Göteborg University Advanced Level 2 Department of Culture, Aesthetics and Media Spring 2007 Film Studies Advisor: Marina Dahlquist Meadow and Apocalypse Constructions of Nature in the Early Works of Miyazaki Hayao Advanced Essay (Level D) Presented in June 2007 by Viktor Eikman Abstract Title: Meadow and Apocalypse: Constructions of Nature in the Early Works of Miyazaki Hayao Author: Viktor Eikman Institution: Department of Culture, Aesthetics and Media, at Göteborg University Advisor: Marina Dahlquist Course: FV6100: Film Studies, Advanced Level 2 Presented: Spring semester 2007 Abstract: Ecological awareness and environmentalist themes are often noted in writings on Oscar- winning Japanese animation director Miyazaki Hayao, but previous attempts to examine those features in detail have typically focused on stated intentions and religious symbolism. Using close textual analysis and the theoretical framework of ecocriticism, this essay problematizes presentations of the physical environment in Miyazaki's early work from a more general environmentalist perspective. Aspects of analysis are the prominence and inflections of pollution, pastoral themes, apocalypticism, wilderness, animals and the Earth itself in Miyazaki's first three productions as a director: the often neglected TV series Conan, The Boy in Future (1978), the feature film Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro (1979), and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), which was presented by the World Wide Fund for Nature. Ideological readings are used to estimate the usefulness of Miyazaki's early work in raising awareness of real environmental problems for common agendas. Environmental themes relevant to an understanding of the director's oeuvre as a whole are also charted from their inception. The analyses reveal that while some constructions of nature in Miyazaki's early work are in line with elements of environmentalist thought, the three titles are not generally suitable for didactic use except as a source of examples for in-depth discussion of problematic cultural traditions. Table of Contents INTRODUCTION..............................................................................................................................1 Ecocriticism....................................................................................................................................4 Definitions and Practice 5 Miyazaki Hayao.............................................................................................................................8 Seriousness and Animation 9 Auteur Status and Meaning 10 ECOCRITICAL CONCEPTS.........................................................................................................13 Distortions of Influence...............................................................................................................15 Tropes and Techniques...............................................................................................................17 Wilderness and Apocalypse 19 Animals and Cuteness 21 The Gaze and Film 23 ANALYSIS 1: BACK TO THE EARTH IN CONAN..................................................................26 The Rocket Tree of Nokosarejima.............................................................................................29 Dysfunctional Industria...............................................................................................................31 Functional High Harbour...........................................................................................................32 Jimsy's Happy Pigs 34 Communion and Colonization....................................................................................................36 ANALYSIS 2: SELF-CONSCIOUSLY SWEET CAGLIOSTRO...............................................40 ANALYSIS 3: MULTIVALENT NAUSICAÄ .............................................................................42 The Ohmu.....................................................................................................................................44 Two Revelations...........................................................................................................................45 A Messiah on Wheat....................................................................................................................47 CONCLUDING DISCUSSION.......................................................................................................50 SUMMARY.......................................................................................................................................51 REFERENCES.................................................................................................................................53 TV Series and Films.....................................................................................................................53 Mirai Shounen Konan 53 Rupan Sansei: Kariosutoro no Shiro 53 Kaze no Tani no Naushika 54 Others 54 Bibliography.................................................................................................................................55 Printed Sources 55 Unprinted Sources 58 APPENDIX 1: LYRICS FROM THE OPENING OF CONAN..................................................60 APPENDIX 2: EXTENDED COMMENTARY ON THE MANGA...........................................61 Resolution.....................................................................................................................................64 Introduction Academy Awards represent the US film industry and are influential throughout the Western world. The West, a contested term, here means countries with a dominant culture descended