Hayao Miyazaki: Authorship And Aesthetic Influence

Following on from the end of last year's discussion on the complexities of authorship, as well as last month's post on Studio Ghibli, this post will explore how much we can attribute certain aesthetic and stylistic elements to director Hayao Miyazaki. When we think about authorship in relation to either art, illustration or film and animation, we often draw upon a continuity of visual style, recurring images, particular colour palates, specific ways of presenting characters, objects or places. Salvador Dali's paintings do not look like anybody else's, the films of Wes Anderson are unmistakably his own. Miyazaki is no exception; we associate his films with particular stylistic traits that recur across his body of work. A strong environmental message, a fondness for fantastic but almost plausible technologies (most often drawing their look from the earliest days of air travel), the use of thick, oily slime as a means to denote corruption, a rich and densely populated mise-en-scene filled with elaborate architecture and vibrantly coloured characters – these elements can be found in many of Miyazaki's works. What I will be looking at now is an example that complicates the idea that we can describe Miyazaki as the definite origin of these aesthetic tropes.

During the 1980s Miyazaki – as well as other Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata – was involved in the turbulent production of Little Nemo. Although his ultimate contribution to the final product was practically zero, I will talk in detail about it as it bears more than a few passing resemblances to his directorial style. The film is an oddity in animation history, the ball started rolling on production as early as the late 1970s, but the final film wasn't realised until 1989. Based upon Winsor McCay's newspaper strip, the character is significant to animation buffs because McCay himself animated the Nemo cast in what is regarded by some as the first fully animated short in 1911 (there were in fact earlier instances of animation, but they lacked the same level of craftsmanship and 'believability' as McCay's three minute opus). On top of this historical significance, the film also boasts a veritable hoard of animation and fantasy 'superstars'; initially George Lucas and then Chuck Jones (the master of Looney Tunes) were each approached (and declined) to helm the project and the production itself was overseen by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson, two of the legendary Nine Old Men of Disney studios and authors of the definitive book on Disney animation The Illusion Of Life. The songs were provided by the Sherman Brothers (who scored The Jungle Book, Mary Poppins, The Many Adventures Of Winnie-The-Pooh, and Bedknobs And Broomsticks among others), and drafts of the story and script were provided by the likes of Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man), John Canemaker (animation scholar and historian as well as accomplished animator himself, such as the Oscar winning short The Moon And The Son), Chris Columbus (screenwriter of Gremlins and director of the first two Harry Potter films) and Jean Giraud (better known as the comic artist Moebius, whom I shall return to later). Some visual development was provided by artist Brian Froud (concept artist on Dark Crystal and Labyrinth) and the studio producing the film, TMS, was simultaneously working on Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira. And Brad Bird (The Incredibles and Ratatouille) briefly served as a producer.

With such a pedigree of talent, how could the film possibly fail? Well, it seems that the sheer weight of talent simply crushed the project into a rather dull and lifeless story that lacks much depth in either characterisation or direction, and yet - for those with an interest in the craft of animation itself - the film is actually beautifully designed and animated. The story follows young boy Nemo as he is summoned from his Edwardian New York life by the King of Dreams to become the heir of Slumberland. Unfortunately for all concerned, he gets mixed up with the mischievous Flip and accidentally releases Nightmare into the land of dreams. Nightmare kidnaps the King and Nemo sets off with a group of allies to rescue him from Nightmareland. Several aspects of the film's visual style resemble that of Miyazaki's films.

For instance, Slumberland itself is a highly ornate and elaborate setting, its vast and beautifully decorated palaces calling to mind the interiors of Yubaba's bath house in Spirited Away and even more so the fantasy-land setting of Howl's Moving Castle.

Little Nemo

Howl's Moving Castle

Spirited Away

Nemo also features vast and bustling mise-en-scene, filled with bright figures and strange contraptions. Not only does this evoke the atmosphere of the early peace-time scenes of Howl but also the Ghibli Museum short Imaginary Flying Machines.

Little Nemo

Howl's Moving Castle

Imaginary Flying Machines

A fascination with the early technology of flight is found not only in Nemo and the short, but also in a great many of Miyazaki's films (also worth noting that Bradbury has a similar fascination with the history of flight; one suspects that the flying squirrel Icarus – not found in the original strip – was an addition from Bradbury).

Little Nemo

Howl's Moving Castle

Laputa: Castle In The Sky

The King's playroom, filled with a variety of toys and conjuring up a sense of the 'outside on the inside' can also be related to the far less healthy playroom of the giant Baby from Spirited Away.

