“See this place?” asks Jigo, the coarse, clever trickster in Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke (1997). He’s squatting over a sputtering fire, disguised as a monk and sharing a meal in a desolate spot with our protagonist, Prince Ashitaka. “When I came here last, a few years back, this was a lovely little village. But then there must have been a flood, or a landslide, or a fire. The only sure thing is that everybody’s dead.” He shrugs, unconcerned; everyone dies, everything crumbles eventually. But for Prince Ashitaka, it’s surely a sore point—he’s just been exiled from his own village, a dying community comprised of refugees from the Emperor’s war on his people. He’s well aware that villages and towns are impermanent and fleeting, but also necessary for survival, and for something more: a shared sense of purpose and true interdependence.
I recently had the opportunity to see the 4k restoration of Princess Mononoke in the theater. Like many, I consider Mononoke to be Miyazaki’s masterpiece. I’ve long been bowled over by its gorgeous landscapes, sprawling cast of vivid characters, and prescient environmental themes. But this time around, I couldn’t stop thinking about the way communities are depicted—and the central place they occupy in most Miyazaki movies. Throughout his filmography, communities die, shift, and reform along with the natural world he loves to animate. They form a sort of natural symphony, filled with many players, switching parts and harmonizing in surprising ways. Mononoke’s symphony is composed of, among others, the Emperor’s samurai, the villagers, the Emishi people, the inhabitants of Iron Town, the animals, and the spirits and gods who inhabit the forest. Akitasha stands out as the lone soloist: an unhappy ronin who sometimes seems like he’d be more at home in a Kurosawa film.
Miyazaki says so himself: “Ashitaka is not a cheerful, worry-free boy. He is a melancholy boy who has a fate. I feel that I am that way myself, but until now, I have not made a film with such a character.” And it’s true—in many of his films, Miyazaki’s characters are ebullient people who find, belong to, or seek a strong community with real ties. It’s not just individual relationships that define Miyazaki’s films, though they matter, and his characters are often strong-minded and purposeful. But whether it’s Sophie in Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), setting off on what she thinks will be a solo search for the Witch of the Waste, or Kiki in Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), deliberately heading out to find a new place to live and work, it’s the strong support of their local or adopted communities that make it possible for these protagonists to succeed. Sophie receives magical help in classic fairy tale fashion as she builds a home in Howl’s castle, while Kiki’s comes in the more ordinary form of new friends and hard-earned roots in her chosen town.
The collective is central in Miyazaki’s worlds. His characters find themselves (sometimes after great effort) embraced, adopted, and changed by time spent in these towns, these bathhouses, these fantastic realms filled with tight-knit communities. No one is inclined to fight battles entirely alone, not even the daring titular porcine bounty hunter in Porco Rosso (1992), who eventually has to rely on the help of his mechanic’s family to help him repair his plane in Milan after he’s shot down. True, Porco returns to solo flying, but narration at the end from Fio, the mechanic’s granddaughter, implies he may finally be returning home to love and companionship. Like Akitasha, his curse, it seems, has been lifted. In The Secret World of Arrietty (2010), the Borrower family decides at last to leave their solitude in a world of humans and heads out to seek a new home, hopefully more of their kind.
It’s bad to be alone for too long in these films. In The Boy and the Heron (2023), the Granduncle has grown bitter and a little mad, retreating even from the fantasy world he created. He’s neglected that world for too long, and now it’s out of balance, with creatures dying as a result. He’s angry that his grandnephew, Mahito, won’t take over his lonely task of maintaining it—but Mahito is worried about returning to his own world, his own family and village. “So you would rather return to a chaotic world full of murderers and thieves?” asks his Granduncle scornfully. “Soon, your world will be a sea of flames,” he adds, referring to the ongoing horrors of World War II.
But Mahito is resolute: he has learned he will find strength in his community. “But I’ll find my friends there like Himi and Kiriko and the heron man,” he tells his Granduncle, refusing to choose isolation instead.
The theme of solitude corrupting runs like a red thread through Miyazaki’s films.1 Porco is cursed with the head of a pig for fleeing from a fight in the air and deserting his band of brothers. Prince Akitasha almost loses his soul without a village or people to assist him, his strong spirit of service useless until he eventually finds purpose in bringing the many disparate communities in Princess Mononoke together. In Spirited Away (2001), the demon No-Face is alone and tormented, but finds a sense of peace and belonging in the witch Zeniba’s household after Chihiro helps him find a home. “You should go back to where you came from,” Chihiro tells him, after No-Face devours half the workers at the bathhouse of the spirits. “Where is your home? Don’t you have any friends or family?”
“No, no,” says No-Face, sullenly. “I’m lonely, I’m lonely.” And in spite of his monstrous greed, we pity him.
Community isn’t just for comfort in Miyazaki’s world, though; it serves an important function—it’s a hallmark of interdependence, a vital theme in almost every one of his films. Miyazaki is deeply concerned with how humans, animals, spirits, and the natural world can all live in balance with each other, or at least strive to. And whenever this delicate balance is disturbed in his movies, big trouble usually follows. In The Boy and the Heron, the achingly lovely and wild sea world that Granduncle has created is out of balance, and invasive pelicans and murderous parakeets battle for existence with the other creatures there. There’s an exquisite moment where we witness the nightly flight of the Warawara—delicate beings resembling tiny plump ghosts—who will be reborn as human souls, ascending slowly to our world. But the scene is interrupted horrifically in a massacre perpetrated by pelicans, swooping down en masse to eat the Warawara, their only source of food. Lady Himi, the fire maiden, destroys the pelicans just as violently with a vicious firestorm, allowing the remaining Warawara to escape to the human world. But it’s clear that this world is in a desperate battle for survival; these creatures must figure out a way to survive, together, or their ecosystem is doomed. The world, Granduncle declares, must be remade. Communities must be reconfigured, bent toward harmonious coexistence.
