I don't know what it is, but there's something about Studio Ghibli (スタジオジブリ), that gets me … hot and bothered. Okay, that’s not really true, and I apologize for the unnecessary, idiotic start to the post. But there really is something that gets me feeling all warm and fuzzy inside. I guess watching a Studio Ghibli film is like, while you’re sick in bed, grateful that you’re missing school, but still bored out of your mind, your grandfather walks into your room, just so that he can read you a fantastic story that will transport you to whole different world, where you’ll find a pirate gang made up of a giant, a Spaniard, and a short Sicilian who continually exclaims, “Inconceivable.” No, no, wait, that’s from the Princess Bride. Well, I’ve never had anyone in my family come into my room to read me a bedtime story when I was a child, but that’s what I imagine sitting through a Ghibli masterpiece is like. Grandfather…(hmm, maybe he’s too young to be one…) Uncle Miyazaki, who by the way looks a lot like a Japanese version of Colonel Sanders, every single time, brings us delicious and very satisfying morsel of visual treats, and unlike the tasty but unhealthy Original Recipe, Miyazaki’s goodness is just that, goodness: good for the mind, good for the world. It’s a bold statement tied to a very weak metaphor, but I’ll stand by it.
Example One: My first foray into Ghibli was with Graves of the Fireflies (火垂の墓).
I was 13 or 14 then, and it was my second trip to Japan, this time to visit my dad. While a visit to a foreign country should be exciting with lots of sightseeing and eating strange new food, I was taken to my dad’s and became a house-sitter.
Dad was busy with his work and I was bored out of my mind. Boredom equals watching a lot of TV, but not just any TV, Japanese TV. Don’t get me wrong, once you get the hang of the language, Japanese TV can be fairly entertaining, but for a kid, who doesn’t understand gibberish, and who only cares about cartoons, Japanese TV was…shit. Here in our wonderful country, once you get back from school, you can always count on at least one channel dedicated to rotting young, impressionable minds by showing cartoons; and lest we forget we’ve the Saturday morning line up of cartoons—yes, I grew up on Smurfs. There, not so. But when I did find a channel that showed a cartoon or anime, it was a great treat.
During one hot summer’s day, Graves of the Fireflies was on. Although I didn’t understand what the characters were saying, intuitively I understood the message of the story. Now, you have to understand that the first two years of my grade school education were spent in Korea. There are two things they will teach you well: the first one is math—I was reciting the multiplication table as a second grader—and second one is politics, yes politics, you know, the kind the Republicans and the White House are good at practicing—propaganda politics. We were taught that (1) the communist North Korea is scary and misguided and (2) the unrepentant Japan is evil (Tokto is Korea’s!). I should elaborate on what they meant by evil, but I can’t be bothered. So anyways… what was the point of this again? Oh yeah, so when I watched Graves of the Fireflies, I understood that many Japanese felt that they were also victims of their imperial, militaristic government of the past. I realized that they also needed to make peace with history. You can’t stay mad at people who think of themselves as victims. Apart from that, a tale of two siblings, orphaned due to an Allied Force’s air raid, trying to survive, trying to maintain their childhood…breathtakingly sad, heartbreakingly beautiful. Even now, when I watch it, I start bawling.
I’ll continue about Studio Ghibli later on…
The purpose of this post, before it became this long essay about my special connection with the studio, which I think I’d like to explore more later on, as I've mentioned before, the purpose of this, and I’ll get to it right away, so as not to make this a run-on sentence, nope, it already is, the purpose is the new Studio Ghibli movie, Howl’s Moving Castle (ハウルの動く城), is coming out this Friday!!! I can’t wait to see it. Although I’d love to see it in its original language, I can deal with the dubbed version. Besides they’ve got Christian Bale, Billy Crystal, Jena Malone, Lauren Bacall doing some of the voices.
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