from Western Europe, which excludes Japan. No Japanese production has ever won an Academy Award for “Best Foreign Language Film”, except in a marginal, honourary capacity. It is therefore especially significant that in 2003, Miyazaki Hayao received one for “Best Animated Feature”. He is still more popular in Japan than anywhere in the West, but Miyazaki's films are prominent examples of anime1 entering the Western mainstream. Critics and audiences quite consistently adore his work. With great success comes a degree of power. Miyazaki's films have an influence, albeit small and unquantifiable, on how his varied audiences experience the world. This is important because natural environments play a considerable part in his films, as his commentators generally note with approval.2 We do not live in an age of monolithic, unavoidable environmental apocalypse, but humankind is threatening its own quality of life through instances of environmental degradation, ranging from global climate change to rusting backyard junk. The current distribution of wealth aggravates a scarcity of nutrition and clean water in many parts of the world, leading to unnecessarily destructive forms of agriculture while the human population continues to rise. Only some diseases evolve to match our technology. Other forms of biodiversity are in rapid decline, with unpredictable effects. It may seem out of the ordinary, or even irrelevant, for a student of the humanities to foreground environmental concerns. An essay about culture does not clean up after an oil spill, but a spill has countless causes, and is bound to happen again unless the assumptions that underpin environmental degradation are exposed to consciousness and remedied. Profound cultural traits have led to many of our problems, and can be reinforced through entertainment. Film scholar David Ingram provides some fairly straight-forward examples: The unrealistic, negative depiction of great white sharks in Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) is widely thought to have contributed to increased hunting in the late 1970s, actually helping to endanger that species, whereas a similarly unrealistic, positive portrayal of dolphins in Flipper (James B. Clark, 1963) had the opposite effect, helping to secure protection for endangered animals.3 Such causal relationships between film narratives and the actions of their audiences have not been proven beyond all reasonable doubt and have their share of sceptics, much like the precise impact of human activity on global warming. I certainly 1 In this essay, anime means animation creatively controlled by Japanese people, regardless of style. 2 Examples include Nigel Andrews, “Japan's Visionary of Innocence and Apocalypse”, Financial Times, 2005-09-20; Mikaela Kindblom, “Skilda världar”, Dagens Nyheter, 2005-11-09; Ivevei Upatkoon, “Mononoke Hime”, EX: The Online World of Anime & Manga (vol. 2, no. 7): http://www.ex.org/2.7/08-exclusive_hime.html, 1997. 3 David Ingram, Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema, Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000, 88-89, 93. Viktor Eikman 1 don't feel inclined to kill great whites after watching Jaws, nor do I believe that my lack of bloodlust makes me a suitable protector of any mythically weak-minded general public. It would also be absurd to think that a film like Jaws really represents a deliberate rhetorical effort to have all sharks killed. Nonetheless, on a societal level, the effects of culture seem strong enough to merit close attention to our descriptions of nature as a means of protecting it and ourselves. There is in fact a minor branch of the humanities studying stories that are thought to illuminate and influence the way institutions and individuals deal with the environment. Ingram is just one scholar of this recently emerged “ecocriticism”. Green Screen, his book on Hollywood environmentalist cinema, stands as the most significant ecocritical study of fiction film to date. I will be using ecocriticism to examine the way nature is presented, and how its meaning is thereby constructed, in three early works by Miyazaki Hayao. Hopefully, I will contribute to a useful understanding in two contexts. The first is when activists and teachers on all levels look for films to show for reasons related to environmental concerns, whether the intent is simply to raise interest with general audiences in an undemanding fashion, or to spark debate on complicated cultural issues as part of advanced courses. This is not a novel effort, as I am preceded for instance by Mayumi Kozo and other ecological economists. They found ways to highlight the messages of their field of research: “By reading Miyazaki's films as case studies, they become material for rich discussions about the imposition of environmental costs onto groups with less access to information and means of protecting themselves.”4 With the methods of film studies I hope to show some potential pitfalls in such applications. However, this essay is merely a set of ideological interpretations, not a lesson plan. I point out what may not be apparent to the untrained eye, using the academic framework of ecocriticism. I leave it to teachers with their own priorities to decide whether a given audience is suitable, and what sort of discussion is appropriate. The other major purpose of this essay is to find themes, in order to show which constructions of nature Miyazaki's great success might generally promote among his fans, many of whom seek out titles from his younger days. Mirai Shounen Konan / Conan, The Boy in Future (Miyazaki Hayao, Nippon Animation, NHK, 1978) is one such early work which has been overlooked by film scholars, in part because it is