kelseyeroberts

[kelseyeroberts]

When you’re reading a paper and the authors keep citing themselves

[kelseyeroberts]

Me, trying to read academic texts:

[kelseyeroberts]

Pointless War in Howl’s Moving Castle

How Miyazaki Renegotiates Imperialist Assumptions By Kelsey Roberts When the 75th Academy Award for Best Animated Feature was declared to be Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, the room erupted into enthusiastic applause for the director and his passionate team at Studio Ghibli. However, neither Miyazaki nor any of his employees stepped forward to receive the award. In fact, his presence, or lack thereof, was quickly and conspicuously glossed over by the Award announcer, Cameron Diaz, who accepted the award on behalf of the Academy before the show continued on. That Miyazaki would miss an invitation to his first nomination, and only win, at the Academy Awards was indicative of something much more powerful than recognition for the arts. Two years prior, on September 20th, 2001, United States President George W. Bush addressed the nation after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. In his impassioned speech, Bush declared that any forces opposed to the United States and their War on Terror, were choosing to side with terrorism. With lines clearly drawn in the sand, Hayao Miyazaki stood back and said “no” to making any decision at all. In fact, he made it very clear on several occasions that he would not visit a country that was dropping bombs on another. At the time of the 75th Academy Awards and the success of his movie Spirited Away, Miyazaki remained resolutely in Japan, working on an emphatically pacifist cinematic reply to the ultimatums presented by the world’s most boisterous military presence.

English poet and novelist Diana Wynne Jones published Howl’s Moving Castle, the first novel in a series of magical children’s books, in April of 1986. The plot centers around a young woman named Sophie Hatter and her dealings with the eponymous Howl Jenkins, a womanizing wizard who travels through time and space via a magically “moving” castle. Ingary, the fictional country in which the story takes place, is full of magic and fairytales, supplying a handy backdrop for deeper questions the character’s face throughout the story. Does a character’s agency matter if fairytales are true and magic supplies near limitless power to some and not others? Sophie, believing a fairytale assumption that she has nothing to achieve other than quiet spinsterhood, resigns herself to this fate, just before being dumped headfirst into an epic romance featuring curses, witches, and kings. Howl, with the might of magic on his side and no earthly consequence to face in result of his endless agency and selfishness, realizes the impressive force of responsibility, though only when it comes to the people in his care. He willingly chooses to lessen his own agency to protect and provide for Sophie and his family. The end finds them reaching an equilibrium of agency and responsibility, of destiny and magic, to live happily in their mystical country. Unfortunately, Wynne Jones’ novel remained unawarded during the original print of the novel, and faded quietly to the shelves of children’s libraries until Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki happened to read it while visiting Strasbourg, France.

Struck by the magical environment of Ingary (no doubt flavored by his recent trip to Strasbourg) and the question of just how a magical castle would move, Miyazaki quickly had Studio Ghibli purchase rights to a feature length film. In 2001, the studio announced that it had begun production of the film with Miyazaki at the helm as director and featuring a musical score created by the equally prolific Joe Hisaishi. Entranced by Wynne Jones’ descriptions of Ingary, Miyazaki chose to return to France, this time to Alsace, to study both architecture and surrounding natural settings to use in his storyboards. The film’s castle designs, and by extension all representations of both technology and magic throughout, were heavily inspired by the French artist and novelist Albert Robida. Robida, a futurist who died in the 1920s, envisioned future technology to be integrated more fully into the everyday, rather than the notions of mad-scientists and scientific abominations that were more popular with his peers. This naturally absorbing technology is reflected in the aliveness of Miyazaki’s interpretation of the moving castle and the visual incorporation of Industrial-era technologies into the practice of Ingarian magic. After spending 3 years in production, and consisting of approximately 1400 storyboards, Howl’s Moving Castle was released to Japanese audiences on November 20th, 2004vi. The film was distributed by Toho in Japan before being dubbed into English by the Walt Disney Company for release in the United States on June 10th, 2005. Howl’s Moving Castle was nominated for Best Animated Film at the 78th Academy Awards and as of 2020, it stands as the fifth most successful film released by the country of Japan.

