There is a moment in Hayao Miyazaki’s movie My neighbor Totoro it’s stuck with me since I first watched it a decade ago. Satsuki Kusakabe is looking for his missing sister, Mei. Looking for help, she sprints to the huge camphor tree where the magical creature Totoro lives. She pauses for a moment at the entrance of a Shinto shrine that houses the Totoro tree, as if considering praying for Totoro’s help there. But then she returns home and finds her way to Totoro’s abode through the tunnel of bushes where Mei first met him. Totoro summons the Catbus, which takes Satsuki to where Mei sits, next to a lonely country road lined with small statues of Jizo, the protective bodhisattva of children.

It was Satsuki’s hesitation in front of the entrance to the shrine that struck me, and what she said about the nature of spirits and religion in the film. We don’t really see Hayao Miyazaki’s films as religious or even spiritual, despite their abundant magic, but some of his most famous works are teeming with Shinto and Buddhist iconography, like these statues of Jizo or the sacred ropes of Shimenawa shown attached. . around the Totoro tree and delimiting the bath of the river god in Abducted as if by magic. Miyazaki is not an evangelist: the gods and spirits in his films do not follow or respect the rituals of religion. But the relationship between humans and gods remains paramount.

Miyazaki’s gods and spirits are not explicitly based on any recognizable Japanese “kami” (a word that denotes a range of supernatural beings, from the sun goddess Amaterasu to minor spirits of sacred rocks and trees). In fact, whether Totoro is a Shinto spirit or not is a mystery. He lives in a sacred tree on the grounds of a Shinto shrine. The girls’ father even takes them there to thank Totoro for looking after Mei at the start of the movie. But Satsuki calls Totoro an “obake”, a word generally translated as “ghost” or “monster”. Miyazaki himself insisted that Totoro is a woodland creature who eats acorns. Is he a Shinto spirit? A monster? An animal? A figment of the imagination of girls? The movie – deliciously – not only doesn’t answer the question, it doesn’t even particularly bother to ask it.

It’s a refreshing contrast to many American children’s films, where getting skeptical adults to believe in a supernatural entity is often the pivotal point of the plot. The adults in Miyazaki movies either to know spirits are real (Princess mononoke) or do not question their children when they tell them fantastic stories (Totoro and Ponyo). The only adults who express doubts are Chihiro’s parents in Abducted as if by magic, and they are turned into pigs. Believe in the spirits or not; they stay.

Many of them live in, or at least frequent, the Yubaba public baths in Abducted as if by magic. Lots of kami that appear in Abducted as if by magic are wonderfully weird, like huge chicks and a giant radish spirit. But a few resemble traditional Japanese gods, like Haku and the “stinking spirit,” who are both river dragons (unlike their fiery Western counterparts, Japanese dragons are usually associated with water). Both were deeply injured by humans: the Haku River was filled in and paved to make way for apartment buildings; the “stinking mind” is polluted with garbage and human waste, from a fishing line to an old bicycle. The gods seem more vulnerable to the whims of humans than the other way around. No wonder Lin and the other public bath workers are so terrified of Chihiro when they find out she is human.

The tension between humans and spirits escalates into all-out war in Princess mononoke, in which Lady Eboshi fights against the forest gods so that she can expand her iron mining. MononokeThe kami are creatures of the woods: wolves, wild boars and deer. They are just as fuzzy as Totoro, but a lot less cuddly. Like the desert itself, they are elemental, powerful, dangerous, and sources of life and death. But they are also vulnerable. Humanity’s pollution and violence can corrupt nature and spirits – one of Eboshi’s bullets turns a boar god into a rampaging demon – but this damage spills over to humanity, especially affecting the most vulnerable in the world. between us (in the same way that poor nations and communities are currently suffering the brunt of climate change). It’s not Eboshi who ends up being cursed by the boar demon, after all; this is Ashitaka, a member of the indigenous Emishi people. And when Eboshi manages to kill the Great Forest Spirit with his weapon in the climax of the movie, it sends a flood of death all over the landscape.