a television series. Excerpts from it may be suitable for the didactic context outlined above, and it marks the first occurrence of many themes repeated throughout Miyazaki's oeuvre. Rupan Sansei: Kariosutoro no Shiro / Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro (Miyazaki Hayao, 1979) is generally considered Miyazaki's first theatrical feature, and although it has much in common with his recent work, it is much less complicated than Conan and will be dealt with only briefly. By contrast, Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind, Miyazaki's most 4 Mayumi Kozo, Barry D. Solomon and Jason Chang, “The Ecological and Consumption Themes of the Films of Hayao Miyazaki”, Ecological Economics, vol. 54, no. 1, 2005, 6. Viktor Eikman 2 famous manga, is intimately concerned with nature and human attitudes toward it.5 Miyazaki produced it intermittently over a period of 13 years, and it is widely regarded as his most serious and intricate work. A part of its story was altered and filmed as the more accessible Kaze no Tani no Naushika / Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Miyazaki Hayao, 1984), which is studied in this essay. Together, those three productions constitute Miyazaki's first great challenges as a director. My conclusions about them may be of use to further research on Miyazaki and on environmental themes in the field of anime more generally. The question I pose here is: What constructions of nature are prominent in Conan, Cagliostro, and Nausicaä, and how are they used? Each work will be subjected to a fairly traditional ecocritical analysis, centered on Greg Garrard's theoretical overview of study and debate about constructions of nature, such as pastoral and wilderness, layed out in Ecocriticism.6 While ecocriticism is indeed a theoretical framework for analysis, not simply a form of criticism, it has no consolidated methods of its own. David Ingram has adapted traditional humanist methods to serve the discipline, and I will generally borrow those. Ingram's brand of close textual analysis in particular will be the main instrument in this essay, with some reservations. As he says, it's a traditional method suited to “exploring the polysemic complexity of a small number of films”, and the number here is certainly too small for the type of survey he also performs. Like Ingram, I will try to refrain from championing a particular theory of environmentalism, from judging artistic value – as opposed to ideological correspondence – and from espousing the “extreme social constructionist tendencies of some poststructuralist thinking.”7 There have been other studies of environmental themes in Miyazaki's work, but among the best examples there is a strong tendency to focus either on his stated intentions, like the ecological economists mentioned above, or on narrowly delimited aspects of ideological content. Cinema- studies Ph.D. candidate Lucy Wright's “Forest Spirits, Giant Insects and World Trees”8 is a fine example of the latter tendency, but the religious traditions she studies so well are not widely known – and therefore not optimally useful – in the Western world. I look at shared ideas, hopefully providing a service to my cultural sphere, which is most responsible for environmental degradation. I do not foreground Miyazaki's biography or stated intentions, partly because questions of divided authorship undermine such an approach to Conan and Cagliostro, but also to see what the tools of 5 Miyazaki Hayao (1982-1994), Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind: Perfect Collection (transl. vols. I-II David Lewis and Toren Smith, vols. III-IV Matt Thorn), San Francisco: Viz Communications, 4 volumes, 1995-1997. 6 Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism, London: Routledge, 2004. 7 Ingram, ix-x. 8 Lucy Wright, “Forest Spirits, Giant Insects and World Trees: The Nature Vision of Hayao Miyazaki”, Journal of Religion and Popular Culture: http://www.usask.ca/relst/jrpc/art10-miyazaki-print.html (hosted at the University of Saskatchewan, originally published in vol. X), 2005. Viktor Eikman 3 ecocriticism can produce given what audiences encounter directly. A more extensive overview of methodology and existing research follows. Ecocriticism The discipline of ecocriticism is a young one, particularly in film studies, and in Sweden. A brief historical survey might be in order. Harold Fromm, a professor of English, writes that ecocriticism emerged after a varied group of relatively isolated scholars became aware of one another's shared interests in the late 1980s and early 90s.9 Fromm edited The Ecocriticism Reader,10 which has been called “a foundation document” of the consolidated movement by Sven Birkerts, one of its critics in the more traditional humanities.11 Since that consolidation, many older texts have been recognized as part of ecocriticism's scattered prehistory, however that widely accepted term for the movement is actually defined. The term is “often credited”12 to one of the older essays reprinted in the Reader, William Rueckert's “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism” from 1978. Rueckert, an experienced theorist, suggests accessible relevance rather than elegance as the basis of an experiment in literary theory, and he recommends ecology as the basis of relevance today.13 Donald Worster has charted the history of ecology at length in Nature's Economy; since about 1919, that discipline has defined itself as the science of the development of communities, studying “the social relations of the natural world”.14 Rueckert's theory, likening the arts to ecological energy, was not itself successful, and the idea of letting conventional notions of relevance into the humanities was certainly nothing new. The oppressive marginalization of women and of ethnic groups are studied on the basis of relevance. However, they are securely understood as cultural problems, and the traditional humanities are nothing if not focused on culture. Cheryll Glotfelty, the other editor of the Reader, sees literary theory in general as equating the world with the social sphere,15 which is still true. It is also true that, unlike threatened habitats, women and minorities can describe their own experiences and 9 Harold Fromm, “Preface”, The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (eds.), Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996, ix-x. 10 The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (eds.), Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. 