Miyazaki Hayao and the Aesthetics of Imagination: Nostalgia and Memory in Spirited Away

Abstract

Miyazaki Hayao has achieved international renown for a succession of feature-long animations that have been noted for their visual flair and highly imaginative world-constructs. Many of the narratives in these films have been situated in fantasy worlds with often only a tenuous representation of the world as experienced in some conventional contemporary (or historical) sense. Yet beyond the surface of these figures and fantastical plot devices there is a clearly discernible stream of engagement with the past. Focusing primarily on Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away) of 2001, this paper critically engages with the leading commentaries on nostalgia and memory in Miyazaki’s work, contrasting the “culturalist” approach of Susan Napier with the “machinic” approach of Thomas Lamarre. In turn, the aesthetic theory of R.G. Collingwood, in particular his concept of “magic”, is employed to demonstrate how certain aesthetic devices within the film facilitate an imaginative engagement with the past, one that is subtle but nonetheless highly evocative of distinctive nostalgic emotions.

Keywords:

• Japan
• Miyazaki Hayao
• cinema
• anime
• aesthetics
• nostalgia
• Spirited Away

Notes

1. More recently, there has also been a fundamental reworking of the Lacanian project by Slavoj Žižek, who has reinvigorated the theory of film through the employment of film texts as tools for philosophical exposition. See Flisfeder (2012, pp. 15–39).

2. Tim Dean’s ‘Art as Symptom: Žižek and the Ethics of Psychoanalytic Criticism’ provides a salutary caveat regarding the limits of treating the analysis of culture as an exercise in cultural pathology. See Dean (2002, p. 21).

3. See Aaron Ridley (1997) and David Davies (2008) for an outline of key polemical issues associated with the reappraisal of Collingwood’s theory of art.

4. Napier does note other possibilities of nostalgia: “This vision [of Miyazaki] is not only of ‘what is lost,’ … but also, perhaps most importantly, of what could be” (Napier, 2005, p. 123). See also Napier (2005, p. 152). Even so, the essential nuance of the “elegiac” arguably retains a confining conception of how we might relate to the past.

5. Napier (2006) arguably remains the most thoroughly worked through analysis from a “culturalist” perspective.

6. Wells (1998, p. 15). This dimension of Wells’ work is dealt with in Napier’s book as well, but I argue here for a more aesthetic interpretation rather than a historically teleological one.

7. See also Lamarre (2002), as well as Lamarre (2006), which provides perhaps one of the most insightful recent commentaries on the relation of animation to cinema. It should be acknowledged that there are Japanese scholars who have engaged in anime from the Deleuzian perspective. One significant example from the last decade is Takahashi (2008); for an alternative discussion of allegory in Miyazaki’s work, albeit from a Deleuzian perspective, see Ikeda (2004).

8. For an alternative commentary on the significance of weightlessness and flight see Kiridōshi (2001), particularly Chapter 4, where he discusses the emancipation of the body and continuous falling.

9. “If the Ghibli film is truly going to gather and focus our perceptual practices, it must to some extent stand alone and allow us to take it in, to contemplate it, in its own techno-aesthetic terms” (Lamarre, 2009, p. 97).

10. For an excellent discussion of this see Schaffer (2005, pp. 84–85).

11. For a broader discussion of these issues including a discussion of Noël Carroll’s critique of “media essentialism”, see Sinnerbrink (2011, pp. 20–23).

12. See Davis (1996) for the definitive discussion of the filmic style.