Fig. 1: I'm not sure why I chose to portray Totoro in a toga praetexta -- perhaps he has a curule magistracy? Further research is required. (Copyright Emma Arnold 2024, all rights reserved.)
One element which has always attracted me to Studio Ghibli's productions is the portrayal of grass. Long, lustrous grass, occasionally rice paddies, coloured in hues of saturated green and waving in the wind. As much as the grass-look may be part of the trademarked aesthetics of a Ghibli movie, I can't help but think that its presence in so many productions is part of a larger strategy of using pastoral space and imagery to negotiate urban and rural, traditional and modern, and Western and Japanese.
At first glance, the lush look of many scenes simply appears to be a reinterpretation of the locus amoenus, the imaginary but pleasant rural retreat of ancient tradition. The mossy glade in which the giant Totoro reclines shows us nature as peaceful, untouched, and timeless. Indeed, some of the characters within the films themselves view the countryside through such a lens. "My Neighbour Totoro," for example, is premised on the countryside offering some kind of superior restorative quality for Sasuki and Mei's ailing mother. In this case, the pastoral space is presented as someplace where you can "get away from it all" in a conventional sense. In this respect, Ghibli pastorals are the heirs to the elegiac tradition. Tibullus 1.1, 1.5, and 1.10, for example, cast the rural life as a place where personal and political problems fade away, and the aesthetic pleasures of nature come to the fore. I confess, and I suspect I am not alone in this, that this is one of the reasons why I find Ghibli films therapeutic. Their portrayal of the world can be not just nostalgic, but also soothingly stable.
However, Ghibli films utilise the pastoral in more varied and subtle ways than simple escapism. A common pattern in Ghibli films is the movement outwards from urban into rural space triggering the unfolding of narrative action. "Totoro," "Howl's Moving Castle," "When Marnie was here," "Only Yesterday," and "Princess Mononoke" all begin with the outwards movement. In the case of "Marnie" and "Only Yesterday" the movement is couched as a return. In other scenarios, it is more like an exile; for Sophie in "Moving Castle" her departure from town is to hide her transformation into an old woman and to seek a way of breaking the spell.
In "Princess Mononoke" the exile element is explicit -- the curse placed on Prince Ashitaka by the wild boar means that he can no longer stay within his community, and instead must venture out into the wilderness. The division between the space of the human community and rural space becomes a way of visualising in-groups and out-groups. At the same time, the manner in which all these characters face a predicament in urban (or social) space which they attempt to solve by moving into rural space illustrates the illusory nature of the locus amoenus: human beings think going into rural space will solve their problems, when in actuality, human beings carry their problems with them.
Following the narrative of "Princess Mononoke," viewers discover that there is no space, past or present, urban or rural, which is immune from human fallibility. "Mononoke," which is set in a semi-fantastical, feudal Japan, shares remarkable parallels with the works of Vergil in the way in which it balances myth and history and uses the portrayal of nature to demonstrate the broader consequences of human action.
Much like Vergil's world in the Aeneid, the forests which fill "Princess Mononoke" harbour diverse and powerful spirits. This numinous quality is precisely what makes the human-nature relationship so fraught. Each interaction between a human being and the environment is loaded with the potential for divine retribution. The shooting of the Boar-spirit with a bullet, leading to it transforming into a demon, serves the same narrative role as the shooting of Sylvia's stag in Book 7 of the Aeneid. The maiming of a sacred creature leads to the unravelling of the stability of the rural space -- mankind's adversarial relationship with nature spirals into conflict within humanity itself.
Similarly, both Vergil and Miyazaki make an explicit tie between the destruction of nature and imperialism. The eventual beheading of the Forest Spirit is motivated by the emperor's desire for immortality, much as Aeneas' repeated incursions into the landscape are motivated by his need to continue the Trojan state. Indeed, the final human-nature interaction in the Aeneid is also a destructive one -- in flattening the battlefield for Aeneas and Turnus, the Trojans destroy a sacred tree stump. While there are seemingly no consequences for this within the text itself, there is the sense of irreversible damage. The uprooting of the tree is a point of no return for Trojans. Although they achieve their objectives, their regime will forever be tainted with endless killing, much as the forest of "Mononoke" can never again return to its pristine state once the Forest Spirit has been attacked.
These narratives demonstrate an extreme outcome for the antagonism between human beings and nature. However, human beings, in both the pastoral tradition and Ghibli, are also capable of interacting with the pastoral space in a way which is more nuanced. This is particularly true of Ghibli's semi-historical films, where the rural space of a modernising Japan reveals the extent to which society has changed, and the ways in which it has remained constant.
These films share the ethos of Hellenistic Greek pastorals in their search for a stable identity within a culturally fluid world. The pastorals of Theocritus, and the prose version offered by Longus, developed in a period when what it meant to be Greek was drastically changing. The city-state system had broken down, to be replaced by monarchy, first under Greek-speaking potentates, and eventually under the Roman empire. This further entailed the growth of cities and a change in the population's relationship to the land itself. As more people lived in cities, the owning and farming of rural space became the business of the ultra-rich and the enslaved, respectively. The result of this was a sense of both nostalgia for a simpler time (and also a time free of imperialism), and a search within the rural space for solutions to the inequality and moral decline this polarisation had caused.
We can see these same trends within Studio Ghibli's portrayals of 20th-century Japan. This tension between competing cultures is perhaps most visible in "From Up on Poppy Hill," which is set in Yokohama in 1963, in the aftermath of the Korean War and before the 1964 Olympics. The conflict between tradition and modernity is symbolised by the struggle between students and school administration over whether to demolish the original club house at the high school. However, it is the landscape in which these events take place which reveals the broader implications of this conflict.
Goro Miyazaki, who directed this particular film, and whose main interest before inheriting the director's role was urban greening, noted in an interview that he wanted to capture the contrast between the extremely developed centre of Yokohama and its rural environs. Thus, at transitional moments in the plot, we see the heroine, Umi, walking through the agricultural fields around the city, on a dirt track edged with trees and wildflowers. Umi's movement between the two visual worlds of agricultural and industrial, Westernised Japan reflects a society in transition.
While "Poppy Hill" emphasises the choice people face in remembering their own culture or adopting a new one, the restorative potential of the rural landscape is most deeply explored in "Only Yesterday." Told through a combination of flashbacks and direct narration, "Only Yesterday" tells the story of one woman's search for fulfilment in life. Although Taeko works most of the year as an office worker in Tokyo, each summer she goes to work on a safflower farm. Not only does this enable a stark visual contrast between the built environment of her regular work and childhood flashbacks and the farm, but the safflower itself also carries a cultural weight. The labour-intensive and painful harvesting of the safflower blossoms in order to make traditional red cosmetics (the Japanese for safflower is benihana, or "blush flower") reflects the way in which the past is not purely positive. History, both on the national and personal levels, can be painful. However, the sense of collaboration and achievement which the rural life affords Taeko serves as a remedy for the alienation she has felt since she was a child in her urban life. Much like Longus' Daphnis and Chloe, "Only Yesterday" shows rural life, not as materially perfect, but as more emotionally complete than urban existence.
Like ancient pastorals, Studio Ghibli films can thus be enjoyed at a number of levels. While the stylised and aestheticised portrayal of nature is soothing and attractive, the interaction between human beings and their environment proves a powerful means to explore culture, history, and our place in the world.
Illustration by the author. Copyright Emma Arnold 2024, all rights reserved.