11 Sven Birkerts, “Only God Can Make a Tree: The Joys and Sorrows of Ecocriticism”, Association for the Study of Literature & Environment: http://www.asle.umn.edu/archive/intro/birkerts.html (originally published in The Boston Book Review, no. 3.1), 1996, 2 of 7. 12 Fromm, x. 13 William Rueckert, “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism”, The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (eds.), Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996, 106- 107. 14 Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (2nd edition), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 204. 15 Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis”, The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (eds.), Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996, xix. Viktor Eikman 4 defend themselves within the field of culture. Steve Baker, who works for animal liberationism through media criticism in Picturing the Beast, accepts the possibility that claiming to represent the interests of another group, such as animals, is a rhetorical imposition which implies a proprietary interest.16 Kate Soper, a philosopher who wrote the aptly titled What Is Nature?, holds culture and nature to be indispensably antithetical.17 It is no wonder that Birkerts voices some typical concerns of purism in the humanities, arising from such complications. He suggests that ecocriticism's analytical focus on nature will actually make it unnatural, and that using works of art to discuss topics other than art, no matter how important, will lead to a loss of “integrity” and a fallacious admixture of politics.18 In the next chapter I will develop a definition of nature that does not dissolve in ecocritical applications. As for politics, gender studies are no more vulnerable to such accusations. Nature doesn't speak our languages, but human culture would be impossible without nature, since it is the source of our food and of countless other substrates of the humanities. To preserve nature is therefore to preserve the possibilities of culture, not necessarily to speak on behalf of silenced subjects. Just as surely as there is a relationship between culture and the treatment of sexes, there is one between culture and the treatment of nature in a wider sense. Natural sciences can describe the environment, but the study of culture is necessary to explain why we are damaging that environment.19 Definitions and Practice Glotfelty defines ecocriticism as “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment.”20 Lawrence Buell, an equally prominent ecocritic, more recently wrote The Future of Environmental Criticism for a series of “Manifestos”, where he defines ecocriticism as “the environmentally oriented study of literature and (less often) the arts more generally, and [...] the theories that underlie such critical practice.”21 Broad definitions aside, ecocriticism began with a heavy concentration in studies of Romantic poetry and a type of non-fiction called nature writing, including such American authors as Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, whose representations have been influential in the construction and management of wildlife preserves and parks. There was a focus on language itself, and the analyses often used a great deal of philosophy and intellectual history. Neither cinema nor television were entirely absent from the 1990s consolidation however, and motion pictures have received more attention since the turn of the century, along with a variety of other subjects in a continuing expansion of the practice. Buell ascribes part of this 16 Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity and Representation, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993, 232. 17 Kate Soper, What is Nature?: Culture, Politics and the non-Human, Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, 15-16. 18 Birkerts, 4-5 of 7. 19 Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, 27. 20 Glotfelty, xviii. 21 Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism, Oxford: Blackwell, 2005, 138. Viktor Eikman 5 change to a second wave of socially oriented younger ecocritics, but I maintain the first wave's focus on preserving nature rather than treating the more immediately social problems of environmental justice. Unnatural urban environments, science fiction and fantasy authors like J.R.R. Tolkien, computer games, intersections with gender and ethnicity, and nationalities other than the English and American have all been addressed in prominent anthologies. One such anthology includes Stacy Alaimo discussing the genre of monster movies.22 As mentioned earlier, Ingram's work on fiction film is still the most substantial of its kind, and of great importance to this essay. To sharpen the analytical focus on visual culture I will be referring briefly to Susan Sontag's classics Against Interpretation23 and On Photography.24 In his