Miyazaki & Me

If you don’t know the name Hayao Miyazaki, your childhood was obviously inferior to mine. Miyazaki is basically like Walt Disney, only he’s better and also his head isn’t frozen somewhere in the depths of Disney World.

When I moved back to the United States at age eight, I was puzzled by my peers’ ignorance of the animation master. Even during my time in the US before I moved to Japan, I had spent many afternoons watching Mei and Satsuki dance to make plants grow (which didn’t work on any of my plants, I am sad to report) and riding around in a cat-bus hybrid. I knew about other animators—my Saturday mornings were spent on the couch with my father watching the Little Mermaid and X-Men television series—but Miyazaki’s movies had, in my opinion, something the other animations did not.

Flash forward fifteen years, and I was interviewing for a teaching job at a small private school in Massachusetts. During what I thought was my second interview (but what the school thought was a job offer, much to my surprise later), the teacher whose position I would be taking handed me a green binder of curriculum for the World Literature class I would be teaching in the fall.

You might think that this binder was one of those 3-5” bad boys, stuffed to the brim with juicy lesson plans and project descriptions for my viewing pleasure. It was not. It was a 1” binder with a few worksheets for each unit and some simple project descriptions. I place no blame on the teacher or the school for this; the simultaneous pro and con of working in a private school is that there are no state curriculum frameworks, so curriculum creation is really at the whim of each teacher.

I was thrilled to see that the World Literature curriculum had historically included a unit on Asian literature with an emphasis on Japanese short stories, which in my opinion was a vast improvement on my high school experience of reading the horribly depressing The Good Earth, which, while technically being about China, was actually written by a white woman. The problem was, the infamous green binder only included a few worksheets about Japanese stories I had never read before, and the beginning of the school year was rapidly approaching.

So there I was, limitless curriculum choices in front of me. I may have a chip on my shoulder about my Asian-ness. My European side tends to dominate my appearance, so I am constantly looking for opportunities to bring up my Japanese heritage in conversations. Furthermore, this was my chance to be who I was always meant to be:

a Miyazaki evangelist.

I was new, so I wasn’t sure how my request to replace a unit of traditional Japanese short stories with a unit on a modern Japanese cartoon would go. I considered going with some of my favorites, Howl’s Moving Castle or Whisper of the Heart, but I wasn’t sure if I could convince the administration. I even considered betraying Miyazaki for his Studio Ghibli companion Isao Takahata and using the WWII tearjerker, Grave of the Fireflies, but I was eventually wooed by what I thought might convince the school this was a good idea: the Academy Award winning Spirited Away.

Good news. They did think it was a good idea.

For the first time in my life, I watched one of Miyazaki’s movies for more than just enjoyment. Then, I read a bunch of stuff about it. Then I watched an entire documentary, which if you knew me in my pre-marriage life, you would not believe.

This is what I discovered.

What makes Miyazaki’s movies so powerful is not just the fact that he is part of every process—the storyboarding, the music composition, the directing—it is that his characters, even when they are cartoons, even though they are often in ridiculous, fantastical situations, feel so real.

Miyazaki’s character feel real because, in part, they are real. The character Sen in Spirited Away was based on his friend’s daughter, and through every little detail—including the way she puts on her shoes—he created a fictional version of her. The way Sen’s mother holds her hand when she’s eating: based on his coworker. Even the strange and slightly frightening No Face is a semi-autobiographical character of Miyazaki himself. The characters’ appearances are not realistic portrayals of humans—they are stylized cartoons—but their essence is real.

This makes the storytelling. This is why countless people, children and adults, return to his works. We see reality in the stories because the people in the stories are real.

Now, in my post-teaching life, the lessons I learned while developing that curriculum eight years ago have trickled into my writing. They say to write what you know, and I write who I know. Not completely; each of my characters are not complete replicas of their inspiration. However, my characters are strongly influenced by the people in my life.

So, if my current project even makes it to bookshelves, you’ll find that the twins in it are a lot like my stepdaughters. Their father? A lot like my wonderful husband. (There’s a stepmom, too, but she’s way cooler than me. The only thing she got from me is her not-so-great cooking skills. Every character needs a weakness, after all.)

For me, this practice has become more than just good storytelling, though. It has also become about representation that isn’t stereotyped, but more nuanced. But for more on that, you’ll have to wait for the next post.

Originally posted on February 5, 2020.