Methods

By choosing to create a film to critique the war practices of the United States of America, Miyazaki is likewise critiquing the ideologies that lead nations like the United States to interfere politically, economically, and militarily in other countries. These ideologies, also called hegemonic structures, work to perpetuate themselves in the minds of the privileged that enact these ideologies upon the oppressed. In an effort to define the differences between those privileged by Western ideology and those oppressed under it, Albert Memmi suggests that he doubts that an entitled citizen’s “gullibility can rest on a complete illusion.” In other words, those that privilege from Western ideologies are at some level aware of this inequality and choose to deny its existence to preserve their own benefits. While the recent actions of the United States military, including the invasion of the country of Iraq, have been analyzed and critiqued politically, there have been few direct consequences to those that directed the military. In fact, military expenditure in the United States is still the highest of any country in the world. Only by directly confronting the concept of war, without valorizing or propagandizing the actions and reactions of countries or ideologies, can violent hegemonies be broken down and effective discussion can truly begin.

The strength of these hegemonies is aided by the continuous circulation of information and media that reinforces them. Western education and Western art, including cinema, reinforce the economic, moral, political, and militaristic dominance of the Western culture. One of the only ways to actively combat these hegemonic mediascapes is to produce and analyze media from outside Western structures of thought. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam call this active combat “multiculturalism” in their book on Unthinking Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism, this continuous domination of Western ideology, “sanitizes Western history while patronizing and even demonizing the non-West.” By choosing to represent Western cultures as the only morally correct and only forward moving culture, while systematically infantilizing other cultures and ideologies as “developing,” Western education and media pick and choose exactly what histories and lessons deserve legitimacy and which do not. Hayao Miyazaki was born in Tokyo in 1941 to a father that manufactured parts for Japanese imperial fighter planes. By the time he was four years old, he had been evacuated from three different homes and had witnessed the fire-bombing of his country. As such, Miyazaki has a significant perspective about Western notions of war, having experienced both sides of an imperialist military force. Imperial Japan provided his father with a job and his family with protection, until United States militarism tore through his home, his family, and his national identity. Eurocentrism, particularly the valorization of the United States’ Pacific campaign during World War II, would not allow for Miyazaki’s unique perspective on imperialist war practices to be critically disseminated. Shohat and Stam’s call for multiculturalism as the solution opens the door for Hayao Miyazaki to provide many varied filmic representations of his unique perspective of both Japanese and United States imperialist hegemonies.

Hayao Miyazaki, in looking to discuss these significant concepts from a safely fictional distance, actively confronts both his own Japanese cultural identity, and the individual identity of the spectator. The encouragement of this feedback loop of dialogue is reminiscent to Stuart Hall’s considerations of cultural identity in his essay, Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation. Singularly important to Hall’s analysis of cinematic representation is a duality of identity that could be similarly identified as a feedback loop. First of these cultural identities is the concept of a “shared culture, a collective ‘one true self,’ hiding inside the many other...selves.” This shared culture is rooted deeply into common experiences and social codes that allow society to continue functioning with relative stability. The discovery and expression of this deepest cultural identity is attributed to powerful creative and representative force that allows marginalized peoples and ideas to express themselves outside of the more restrictive hegemonies of cultural identity. The second definition of cultural identity conversely involves strong points of difference and individuality present in each person, which as previously noted, are entirely at the mercy of hegemonic structures looking to reinforce their own supremacy. Hall calls this second definition a “becoming” of identity, that is continuously redefined and negotiated in relation to both recent history and present considerations. Miyazaki, choosing to confront both definitions of cultural identity with his cinema, presents his audiences with the tools to renegotiate their own cultural identities and preconceived notions.

