Joseph Beaulieu – Hayao Miyazaki & Studio Ghibli’s Environmentalism

Hayao Miyazaki: An Evolving Environmentalist

Hayao Miyazaki is the co-founder of  Studio Ghibli and the director of twelve feature films, many of which are among the most popular anime films of the last forty years. These include Laputa: Castle in the Sky, My Neighbor Totoro, and Spirited Away. Many of Miyazaki’s works have strong pacifist and environmentalist themes, but even his films that do not center on nature, such as The Wind Rises, depict the natural environments of the world, especially those of Japan, gorgeously.

This appreciation of nature stems at least in part from Miyazaki’s own life experience: he was born in Japan during the Second World War, and he and his family were displaced by the United States’ firebombing of Japanese cities that killed nearly a million civilians and greatly damaged the environment of Japan. Through his lengthy directorial career, Miyazaki’s stance on the environment has evolved along with his work.

Miyazaki’s second film, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) is a commentary on World War Two, the bombing of cities across Japan, and the ecological consequences thereof. The film takes place in a futuristic version of Earth that is being slowly consumed by a toxic jungle that was mutated as the result of a worldwide quasi-nuclear war fought with bioweapons (left image) a millennia ago. The protagonist, a princess named Nausicaä, collects plants from the jungle, cultivates them, and finds that they are harmless when grown in clean soil (as shown in the image below). Nausicaä plays the role of a Christlike pacifistic figure who convinces the remaining nations of the world to end their conflicts and learn to coexist with nature. The film ends with a non-toxic tree growing on the surface for the first time in a thousand years.

Miyazaki’s seventh film, Princess Mononoke (1997) is set in a fictional version of the Muromachi Era (1336-1573) of Japan. Many of the natural spirits of this world have been corrupted by being shot with firearms made in Iron Town. The ruler of Iron Town, Lady Eboshi, hunts the Shishigami, the most powerful of the forest spirits. In the climax of the film, Eboshi decapitates the Shishigami. The spirit’s blood spreads, killing everything it touches until the film’s protagonist, San, a human who was raised by the forest spirits, manages to retrieve the head and reunite it with its body before Iron Town is entirely consumed. In the end, the Shishigami dies, but the survivors in Iron Town agree to leave the forest alone as they rebuild their homes.

While these two movies seem to have very similar messages, the themes surrounding the environment vary in a few key ways. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind uses strong Christian imagery and frames its protagonist as the savior of nature. Princess Mononoke, meanwhile, evokes imagery from Japanese folklore and Shintoism. It frames its protagonist not as a savior, but as a part of nature and the rest of humanity as something that should remain separate from, but respectful of nature. This reflects Myazaki’s own evolving view on the environment and his disagreement with other environmental viewpoints.

Hayao Miyazaki is a significant artist both to Japan and to the world. In his lifetime, his home country has experienced nationalism, facism, imperialism, war, civilian bombings, industrialization, pollution, and deforestation, along with the rest of the world, but despite all that Miyazaki has lived through and own expressed pessimism, his works stand as sources of optimism for environmentalists and pacifists around the world.