policeman.”
So what does this mean? But the film moves so fast that I didn’t ask Kenji to pause the tape until a moment later, to wonder what their voices revealed about the characters.
“That they are city people,” he said. “That they use a sort of polite pronunciation, and that the father, when he talks to them, is well educated.”
The road passes through fields, over a bridge, turns a corner and now we see how rural this is, nothing like the concreted landscape Alex Kerr attacks so eloquently in Lost Japan . The road is unsealed, rutted.
“Stop,” said Kenji.
As Charley and I had already seen the film three times, the image Kenji froze was so familiar that it was hard to imagine what else we might learn from it. The right-hand side of the frame was dominated by the trunks of two huge trees; the gloom of the woods was deep, and one already felt the force of nature. What Kenji now pointed out, what Charley and I had never noticed, was that hidden in the shadows were some steps and a torn , a red gate to a shrine, an early hint of the film’s religious reverence for nature. This is so subtle, though, that we’re more likely to notice that the truck is a three-wheeler, thatit splashes through a puddle beside the two big trees, and emerges into a bright landscape of rice paddies. It is part of Miyazaki’s genius that as he celebrates the world of nature, trees, flowers, as the girls look into a stream and exclaim about a fish, he also shows us an empty sake bottle abandoned in the water, and that this is done in some morally neutral way.
“You can see,” Kenji said, “that this is set twenty or thirty years ago.”
In fact, this had not occurred to me.
“Perhaps,” he said, “it is Miyazaki’s childhood. What tells us that this is so long ago? Well, firstly the three-wheeled van, and then the local bus it passes. See the model. He is not being romantic about the countryside but he is perhaps nostalgic about his childhood, and for a physical world that, while not pristine then, has been seriously messed-up since.”
The three characters finally arrive at the house on foot. To my eye, it is a simple farmhouse, rundown, rustic, but also particularly Japanese. The first time I saw the film, I wished to live in that house, and it was because of this that I thought it might be interesting to watch it with an architect, to extract all the information that was before my eyes but culturally inaccessible. Now Kenji explained that this was in fact two houses, an old house with a modern addition, a Western-style front constructed in perhaps the 1920s.
Western? It had seemed so Japanese.
Wonderfully, this was not the only misunderstanding. First, Kenji told us, this dusty, slightly rundown house belonged to a rich family. “Who else could afford such a luxury? Also,” he said, “it is a kind of a ghost house.”
“What makes it a ghost house?”
“Well, as you will see in a moment, there is a well.”
“So?”
“The well is a very animistic thing. It is a hole to another world, to ghosts and spirits. A Japanese viewer sees that well and immediately understands that this will be a story about spirits. Besides— there!—the older girl is calling. She says, This is like a haunted house.”
A moment later we see how this notion is developed: girls play, running, whooping, performing handsprings which serve to draw them (and us) from the house and into nature. Suddenly we are confronted by a vast and ancient camphor tree which looms like a mountain above the children. This tree will be a major character in the story, the world of the wonderful mythic Totoro. But only after the girls enter the house, and a single nut drops mysteriously to the floor, do we really begin to feel the place is haunted.
It is just at this point, as the father offers rationalexplanations—squirrels, perhaps, or acorn mice—that Miyazaki shows us that well, which in New York City had seemed merely commonplace, utilitarian.
Then the girls
So what does this mean? But the film moves so fast that I didn’t ask Kenji to pause the tape until a moment later, to wonder what their voices revealed about the characters.
“That they are city people,” he said. “That they use a sort of polite pronunciation, and that the father, when he talks to them, is well educated.”
The road passes through fields, over a bridge, turns a corner and now we see how rural this is, nothing like the concreted landscape Alex Kerr attacks so eloquently in Lost Japan . The road is unsealed, rutted.
“Stop,” said Kenji.
As Charley and I had already seen the film three times, the image Kenji froze was so familiar that it was hard to imagine what else we might learn from it. The right-hand side of the frame was dominated by the trunks of two huge trees; the gloom of the woods was deep, and one already felt the force of nature. What Kenji now pointed out, what Charley and I had never noticed, was that hidden in the shadows were some steps and a torn , a red gate to a shrine, an early hint of the film’s religious reverence for nature. This is so subtle, though, that we’re more likely to notice that the truck is a three-wheeler, thatit splashes through a puddle beside the two big trees, and emerges into a bright landscape of rice paddies. It is part of Miyazaki’s genius that as he celebrates the world of nature, trees, flowers, as the girls look into a stream and exclaim about a fish, he also shows us an empty sake bottle abandoned in the water, and that this is done in some morally neutral way.
“You can see,” Kenji said, “that this is set twenty or thirty years ago.”
In fact, this had not occurred to me.
“Perhaps,” he said, “it is Miyazaki’s childhood. What tells us that this is so long ago? Well, firstly the three-wheeled van, and then the local bus it passes. See the model. He is not being romantic about the countryside but he is perhaps nostalgic about his childhood, and for a physical world that, while not pristine then, has been seriously messed-up since.”
The three characters finally arrive at the house on foot. To my eye, it is a simple farmhouse, rundown, rustic, but also particularly Japanese. The first time I saw the film, I wished to live in that house, and it was because of this that I thought it might be interesting to watch it with an architect, to extract all the information that was before my eyes but culturally inaccessible. Now Kenji explained that this was in fact two houses, an old house with a modern addition, a Western-style front constructed in perhaps the 1920s.
Western? It had seemed so Japanese.
Wonderfully, this was not the only misunderstanding. First, Kenji told us, this dusty, slightly rundown house belonged to a rich family. “Who else could afford such a luxury? Also,” he said, “it is a kind of a ghost house.”
“What makes it a ghost house?”
“Well, as you will see in a moment, there is a well.”
“So?”
“The well is a very animistic thing. It is a hole to another world, to ghosts and spirits. A Japanese viewer sees that well and immediately understands that this will be a story about spirits. Besides— there!—the older girl is calling. She says, This is like a haunted house.”
A moment later we see how this notion is developed: girls play, running, whooping, performing handsprings which serve to draw them (and us) from the house and into nature. Suddenly we are confronted by a vast and ancient camphor tree which looms like a mountain above the children. This tree will be a major character in the story, the world of the wonderful mythic Totoro. But only after the girls enter the house, and a single nut drops mysteriously to the floor, do we really begin to feel the place is haunted.
It is just at this point, as the father offers rationalexplanations—squirrels, perhaps, or acorn mice—that Miyazaki shows us that well, which in New York City had seemed merely commonplace, utilitarian.
Then the girls
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