Miyazaki Cowboy
No Face stares out onto the plains, vast as a banquet table. Perhaps on the distant horizon Lady Eboshi struts through the swinging doors of her saloon petulantly awaiting what the next stagecoach brings. Inside the saloon, the midday heat has long since silenced the player piano. Nausicaa drums her fingers at the bar, pretending to sip a shot glass of moonshine, screwing up the courage to do what she must do.
The American West could have been Miyazaki’s playground. It certainly persists as an idea just as steadfastly as the disappearing Japanese forests around which Miyazaki weaves his inspiring fables.
Considering how ardently I’ve resisted growing up at times, it’s a surprise that I also resisted the films Hayao Miyazaki for as long as I did.
The resistance had much to do with the genre: Anime. Akira left me confused and numb. I fell asleep during Ghost In the Shell. It seemed reasonable to give up.
But the lesson persists, categories endure only because - once in a blue moon and in spectacular fashion - descriptions fall so hopelessly short of mark. Further, genre will always be transcended, often when least expected.
Miyazaki’s films are well crafted yet undeniably fun. They’re complex in emotional texture yet elegant in execution. A singular conscious pervades his work yet Miyazaki reaches out to the universal.
In short, it’s all very very good.
I can’t remember if I watched Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke first. I remember the DVD case to Spirited Away at the video store, held in Keetens’s paw with an imploring look. Again and again, I wiggled free from watching it. (That difficult negotiation that Netflix has made irrelevant, the hour spent in the video store, running up to the significant other, a look of triumph with a case lofted high… sometimes to be spurred on, sometimes shot down, I miss that.)
Whenever I did finally capitulate, I felt the fool. Why did I waste any time resisting? We soon ripped through them all: Nausicaa, Castle In the Sky, Totoro, Kiki, Porco Rosso, even Castle of Cagliostro. We awaited Howl’s Moving Castle with impatiently hopping feet.
There is something in the thrill of discovery, new worlds opened up in-between the unlit crevices of the one you’re already too familiar with, new words to be spoken which untie the knotted tongue. I worry sometimes that I’ll never again be thrilled as I was when I stumbled upon Miyazaki’s movies in my mid-20s, or the Lord of the Rings books in early adolescense, or the bizarre work of Phillip K Dick from the Eileenosaurus’s bookcase, or the first time I listened to the Black Saint and the Sinner Lady… It’s foolish, I know. There’s too much within this world to know even a meaningful fraction of it. But when certain great works created by others, by genius, become personal, it’s hard to imagine how anything else could put its grips on your heart if not in the same way then at least with the same force.
I chose this picture because at first it made me laugh. (And, because I will never pass up an opportunity to sing Miyazaki’s praises.) But the more I look at it, the more I do think there’s something to it. And, it’s not just how fitting the bushy eyebrows and moustache flow into the Studio Ghibli aesthetic. No, it has something to do with our imagined worlds, for America the West. And No Face, an empty vessel searching for something, maybe beginning with a simple innocent desire, maybe turning into ravenous unchecked disaster…
Or maybe it’s the simple notion that if Miyazaki was a gunslinger (taking my cue from Mingus) there’d be a whole lot of dead animators.
