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https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/hayao-miyazakis-beautiful-broken-worlds>
"Great artists are often prey to a single disturbing or irreconcilable idea
that simply won’t leave them alone. The children’s animator and manga artist
Hayao Miyazaki returns over and over to a central, obscene question: What is it
like to be a child in a world that is dead or dying? In his post-apocalyptic
manga serial “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,” his heroine is just shy of
adulthood. At sixteen, she is solitary, eager for adult responsibilities, and
heartbroken by the seemingly irreversible destruction of the environment around
her, where a spreading blight threatens to supplant a world where humans can
live. In his film “Ponyo,” from 2008, Miyazaki excises both tragedy and romance
from Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Little Mermaid,” making Andersen’s
lovers, a landlubber prince and a sea-creature princess, into Sosuke and Ponyo,
a pair of boisterous five-year-olds. As floods overwhelm Sosuke’s seaside home,
the two form an easy bond born of shared enthusiasms and blunt, charming,
ridiculous deductions. Miyazaki’s enormous worlds are carefully obscured in
ways that mirror his young characters’ uncertain grasp on reality, and he
tailors those worlds to fit the children at their centers: Nausicaä’s ossified,
war-torn dystopia can be changed only by her idealistic teen-age fervor, and,
although the submarine mythology of “Ponyo” baffles and terrifies the film’s
reasonable adults, its little children are more than prepared to meet a
dinosaur or a sea wizard.
As Miyazaki began pre-production on the film version of “Nausicaä” in
1983—though he would not complete the story to his own satisfaction until he
finished the manga eleven years later—he was also wrapping up work on a
watercolor manga called “Shuna’s Journey,” about another child growing up in a
deteriorating world. Like “Ponyo,” the book, published this week in its first
English translation, by Alex Dudok de Wit, is an adaptation of a much older
story. It is a reworking of a Tibetan folktale, “The Prince Who Turned Into a
Dog,” about a prince who finds a magic grain to feed his starving people. The
tale is commonly thought to be a metaphor for the momentous introduction of
barley, which can survive the region’s biting cold, to the Tibetan plateau."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
