Nick Park, of Aardman Anumations, tells Will Hodgkinson that the films of Hayao Miyazaki have as much in common with Japanese animation as their European counterparts.
Hayao Miyazaki has a style that is pure and rich. His films work well in the west because, although they are very Japanese, they manage to avoid being "manga", which is something that has tended to alienate western audiences.
Spirited Away is the story of a little girl, Chihiro, who enters a spirit world. Travelling with her parents to their new home in the countryside, they take a detour to explore an old-fashioned Japanese bath-house, which is actually a bath-house for spirits. Her parents are transformed into pigs, and she is trapped in a world of supernatural creatures.
Miyazaki's work is reminiscent of Tintin. His simple graphic style and attention to detail reveal great imagination; the smallest movement on the girl's face conveys a whole series of emotions. When Tintin creator Hergé drew cars, ships or planes, you could see a love for the subject itself. You see that with Spirited Away. There is a love of the process of animation and each shot is composed and looks gorgeous.
Miyazaki is as concerned with atmosphere as he is with action. Spirited Away has shots of grass being blown by the wind, of lovely clouds. They bring back childhood memories of lying and staring at the sky and letting your mind wander. We are allowed to look at a scene and take things in. It's a slow film; it might be thought that children in the west would find it hard, but I don't think we should underestimate young audiences.
Miyazaki says that many of the bizarre images come from his childhood memories of traditional Japanese culture, and of the spirits and stories from the Shinto religion. The film is full of weird ideas, like a giant baby who turns into a mouse, a scary old lady running the bath-house who has a giant head, and the three heads bouncing around who are her bodyguards. It is genuinely frightening without ever being bombastic.
Miyazaki starts by lulling us into a false sense of security. Chihiro's parents look western, and they are driving a modern car, but then they turn into pigs and everything becomes very strange indeed. There is a creature with six arms that operates the furnace of the bath-house, and a spirit called No Face who tempts people with gold before eating them. It is almost like a Freudian nightmare, yet you never know if the creatures are good or bad. Even the scary old lady with the giant head turns out to be all right in the end.
I've always been a big fan of Rupert the Bear, which frequently had unexpected references to Japanese culture; there is a lot of origami and Japanese towers - pagodas - in the woods where Rupert has his adventures. One character is a little Japanese girl whose father is a magician. I don't know if Miyazaki is aware of Rupert the Bear, but there are strong parallels. The frightening characters of Spirited Away are reminiscent of the kind of creatures Rupert would bump into in the woods, such as Raggady, the stick monster. Arthur Rackham's illustrations have a similar quality. Somehow, children's book illustrations from England and Japanese cartoons have influenced one another.
I find Miyazaki refreshing, precisely because so much commercial animation is lacking in imagination. Mainstream animated movies are dumbed-down and sanitised; they make the world in their own image rather than exploring the limitless possibilities that are out there. A lot of films now have such a strong commercial agenda riding on top of them that you can almost hear the meetings that have taken place, and you know that the meaning comes before the idea. What is this character about? What have they learned? What is their motivation? The joy of animation comes last.
Success brings with it pressure to conform. I always thought that success would lead to freedom, but the opposite is true: more people get involved and committees make decisions, and it becomes a fight to stay free. My colleagues and I have to constantly remind each other that we must keep our own view on the world while making films. With Chicken Run, we learned how easy it is to be influenced by outside forces, but you mustn't lose the heart and soul of what you are doing.
Spirited Away is the most successful Japanese film of all time, yet it is very idiosyncratic, and personal. Miyazaki has managed to make his success work. The film is a meander through a bizarre world. The mainstream wants linear story structures, character arcs and epiphanies, but Miyazaki doesn't bother with any of that. He has a different starting place. In animation, ideas start with doodles and you arrive at visually interesting things that way: I can see that Miyazaki was doodling three heads bouncing around, and he then found a way of incorporating them into the story.
Miyazaki reminds me that it is always good to plunder the depths of the childlike imagination and in doing so, he helps me get back to where all my work comes from in the first place. Spirited Away has a childlike view of the world, which I think is necessary for people working in animation, and it is very sophisticated. He asks the question: "What if?" That, for me, is where it all starts.
Spirited Away opens on September 12th in the IFC, Dublin
- Guardian service
