providing the heart that he would usually do in his cherished characters. But The Boy and the Heron is also the most personal film Miyazaki ever made. It is a semi-biographical statement harkening to Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ and Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, where the filmmaker harkens back to his cinematic legacy and focuses specifically on one thing that caused it. Mahito’s grief is perhaps enhanced by Miyazaki’s experiences of World War II in the same way that Spielberg’s interest in family-oriented films was heavily influenced by his parents’s divorce. The Boy and the Heron is Miyazaki’s simplest film about war, merely set up so that a young man can process grief after losing a loved one during a war and struggling to adjust to his new carers. The film is introduced to an air raid siren, where a hospital in Tokyo is about to be firebombed. During this raid, we see Mahito rushing to the fires that his mother is trapped in and throughout the film, we see him encounter this event in his nightmares.
War is one of the most common themes in Miyazaki’s films. Whether it’s Princess Mononoke or his previous feature The Wind Rises, Miyazaki depicts the destructiveness of humanity and its impact on the environment in a complex and prudent manner. Another film from his production company Studio Ghibli, Grave of the Fireflies, have proven to be no exception, focusing on two children struggling to survive after witnessing the bombing of Kobe that resulted in the death of their mother. In contrast to its Western peers like Disney (which has historically contributed to the US war propaganda), these films took a critical outlook on war, where its characters pursued peace enjoyed by its human and non-human characters. These films have shown to be Miyazaki’s most personal statements and have come to redefine the medium of anime.
It is no coincidence that some of the events in The Boy and the Heron are directly parallel to Miyazaki’s childhood. Born on January 4, 1941, Hayao Miyazaki was raised in an affluent family that was driven by war. His father Katsuji Miyazaki managed a munitions factory, along with his brother who ran a plane company called Miyazaki Airplane. It housed many Japanese dogfighters that would be used for World War II. Around the same time, Japanese animators produced a lot of anti-American war propaganda, which Momotaro: Sacred Sailors. As Japan’s first animated feature, Momotaro was to anime what Battleship Potemkin was to Soviet Cinema. Released in April 1945, the film was poorly timed with Japan’s declining war morale and failed to capture a children’s audience, as they evacuated from the bombings.
To flee from any possible conflict, Miyazaki’s family moved to Utsomoniya in July 1945, only for the city to be air raided by US army pilots, causing the Airplane company to be destroyed. In a documentary called The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, Hayao Miyazaki recounts how his father would rescue him after being stuck in a ditch to escape the bombings. But he grew conflicted with Katsuji profiting off from the munitions factory that he was running. A month later, the US launched the atomic bomb targeted at Hiroshima and Nagasaki resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of civilian lives.
After World War II, anime began looking outside of Japan and towards Western animation. Hayao Miyazaki’s biggest influence is Osamu Tezuka, well known for penning Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion and is considered to be the Walt Disney of Japanese animation. Tezuka took inspiration from Charles and Max Fleisher, as well as the Betty Boop cartoon, which has influenced the large pupils that every character in modern anime has embodied. Miyazaki doesn’t take inspiration from American animation (Studio Ghibli had a deeply complicated relationship with Walt Disney Studios, and Miyazaki had once expressed his disdain for their animation style), but took interest in literary authors such as J.R.R Tolkien, Lewis Carroll and Roald Dahl, reinforcing a grandiose and whimsical style that made him as an animator.
The impact of the atomic bomb has been the newly realised discussion of nuclear weapons and its impact on civilian life. One of Miyazaki’s earliest films Nausicca of the Valley of the Wind, brings overt parallels with its themes of environmentalism and war to that event. Based on his 1982 manga, Nausicca centres on the 16-year-old princess of the Valley of the Wind, a kingdom surrounded by a toxic jungle caused by Earth’s ecocide known as the Seven Years of Fire. Further conflicts between the Valley of the Wind and another kingdom called Tolmekia could lead to more environmental disasters. Like its post-apocalyptic peers, the atmosphere is relatively sparse and the creatures breeding in the jungle are delicate, harmless and crucial to human survival. It shows Nauusica as the sole protector of Earth and its creatures, especially the Ohms, but to ensure that humans can co-exist with each other. Her approach to violence with non-violence is uncompromising since much of humanity, especially the Tolmekians, is driven by vengeance over the ecocide. Miyazaki adds this justifiable layer, preventing them from being further tyrannical and sinister.
Most of civilisation’s contradictions are captured in huge historical events like war, especially with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and they represent the best and worst capabilities of humanity. War impacts many aspects of humankind and these implications are mirrored by Nausicca and the Valley of the Wind, which sees numerous conflicts as immoral, arguing that an unrestrained military is wrong by depicting the Tolkians as a threat to the creatures that breed on the land. But the film also shows that achieving a utopia can be difficult, especially when one of the ways is still committing violence.
