Week 6 - How Miyazaki's Films Address the Humanity/Nature Divide

Many of Hayao Miyazaki's works incorporate a spiritual element in order to put across to the viewer the ideas expressed within his films, but these ideas are never dependent on the structure of organized religion (Wright, L, 2005.), instead hearkening back to ancient times and the innocence of pre-intellectualism (Wright, L, 2005.). He deliberately goes against the notion of organized religion and instead asks the viewer to reach their own conclusions on the state of humanity and the world in which we live, forgoing the arbitrariness of religious tenets and concentrating on the innermost qualities of innate spiritualism that we have sacrificed in the pursuit of greater knowledge.

In many ways, Miyazaki's timeless tales of the conflict between nature and human expansion echo the 'Collective Consciousness' developed by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, an ideological view of humanity as an interconnected family that derives all thought and experience from the same source, while utilizing the Japanese Shinto religion as a foundation on which to base the struggles of his characters as they attempt to rectify the unbalance between mankind and the natural world. Miyazaki seems to have an understanding of religion and spirituality as being rather distinct from one another, that religion is a human construct (Wright, L, 2005) that stems from the inherent spirituality within all peoples. The message at the heart of Miyazaki's works seems to be that religion, in a sense, obscures what is at the core of all human beings, a primal sense of right and wrong that should not be misconstrued by the mythology of gods and demons that modern religion often touts as the chief good and evil.

Princess Mononoke and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind are films that depict settings bearing little to no resemblance to our modern world, historically set within the distant past and the far future respectively, but the conflicts that take place in them are largely derived from the same source: humanity's struggle to live harmoniously alongside the natural world. The central figures at the crux of these films are female characters, Sen and Nausicaa, both of whom embody Miyazaki's perspective and the aforementioned innocence of pre-intellectual antiquity, who battle to enlighten the films' antagonists who seem to embody humanity's post-intellectual, pro-human survivalist modernity. As the protagonists journey through the events of the films, they aid in elevating the understanding of the natural world for greater humanity, proving to the films' antagonists that humanity and nature can achieve an equilibrium and live side-by-side.

Another thing about Miyazaki's films that I find noteworthy is that almost none of the antagonistic characters are depicted as being beyond hope of redemption, a quality that echoes the Shinto faith's perception of the human spirit as being like a fogged mirror that, when wiped clean, reveals the essential purity of the person's soul beneath (Wright, L, 2005.). Another area of the Shinto faith that Miyazaki draws parallels with is the idea that humanity is in search of a paradise beyond our current sphere of existence, the Earth, an Edenic world that is reserved for the chosen people of the gods should they resist the temptations of an earthly life; Miyazaki's films and the Shinto belief system tend to view the Earth, itself, as the mythical paradise that all humans are desperate to transcend to after death (Wright, L, 2005). According to Miyazaki and Shinto, we are living too much for the illusory next world and not bettering the one we already have, a system of thought that I can personally agree entirely with.

In Wright's examination of Miyazaki's film, Princess Mononoke, the central antagonist, Lady Eboshi, epitomises the perceptions of our modern world, that the sacrifice of natural resources is a worthy trade-off if we are to guarantee humanity's growth and survival as a species (Wright, L, 2005.), the notion that humanity's progression or technological evolution must take precedence over the preservation of the environment. Ultimately, this ideology will lead humanity to its undoing, and Miyazaki's films act as cursory reminders of the grim future that awaits us should we continue to do business without consideration for the life of our planet.

In summary, Miyazaki's films are tales of the conflict between advancement versus stagnation as a species, the divide between nature and urbanization, and the pursuit of knowledge at the expense of the simplicity provided by our hereditary "childlike" nostalgia (Wright, L, 2005.). This, however, does not mean that Miyazaki or his films are religiously or spiritually inclined by his and/or their nature; he simply communicates his ideas about what it means to be human in relation to the natural world by borrowing from various religious sources, not unlike Shinto itself, and wants to enlighten viewers to the spiritual core of their being without direct associations to any religion at all.