Community isn’t just for comfort in Miyazaki’s world—it serves an important function as a hallmark of interdependence, a vital theme in most of his films. Miyazaki is deeply concerned with how humans, animals, spirits, and the natural world can live in balance with one another, or at least strive to.
Offering respite from an adult perspective without denying it, Studio Ghibli films often invite viewers into exalted states of innocence.
A sense of warring duality is everywhere in Princess Mononoke: selfishness and altruism, nature and humanity, life and death.
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.