guide to the discipline, Greg Garrard describes occasionally contradictory insights on half a dozen current and traditional ecocritical topics, calling them “tropes” and “large-scale metaphors” which are thought to have political impacts, sometimes on behalf of “particular social interests.”25 In the same series of books, literary scholar Terry Gifford takes a longer look at one trope, Pastoral.26 Garrard develops Gifford's simple system for dealing with that contested term a little further, adding it to a general overview of ecocriticism with attention to its diversity of perspectives. The primary purpose is not to lay out a unifying abstract framework, but Ecocriticism is still an excellent point of departure for analysis of ideological contents. In this essay I limit myself to a relatively ordinary environmentalist perspective, in order to make myself useful to a broad range of interests. However, like most ecocritics I see flaws in mainstream environmentalism,27 so I will glance at more radical theorists and the facts they emphasize, to show some of the misconceptions relevant to popular glamorization of Miyazaki as an environmental guru. Petra Andersson's recently published doctoral dissertation in philosophy explicates and attempts to unify a set of relevant “holistic” environmentalist ideologies.28 Uncommon ecocritical points of view are certainly attractive with Miyazaki. A revolution of the working class in Conan coincides with the overthrow of a profoundly unnatural dystopia, which is one of many narrative features in his oeuvre that are likely to interest social ecologists.29 Film scholar Susan J. Napier includes a feminist perspective on Miyazaki in her prominent Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving 22 Stacy Alaimo, “Discomforting Creatures: Monstrous Natures in Recent Films”, Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace (eds.), Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001. 23 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966. 24 Susan Sontag, On Photography, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977. 25 Garrard, 7. 26 Gifford, Terry, Pastoral, London: Routledge, 1999. 27 Garrard, 18-20. 28 Petra Andersson, Humanity and Nature: Towards a Consistent Holistic Environmental Ethics, Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2007. 29 Garrard, 27-30. Viktor Eikman 6 Castle, which also discusses apocalypse in Nausicaä.30 Feminism can productively be combined with closer attention to depictions of nature,31 though I won't do it here. In feminist film studies, theories of “the gaze” are often used to illuminate constructions of gender, with the sort of complex psychoanalytical underpinnings outlined by Robert Stam and his associates in New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics.32 Like John Berger, a problematic postmodern critic who wrote About Looking,33 I will apply some gaze theory to constructions of nature instead. While it diversifies, the practice of ecocriticism is also spreading internationally. The first anthology of Swedish ecocritical essays was just published.34 Despite its growth, the discipline remains peripheral. In 1996, Glotfelty remarked that a “recent, authoritative guide to contemporary literary studies” contained no mention of an “ecological approach”.35 Ecocriticism is similarly absent from the latest Blackwell guide to major theoretical disciplines.36 An underdog mentality is therefore common, exemplified by ecocritic Michael P. Cohen who urges aspiring ecocritics to prepare for ridicule. He also comments on a widespread subtle fear that the discipline is “fuzzy”, not formal enough in its organizational aspects to sustain properly structured academic thinking.37 Time will tell. William Rueckert wrote about making “a contribution to human ecology”.38 As a subject in its own right, human ecology was only nascent at the time. It can now be defined as studying how nature becomes a part of human reality, according to an introductory anthology of Swedish human ecology.39 Similarly, Garrard defines ecocriticism at its broadest as “the study of the relationship of the human and the non-human” and as being about “the demarcation between nature and culture, its construction and reconstruction.”40 In the shared tradition of these two closely related disciplines, I will draw upon a variety of sources external to the humanities, introduced throughout this chapter and the next. One such source, Jared Diamond, won a Pulitzer Prize for his overview of why Europeans were able to subjugate others, without resort to Eurocentrism.41 He has also written about 30 Susan J. Napier, Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 31 Garrard, 23-27. 32 Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond, London: Routledge, 1992, 162-174. 33 John Berger, About Looking, London: Writers and Readers, 1980. 34 Ekokritik: Naturen i litteraturen: En antologi, Sven Lars Schulz (ed.), Uppsala: CEMUS, 2007. 35 Glotfelty, xv. See also Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism, 129-133. 36 Gregory Castle, The Blackwell Guide to Literary Theory, Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. 37 Michael P. Cohen, “Blues in the Green: Ecocriticism Under Critique”, The History Cooperative: http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/eh/9.1/cohen.html (originally published in Environmental History, vol. 9, no. 1), 2004, 2, 6 of 31. 38 Rueckert, 107. 39 Henrik Bruun and Tom Gullberg, “Inledning”, Humanekologiska perspektiv på människans tillvaro, Henrik Bruun and Tom Gullberg (eds.), Nora: Nya Doxa, 2002, 14-15. 40 Garrard, 5, 179. 41 Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, London: Random House, 1997. Viktor Eikman 7