Hayao Miyazaki: Film Analysis

The aim of this thesis is to discover the industrialization influences on Hayao Miyazaki (one of the greatest animators and directors in Japan) and Tolkien (one of the most renowned authors of high fantasy) in respect to their views on industrialization to which many subtle references are made throughout their respective works. I am very intrigued by the fact that the two greats had references to industrialization in some of their works like Princess Mononoke film and The Lord of the Rings book. On the other hand, another of Hayao Miyazaki’s films, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, also possessed great reference to industrialization in itself. Both Miyazaki and Tolkien were affected by the industries of war and I will further explore in that

I would also like to further add to the research material on the symbolisms on how the two artists actually view industrialization personally and most probably on how they come to a conclusion to the films they have created. Miyazaki’s childhood seemed to have affected his ambivalent feelings towards war and weapons . His mother suffered from spinal tuberculosis and this affected his relationship with his mother and Miyazaki himself says that this might have affected the relationship between Nausicaa and her mother in the manga as well as in Totoro when the “mother was away from home due to an illness”. Miyazaki was born into an affluent family who owned a company which made wingtips for Zero fighters during the war which made him feel guilty about growing up comfortable under parents who made money from the war, while others suffered from it. Alas, Miyazaki was strongly influenced by Marxism which affected him in how he ended the manga, Nausicaa. Marxism is a worldview form of communism where it is a theory to analyze society and history. Miyazaki used the Earth’s environment as a metaphor, for example, the stated that when he as young, he was thrilled by Tarzan movies by Disney as he saw Tarzan riding on the backs of the strongest creatures in the entire world. Later on, he learnt that elephants can be killed by machine guns and became very dejected. He assumed that machine gun bullets would bounce off elephants. I feel that here was influenced by the Ohmu in Nausicaa to be the natural world’s elephants . The struggle between tradition and modernity, and between craft and technology, is a theme in many of Miyazaki’s films, most notably in Princess Mononoke