My Neighbor Totoro is a children’s film for the world as it is, and for the world as it should be.
In Spirited Away, I see a film that I can show my daughter to find herself in, and a model I can only hope to embody myself.
The world of Howl’s Moving Castle, filled with mystery and magic, strips away the truth of a body’s danger.
At different forked roads in my 27 years, I saw Miyazaki’s women and thought, I can? And each, in her distinct way, said Yes.
Nature in Castle in the Sky is much simpler; its purity is corrupted by human influence.
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is not, perhaps, Miyazaki’s best movie, but it is his most earnest and original; a declaration of ideals that his later movies will refine.
What all this lavish praise doesn’t explain is why, precisely, the hand-drawn aesthetic matters for the particular story being told.
The film is a warning that bullets and bombs are not the only deadly forces in wartime.
It’s always felt like Ghibli movies understood what it meant to grow up as a girl, still unconvinced by the world that she has to fight for everything she has.