Nausicca was considered a watermark for anime, particularly during the Golden Age of the 1980s. At the time, Japan faced an immense economic boom not seen since the end of World War II, meaning that more opulent animated works could be invested and produced, allowing Naausica’s budget to become bigger. More importantly, its environmental and pacificist layers significantly resonated when on 31 July 1995, the film was screened at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
Aviation is a regular vehicle of transportation in his films and has many various storytelling utilities. Nausicca showed how flying doesn’t have to damage the ecosystem. The act of flying plays an essential role in concrete world-building, like in Castle in the Sky, which imagines a world where eccentric flying machines connect two characters from different worlds. But it also serves the growth of its heroines, like in Kiki’s Delivery Service, where our titular character moves out of her family home to train as a witch. Kiki’s broomstick and her black cat Jiji represent her coming of age and the independence that she earned away from her family. Porco Rosso, which centres on the life of a bounty hunter with a pig’s head, prominently uses aviation as an homage to the Italian World War I manufacturers that Miyazaki idolized as a child. The film also has a clear political slant, as the bounty hunter sees the newly elected Italian Fascist Party as his new enemy, one of the few characters the animator depicts as a full-blown cartoon villain.
Miyazaki revisited aviation in The Wind Rises, which is his most direct response to World War II. It is a biopic of the aviation engineer Jiro Horikoshi, who worked for Mitsubishi and designed many reliable Japanese fighters in World War II, including the Mitsubishi A6M Zero. Despite his involvement, he was strongly opposed to the war. In a diary entry during the final year of the conflict, he wrote:
When we awoke on the morning of December 8, 1941, we found ourselves — without any foreknowledge — to be embroiled in war... Since then, the majority of us who had truly understood the awesome industrial strength of the United States never really believed that Japan would win this war. We were convinced that surely our government had in mind some diplomatic measures that would bring the conflict to a halt before the situation became catastrophic for Japan. But now, bereft of any strong government move to seek a diplomatic way out, we are being driven to doom. Japan is being destroyed. I cannot do [anything] other than blame the military hierarchy and the blind politicians in power for dragging Japan into this hellish cauldron of defeat.
If it weren’t for The Boy and the Heron, then The Wind Rises would have been the artistic sendoff for Miyazaki. It is more reflective, visually restrained and realistic, resulting in a touching portrayal of Jiro Horikoshi leading up to World War II, where his aircraft will be used for battle. The Wind Rises marks a stylistic departure for Miyazaki. His protagonist is male, rather than female. But there is no awestruck sense of magic, except for his dreams, where he imagines speaking with his aviation idol Giovanni Battista Caproni, who built planes for the Italian military during World War I, which included bombers and light transport aircraft. Simultaneously, Horikoshi faced a lot of nightmares of collapse and destruction, having experienced the Great Kanto earthquake and his nearsightedness that prevented him from flying a plane. These passions are further constrained by his wife Nahoko Satomi’s tuberculosis, who by the end, leaves him and tells him to follow his dreams, as she will be included after her death.
The Wind Rises have proven to be quite controversial. Korean internet users criticised Miyazaki for glorifying the Zero fighter that Horikoshi designed, viewing it as a symbol of Japanese militarism, built by Korean slave labour. This has surprised Miyazaki, who has been politically outspoken against militarism for most of his life. He boycotted the Academy Awards in 2003, when Spirited Away won Best Animated Feature, over the Iraq War. In 2013, Studio Ghibli criticized Japan’s then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for a proposed constitutional amendment that would revive the military’s culture which resulted in him receiving death threats from Japanese nationalists. Yet the animator took exception to the Zero as the country’s greatest achievement, defending his decision to depict it like it is as “a formidable presence.” To him, planes don’t have to kill people or make our way of living worse.
This is one of Miyazaki’s numerous contradictions, in which his personal and artistic outlooks clash. He loves nature but smokes and owns a car that contributes to the Earth’s pollution. he made films that break box office records, monetizing on wars that cause civilian and soldier casualties. Yet he often embraces it in his art. “We as humans make mistakes,” he told to the New York Times Magazine. And this is ultimately the appeal of Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, beyond any form of animation. His works aren’t power fantasies, but they clearly define good and evil. His protagonists aren’t perfect but ultimately sacrifice themselves for the greater good.
Hayao Miyazaki’s confronting depiction of war is compelling and it sets many artistic precedents for Japanese animation. Miyazaki’s animation doesn’t resemble a lot of modern-day anime (he once infamously said that anime is a mistake and shares a disdain for its most passionate fans, otherwise known as ‘otaku’). Yet after The Wind Rises, some series and movies have caught up to the animator’s sensitivities towards conflict. Attack on Titan, one of the most popular anime series released this century, is far bleaker in its outlook, yet it serves as a serious cautionary tale of an individual becoming more swept up with the worst impacts of war - death, betrayal and oppression - which shapes him into the evilest. The film In This Corner of the World, released in 2016, depicts life in Hiroshima, ten years before the atomic bomb was launched. By exploring darker territory, rather than the fanatical world that he typically depicts, The Boy and the Heron have continued the traumatic norm that Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli have set out and deduced to their basic conclusion, which is to keep moving forward.
In summary, Miyazaki contributed to a direction for anime to be introspective and the medium’s creators owe a lot to his accomplishments. Non-violence in his films is consistently depicted in a way that isn’t preachy or comes at the expense of Studio Ghibli’s artistic endeavours. His experiences of World War II were intense and traumatic, but his films, show that his experiences don’t need to remain static and misanthropic. For Miyazaki, it is important to move forward from the inevitable and blunt errors of humanity and onto a better world.