One of the most intense differences between Diana Wynne Jones’ original novel and the filmic adaptation of Howl’s Moving Castle is the narrative inclusion of war. The original novel talks about war only tangentially, with Ingary’s King requesting Howl’s help to find his missing war-general of a son. With impending war relegated to a sub-plot, the bulk of the story focuses on how Sophie and Howl grow closer together through prolonged disagreements and magical shenanigans. The narrative of the novel paints a distinctly Western perspective on the valorization and presumed agency of those involved with war, by choosing instead to focus on a relatively privileged wizard who can shirk responsibility in favor of womanizing and magical travel. Memmi likewise considers a colonizer to be a man of this type: “If he preferred to be blind and deaf to the operation of the whole machinery...; he is then the beneficiary of the entire enterprise.” Ignorance of the harmful constructs of war, using war as a subplot as though there are not direct consequences to war, makes the original plot compliant with hegemonic constructs. Conversely, Hayao Miyazaki’s adaptation of Howl’s Moving Castle drags the war to the forefront of the narrative. Fear of war and death is the motivation for Howl’s selfishness, and the motivation for him to gain responsibility for the safety of Sophie and his country. By bringing war to the forefront of a children’s narrative about assuming responsibility for power and the abuses of those powers, Miyazaki creates an environment to confront the complex duality of his own cultural identity as a Japanese man, and to confront the similar injustices he saw in the United States occupation of Iraq.

Analysis

Hayao Miyazaki is a master of visual shorthand; every shot does as much heavy lifting as possible to assist the audience towards personal connections. From the first second Sophie’s hometown, a village in Ingary, appears on screen the audience is bombarded with militaristic propaganda, including an ever-present national flag. Featuring unfamiliar and highly visible strips of pink and yellow, hardly a shot of Ingarian civilization is shown without one or many Ingarian flags hidden in plain sight. Miyazaki elevates this level of nationalism to uncomfortable levels early on, highlighting his own experiences with imperialism. Soon after we meet Sophie, we witness her pass by a highly detailed grand parade of troops and war tanks.  A crowd of civilians cheers the soldiers’ uniforms and perfectly timed goose-stepping, waving Ingarian flags as heavy brass trumpets play something heroic and distinctly European in style. Throughout the film, as the war causes casualties, Sophie overhears civilians casually discussing the lack of motives for the fighting and their superior military technology. In 2004, this kind of patriotism may have seemed familiar to the population of the United States. After the attack on the World Trade Center, Walmart sold approximately 116,000 American flags, and another 250,000 the next day. Nationalism was pouring through the streets of America, and that nationalism looked like stars and stripes. Concurrently, anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States rose by over 800%, and the Patriot Act was implemented, removing safeguards against government surveillance and seizure. Shocked beyond reason, United States citizens overlooked the stripping of their own rights under the guise of national security and patriotism.

While it is quite clear that Miyazaki recognizes the visual affect that is attached to military performance, he does not hide his distaste for the valorization of war. Everything outside of the Castle seems to be focused exclusively on Ingarian nationalism and wartime propaganda, and yet inside there is a distinct absence of hegemonic structures of any sort. When Sophie first enters the Howl’s abode, she immediately learns several seemly disconcerting things; Howl is a terrible housekeeper, and a sarcastic fire demon pilots the whole Castle. A small child named Markl is left alone to watch Howl’s business aliases while the wizard disappears for days on end. Within a few scenes, Sophie’s previously “predetermined” constructs of home, trust, and family are broken almost beyond repair. Two of these hegemonies just happen to be civic duty and citizenship. Howl elects to keep the Castle moving through the untamed Wastes of Ingary, far from military occupation and government control. Rather than the lawless and desolate wasteland that Sophie first believes, the Wastes prove to be glorious mountainsides and lush green lands, reminiscent of Miyazaki’s travels to France. Though extremely capable of leaving his country entirely, Howl chooses to remain in the countryside of Ingary, removing any reminders of the violent constructs which he does not feel represent the natural beauty of his home. In this way, Miyazaki contrasts two drastically different forms of nationalism. One is focused on the outward enforcing of hegemonic constructs on other countries, and the other is focused on the inward appreciation of the natural resources and beauty that a country can provide its citizens.