Miyazaki doesn’t paint in black and white, however. Lady Eboshi might be a god slayer, but she’s also extremely sympathetic and even admirable. She is a woman who has carved out a seat of power for herself in feudal Japan, and she uses that power to provide shelter and jobs for marginalized members of society, including lepers, prostitutes and Ashitaka himself. . If deforestation and industrialization bring humanity into conflict with the environment and even the gods, it may also be the only opportunity for the poor and the excluded to survive. The only real bad guys in Mononoke are the local samurai – portrayed as violent henchmen – and Jikobo, a Buddhist monk in the service of the emperor seeking to reclaim the head of the spirit of the great forest. The Emperor wants divinity because possessing it will supposedly grant him immortality.

Screenshot: Studio Ghibli

The anonymous emperor’s desire to have a god’s head cut off is a perversion of Japanese religious ritual. Rather than making offerings to them and imploring the gods for the benefit of his people, this fictional emperor wants to assassinate a god to gain eternal life for himself. It’s a small but quite radical plot point, given that at the time the film is set, the Emperor himself was considered a kami and a direct descendant of the Sun Goddess. Miyazaki does not indict the chrysanthemum throne, but rather the selfish thirst for personal gain of the powerful. Gods can be corrupted into cursing demons, just like those – like Monk Jikobo and the Emperor – who are supposed to serve as intermediaries.

But while the relationship between kami and humans can be strained and even deadly, it can also be intimate and positive. Satsuki and Mei give Totoro an umbrella and he gives them a packet of seeds. The wolf goddess Moro raises San as her own child, and when she grows up, San fights for the forest against Eboshi. Haku saves toddler Chihiro from drowning, and she in turn risks her life to save hers and free him from Yubaba’s service.

This intimacy is more apparent in Ponyo, about the love between a little boy named Sosuke and a goldfish who turns into a girl thanks to a drop of Sosuke’s blood and powerful magic potions. While it takes place in Japan as Totoro, Abducted as if by magic, and Princess mononoke, PonyoThe supernatural world of is a mixture of mythology. Ponyo is based on that of Hans Christian Andersen The little Mermaid, but it also echoes the popular Japanese tale of Urashima Taro, about a young fisherman who rescues a sea turtle and is rewarded with a visit to the underwater palace of kami Otohime. Ponyo’s birth name is Brunhilde, a nod to Wotan’s daughter Valkyrie in Germanic Nibelungenlied. And her mother is Gran Mamare, a sea goddess with a Latin name, but whom a Japanese sailor calls Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy. More than anything, she seems to be the ocean itself, ancient and of immeasurable power. Our myths and religious tales, Ponyo suggests, are only approximations of the true nature of the earth and its spirits.

Screenshot: Studio Ghibli

In all of Miyazaki’s films, it is the children who capture this nature the best. Sosuke and Ponyo love each other; Chihiro and Haku too. No adult ever sees Totoro or the Catbus, although they can feel their presence in the rhythm of strange music in the air or a gust of wind (this may even extend to viewers; I had seen Totoro countless times, but it was my 3 year old son Liam who pointed out to me that the gust of wind blowing firewood from Satsuki’s hands near the start of the movie is probably the invisible Catbus passing by. ).

It’s not that the children are pure, innocent and unconditional – the young protagonists of Miyazaki are deeply human and imperfect. It is that they are open to the minds as adults are not. They do not publicize their experience of nature and the world through rituals of religion or calcified worldviews. Mr. Kusakabe may have to visit the Camphor Tree Shrine to talk to Totoro, but Satsuki and Mei don’t – they can find their way to him from their own backyard. Adults see what they expect to see. Children have low expectations of what is and is not hiding in the world; it is they who see shadows moving in the half-light of an abandoned amusement park, a goldfish returned in the form of a girl, or a small white spirit walking in the grass.

Miyazaki’s films do not invite us to any particular faith or even a belief in the supernatural, but they invite us to see the unexpected and to respect the spirit of trees and woods, rivers and seas. Like Totoro and Gran Mamare, their true nature and reasoning is beyond our comprehension. Call them kami, or gods, or spirits, or woodland creatures, or Mother Nature, or the environment. They are there if we know where to look, and their gifts are ready for us if we know how to ask. We only have to approach them like a child – like Satsuki, Mei, Chihiro, and Sosuke – with open eyes and hearts.

Screenshot: Studio Ghibli

Originally published in September 2017.

Austin Gilkeson was previously The toast‘s Tolkien Correspondent, and his writings have also been published at Catapult and The Cast of Wonders. He lives outside of Chicago with his wife and son.