In Howl’s Moving Castle, Hayao Miyazaki flips his own script and instead of making a coming-of-age film, he makes a film-where-people-should-have-come-of-age-but-didn’t, shaping his story around how to grow up if you’re already an adult. Howl’s Moving Castle is unique in the sense that it’s like a setup for a sitcom: it takes characters that have […]
Howl’s Moving Castle: a film about people who don’t want to be adults
Spirited Away is really about growing up in modern Japan
As his career progresses, Hayao Miyazaki just keeps piling on the complexity of his films, and trying to see how many characters, plotlines and themes he can put in there and get himself out of it – and every time he manages to pull it off so effortlessly, he creates another masterpiece. Like with Totoro, […]
The many layers of Princess Mononoke
By the time they started making Princess Mononoke, Studio Ghibli was a big name – but their reputation was based on the cute fuzzy Totoro toys they were selling. Hayao Miyazaki, being quite irritated at the simplification of his work, set out to make a film to revisit themes from My Neighbour Totoro but through […]
How Kiki’s Delivery Service grounded the Magical Girl genre
Kiki’s Delivery service is 30 years old. Rewatching it now, though, it couldn’t feel younger or fresher – or more relevant in our ever more turbulent world. In my newest talk, I explore why that is. With Kiki’s Delivery Service, writer-director Hayao Miyazaki took a close look at the modern and peculiarly Japanese genre, the […]
The personal mythology behind My Neighbour Totoro
When I tell someone that my main area of film research is Studio Ghibli films, there is a fifty percent chance that the next question I get will be: “So did you hear about the theory that Totoro is actually a vicious death god?” Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh. I don’t blame anyone who thinks that — the long-standing attempt at simplifying […]
The secret link between Grave of the Fireflies and My Neighbour Totoro
You see, Grave of the Fireflies is already routinely called “the greatest anti-war film of all time” and “the saddest film of all time” (both of which I agree with). But there’s an extra layer to this Studio Ghibli classic if you know the context in which it was made. And because of how these […]
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