Unfortunately, Howl is not able to fully escape his own moral imperative to help people. Though he hides from the draft notice issued by the King of Ingary, Howl travels to the frontline to protect civilian homes from the carnage of battle. Scenes showcasing indiscriminate battleships dropping firebombs punctuate Howl’s interactions with his family, providing a clear connection to his reason for fighting. While in battle he confronts several less powerful wizards that are mutated with magic. Later, Howl comments sadly that these wizards readily turned themselves into monsters under the King’s orders, and as such will never regain their humanity. Throughout the film it is implied that Howl’s dedication to Sophie and to his own personal freedom are the only things that prevent the loss of his own fragile humanity. The emotional and physical cost of war is not limited to either side of the confrontation. All individuals that take part in the structures of violence are affected. Clear connections between these wizards and the soldiers that fought in the War on Terror are made, focusing on their difficulty to return to civilian life and their struggles with the atrocities that they commit. A database called the Iraq Body Count has been working diligently to try to document the countless Iraqi civilians that were killed by the United States invasion. Unfortunately, they are only able to provide a rough estimate of between 185,497 – 208,547 deaths from violence. Miyazaki’s urge for victims of war and soldiers to lean on family and nation while under these stressors, while a bit simple in concept, reflects a lack of compassion shown in Western media for both the civilians of foreign nations and soldiers who do not return proud of their accomplishments in war.

Comparisons could be drawn between Howl’s active pacifism and general Japanese cultural identity post-World War II. After the total annihilation of two of their cities by nuclear bomb, and the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians by firebombing, the Japanese Imperial Government surrendered to the United States on August 15th, 1945. After their country brutalized in the name of imperialism, it was likewise brutalized in the name of Western democracy. Soon after, a constitution was put into place to usher in new political constructs, one of which being the intensely debated Article 9. Within this article is the assertion that the Japanese government will never again have a standing military presence, or more specifically: “Aspiring sincerely to an international peace...the Japanese forever renounce war as a sovereign of the nation.” In choosing to directly confront the ideological structures that preclude war as a part of politics, Japan opens larger conversations about pacifism that Miyazaki makes great narrative use of. Outwardly expressing his opposition to amending Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, Miyazaki emphatically declared that “Japan is not a country where a war can be fought.” Unlike the boisterous, illogical military might continuously pushed into the audiences’ face, Howl exists as a direct example of the Japanese ideal of active pacifism, to actively choose peace in the face of injustice and violence.

The simplest way to illustrate Miyazaki’s own difficult reckoning with his unique cultural identity is in comparing the depiction of technology in the beginning and ending sequences of the film. Howl’s Moving Castle begins as many Miyazaki films do, with an introduction to a main character. However, the main character portrayed in this first shot is neither Sophie Hatter nor Howl Jenkins, but the infamous Moving Castle, stalking its way through a heavy fog in the Ingarian countryside. Direct attention is paid to the lifelike mechanics of the Castle’s movement, the creaking and groaning of enormous gears and bellows of its anthropomorphic “face,” as four spindly chicken legs hold up the incomprehensible weight of the underbelly and spike-like towers. Each mechanical piece, though entirely disparate and featuring a slap-dash sort of connectivity, works together within the whole of the Castle to provide an astounding feat of both the technology and magic that permeate the narrative’s universe. In these first shots, the audience is introduced to the “human technology” favored by Albert Robida; a living, breathing home for the other protagonists, something that audiences can connect to. Technology of this sort is the technology that Miyazaki experienced as a child; watching his father create flying machines that he envisioned as vehicles to adventure. Quickly, as in life, the peace of these beginning shots faces a violent juxtaposition, and in the next sequence spectators watch as the Castle hefts its girth behind a cloud of fog, just as two small military planes bearing Ingary flags pass by.