Though he is a staunch environmentalist, Miyazaki doesn’t take sides—his films are deeply humanist as well. “When we recognize that even living humbly destroys nature, we don’t know what to do,” he said at the time of Mononoke’s release. “And I think that unless we put ourselves in the place where we don’t know what to do and start from there, we cannot think about environmental issues or issues concerning nature.” Miyazaki doesn’t condemn the people of Iron Town, or Lady Eboshi, for cutting down the forest or fighting the wolves; he takes pains to paint them as hardworking and surprisingly soft-hearted.
In a stunning scene that neatly illustrates this paradox, Eboshi introduces Prince Ashitaka to “her lepers,” people society has shunned but she has saved, housed, and fed—now currently hard at work making weapons to help destroy the forest gods, and causing them to be cursed. The people at Iron Town are a close group of outcasts, who’ve come together to build something and find peace for themselves through hard, honest work. That this puts them at odds with both the Emperor and the forest gods is the crux of the film, but Miyazaki doesn’t give us any easy answers. He doesn’t let Iron Town off the hook, nor does he condemn them; he destroys their town and homes but not the people themselves, giving them a chance to rebuild and reform. Their community shifts, expanding to include Akitasha—and even, on the fringes, San (the titular Princess Mononoke and adopted human daughter of the wolves). All the old ways are dying, and the new ways must depend on cooperation.
In Miyazaki’s stories, there is often an opening element of the gothic underpinning the narrative; the protagonist has to leave all they’ve known and enter a strange, threatening or uncertain place. In Kiki’s Delivery Service, the town is an orderly place where laws prevail, and magic is relatively unknown. In Mononoke, the hero is outcast and must travel through strange lands at war. In The Boy and the Heron, Mahito must leave his home in Tokyo and move to his dead mother’s family home in the country, where he knows no one and doesn’t fit in. Even Chihiro in Spirited Away is moving with her parents to a new home, leaving her friends behind.
But there is nothing gothic about what happens next. Towns become homes, people learn to work together, and even the rogues usually find it in their best interest to work against the true villains.2 In Castle in the Sky (1986), the pirates eventually shift sides and help miner Pazu and Princess Sheeta to escape the government agents who’ve kidnapped them. Morality is complicated and shifting in these films precisely because protecting the community is the goal. This often makes characters in these towns and villages and tribes capable of surprises, both good (Lady Eboshi helping the lepers) and evil (the murderous wolves and boars in Mononoke; the furious, threatened insects in Nausicaä, and even Ponyo’s father, who’s trying to keep the oceans and the world in balance).
If community is the signature setting, then the tool to render it faithfully is the work that Miyazaki puts into the cities and towns and villages to fully realize them. Perhaps this is because they’re so often modeled on real places, allowing Miyazaki to build them out as completely and harmoniously as detailed toy models. The Koriko of Kiki’s Delivery Service, for example, mirrors much of mid-century Stockholm; if you look closely, some storefronts actually bear the names of real stores in Sweden. Ponyo’s town is modeled after the port town of Tomonoura in Hiroshima, after Miyazaki vacationed there. Before he made The Castle in the Sky, Miyazaki visited Wales for the first time and saw the miners on strike. “I admired the way they battled to save their way of life, just as the coal miners did in Japan,” he said in an interview with The Guardian. Even the wildly imaginative bathhouse in Spirited Away is said to be inspired by a real luxury bathhouse, complete with a small train station.
But these places aren’t just architectural larks; they’re living, inhabited spaces, and that’s the point. People fish and stroll and eat, lights go on and off, people watch TV in shop windows. People live in the storefronts above the busy shops, work the bellows in Iron Town, trawl for fish at sea. Even in the spirit realm, these places are busy, full of ordinary, daily rhythms—the shadow commuters on the train and obsequious bathhouse attendants in Spirited Away; the shy rhythms of the soot sprites in Totoro; the strange little Kodoma, spirits of the trees, in Mononoke. Miyazaki intentionally creates not just backdrops, but places, and then fills these places up with life, as bustling as any day in Richard Scarry’s Busytown. He creates the complicated tapestry his characters are woven into, or busy extracting themselves from. In these films, everyone is coming from a place, pulling the threads of where they’ve come from into the loom of where they’re going. The richly imagined, rigorously researched towns and cities in his films inform his characters and relationships as much as any events do.
Miyazaki’s films are often cited as comfort watches, and I do find myself seeking them out when I’m in need of something sustaining, something nourishing. I wonder now if that something, for me, is simply the safety net of other people. When you grow up in America, you end up watching film after film where the tough protagonist stands alone against the cruel, hard world. In Miyazaki’s films, though the world might still be hard, might still be cruel, the village will always have your back—and a bowl of hot soup for you at the end of a long day.
- Speaking of red, it’s tempting to speculate on whether the collective spirit in Miyazaki’s films comes at least partly from his days as a Marxist and a union activist, but that’s another essay altogether, and possibly an entirely spurious one.
- If there’s any character Miyazaki truly loves, it’s not a villain or a protagonist, it’s a secret third thing—often a variation on the pirate or rogue.