week six: studio ghibli

I was around eleven or twelve when I first watched Spirited Away, and it was beautiful. Back then, as a kid, I wasn't quite concerned with critically thinking about media like I am now. I just know that when I saw it, I saw something magical come alive on the screen. This might sound weird, but I can still remember the feelings I had while watching the movie a decade ago - the confusion when Haku made Chihiro eat the berry, the surprised fear when the stair under Chihiro broke, the awe of the washing/bathtub scene.

I read Miyazaki's Nausicaa manga this week, and I was pretty surprised at the vast differences in the manga and movie. I think he did a great job at compressing the manga while keeping so many of the themes and significant details, like Nausicaa's uncontrollable rage at the soldiers and the prophecy of the blue dress and a wheat field. Despite watching my first Ghibli movie at eleven(ish), I actually only first watched Nausicaa when I was around fourteen or fifteen, and I remember being Horrified at Nausicaa's stunning violence in the movie. It wasn't the same violence as Ashitaka's in Princess Mononoke, which was violence that, though brutal, was also violence that defended himself and the people he cared about. No, Nausicaa's violence was stunning to me, and how Miyazaki ties together the theme of humanity's violence, the Sea of Corruption's goal of purifying the world, and the grace with which these people - in what is essentially an apocalyptic wasteland - live with.

I also want to talk a little bit about the "conspiracy theories" people have about Studio Ghibli movies, because honestly? They're so unnecessary. Like the theory that the Spirited Away bathhouse was a metaphor for sex work, and that the girls in My Neighbor Totoro were secretly dead the whole time and were based off of, like, a murder/disappearance that happened historically in the region where Totoro was set in. These are just ridiculous "theories" that do a huge disservice to the artistic integrity of Hayao Miyazaki. He didn't write these movies as some roundabout way to be edgy. The stories that he wants to tell have genuine meaning behind them.