The final shots of Howl’s Moving Castle, after Sophie has successfully restored Howl’s heart and the family has both actively and passively saved their country from catastrophic destruction, feature a reversal of the initial sequence. Through a thick blanket of thunderhead clouds, a hole reveals enormous and anonymous battleships flying in formation. Their muted sounds and shiny seamless technology, seen throughout the film in direct contrast to the hodge-podge hominess of the Castle, is rendered soulless. None of the life of the Castle is present in the machines of war. For Miyazaki, technology used for the object of violence and death cannot be alive. Instead, the technology is stripped of all liveness, just as the wizards who submit to Madam Sulliman lose their humanity. With the war ended and yet not won, these violent machines are castrated, and their purpose has ended. They disappear, covered by the blanket of darkness that their purpose has covered them in. Then, from behind a curling tuft of cloud emerges the newly restored Castle, into an endless bright blue sky. This third iteration of the Castle, featuring sweeping wings, is no longer tied to the ground. Instead, Howl and Sophie stand romantically at the helm, watching as Calcifer pilots their home towards a brilliantly sunny horizon.xxv While this ending may seem saccharine in comparison to the more realistic ambiguity of the outcomes of war, Miyazaki seems to favor the notion that those who fight for the safety of their country deserve a measure of peace at the end of their service. Whether or not Miyazaki thinks that measure of peace should be afforded to those in control of these soldiers is decidedly less certain.

Conclusion

Hayao Miyazaki’s distinctive personal history, coupled with his complex cultural identity as a Japanese citizen, makes him uniquely determined to speak on matters of pacifism and war. As an animated film director, his medium allows him a certain distance from distinct hegemonic structures and allow him to confront difficult concepts in a gentler fashion. This is not to say that Miyazaki is in any way ambiguous about his intentions. As depicted in Howl’s Moving Castle, Miyazaki uses visual storytelling to paint the country of Ingary to be a fictional mirror of the nationalism present in the United States in the early 2000s. Ingarian flags hang from every building outside of Howl’s sheltered Castle, reminiscent of the patriotic fervor that gripped the citizens of the United States at the beginning of the War on Terror.  Howl himself provides the audience with a character that reflects Miyazaki’s own distaste for this sort of brute nationalism, instead choosing to appreciate his country in more passive, classically romantic ways. Soldiers and wizards that brazenly choose to fight for their King are treated with compassion and pity, lamenting their lost humanity, while Howl’s dedication to his family and his country are the only thing that prevent him from meeting a similar fate. With design cues and philosophy borrowed from Albert Robida, Miyazaki crafts clever shorthand to portray technology in both militaristic and humanistic ways, highlighting the liveness and the hominess of humanist technology, and shunning the militaristic technology as sleek but soulless. Doing so provides Miyazaki an outlet to confront his own disconcerting childhood, having spent his youth connecting the technology of adventure to the machines of imperialism. Though his opinions on war, pacifism, and the United States brand of nationalism are overt in this film, Miyazaki as a single director is unable to completely dismantle the hegemonic structures that he critiques. However, Howl’s Moving Castle does provide a thoughtful and methodical meditation, allowing for the beginning of discussions about the ideologies that power the machine of war. Bibliography

Cavallaro, Dani. Hayao Miyazakis World Picture. McFarland & Co., 2015. 

Cavallaro, Dani. The Animé Art of Hayao Miyazaki. McFarland & Co., 2006.

Hall, Stuart. “CULTURAL IDENTITY AND CINEMATIC REPRESENTATION.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, no. 36, 1989, pp. 68–81. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44111666. Accessed 26 Jan. 2021.

Iraq Body Count, www.iraqbodycount.org/database/.

MacCarthy, Helen. Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation ; Films, Themes, Artistry. Stone Bridge Press, 2010.

Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized: Introd.by Jean-Paul Sartre. Beacon Press, 1972. 

“Miyazaki, Hisaishi, and Their Collaboration.” Joe Hisaishi’s Soundtrack for My Neighbor Totoro, 2020, doi:10.5040/9781501345159.0008. 

“President Bush Addresses the Nation.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 20 Sept. 2001, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/bushaddress_092001.html. 

“The United States Spends More on Defense than the Next 10 Countries Combined.” Peter G. Peterson Foundation, 15 May 2020, www.pgpf.org/blog/2020/05/the-united-states-spends-more-on-defense-than-the-next-10-countries-combined. 

Yazbek, Yara. “Miyazaki Hayao's ‘Howl's Moving Castle’: Environmental, War-Related, and Shojo Discourses.”