Little Nemo

Spirited Away

The presentation of Nightmare also evokes famous antagonists from Miyazaki's most popular works; the demon god from Princess Mononoke's opening, the corpulent No-Face from Spirited Away and the Witch of the Waste's slimy henchmen from Howl all share the viscous, oozing quality of sentient crude oil (or Shoggoths for those Lovecraft fans among us).

Little Nemo

Princess Mononoke

Spirited Away

Howl's Moving Castle

Nightmare's two emotionless pinpoints of red for eyes also resembles Mononoke's demon god.

Little Nemo

Princess Mononoke

All of these examples might suggest that Miyazaki's aesthetic and thematic concerns are so clear and strong that they shine through in a film that he was only involved in for a few months (and has openly stated was the worst experience of his career). But the eagle-eyed Miyazaki fan will already have picked up on the key detail here: Little Nemo was released in 1989, not only predating the cited films by at least eight years but – much more importantly – predating Miyazaki's adoption of these aesthetic preferences. Put another way, Little Nemo looked like Miyazaki before Miyazaki started to. By 1989, Miyazaki's feature career encompassed Castle Of Cagliostro, Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind, Laputa: Castle In The Sky, My Neighbour Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service. Aside from the fascination with flying machines, none of these other tropes had appeared in Miyazaki's own work.

So, what might be going on here? To answer this question, let us return to two of our famous faces from Nemo's production history – the comic writer and artist Jean Giraud a.k.a. Moebius and the original creator of the strip Winsor McCay. Giraud is perhaps most famous for his work for Metal Hurlant (the original French version of Heavy Metal). Not only is he responsible for both short and longer narrative comics, but he has collaborated with the likes of Alejandro Jodorowsky (cult director of El Topo and The Holy Mountain) on the unproduced movie epic of Dune and the comic saga The Incal. He was also the main visual stylist for Rene Laloux's animated sci-fi Les Maitres Du Temps. His style of illustration and art has a clear and identifiable look, and we can reel off several recurring elements: a fascination with vast, alien wildernesses and wastelands, populated by bizarre flora and fauna, exotic architecture that does not always seem to have a functional purpose and implies a long-forgotten history, and sweeping aerial 'shots' as characters (most famously the recurring hero Arzach) fly through the air.

Artwork by Moebius, including images from Les Maitres Du Temps

These elements can also be found in Miyazaki's Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind. Miyazaki has openly stated his love of Moebius' comic work and cites it as a major influence on Nausicaa and so the resemblance is unsurprising – it is a conscious homage.

Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind

Moebius/Giraud was not only responsible for one of the drafts of the screen story for Little Nemo, he also worked on visual development. Looking at the film, one suspects that the greatest influence comes in the second half of the film, once Slumberland has been destroyed and the characters venture into Nightmareland. The strange wastelands of each setting evoke the world of Arzach, albeit in a slightly more conventional vein.

Artwork by Moebius

Little Nemo

It is possible to see a clear resemblance in the purged Nightmareland from the end of Nemo with the purified caverns beneath the wastelands in Nausicaa.

Little Nemo

Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind

Miyazaki's directorial influence on the aesthetic of Nausicaa is undeniable, and we can clearly relate the themes and visuals of the film to other works by the director, but the film still remains tied to the aesthetic of the French comic artist. Let us now turn to Winsor McCay, the original creator of Nemo and his friends.

To say that McCay was a newspaper comic strip artist and earlier animator is a preposterous understatement. To say that McCay pioneered each of these mediums and pushed their artistic possibilities further than any other contemporary is far closer to the mark. Today, we think of early pre-Mickey Mouse animation in terms of the early mass-produced cartoons featuring heroes such as Felix the Cat or Koko the Clown. But McCay, with no prior reference point, animated fully rounded figures that looked consistent from all angles and displayed an array of minute details in their design and movement. Likewise, we might think today of Garfield or even Peanuts when we think of newspaper strip; a brief three or four panel gag. Back at the turn of the twentieth century, McCay was producing huge art-nouveau style images for the daily papers.

What these beautiful images demonstrate is that a) McCay was a bit of a genius, but b) the aesthetic of the 1980s movie draws heavily on the style of the original author/artist. I've argued that Nemo looked like a Miyazaki film almost a decade before Miyazaki made films that even looked like that, but could we say that McCay's own aesthetic and ideas have had an unconscious influence on Miyazaki? Could it be that his brief stint working on the film adaptation of McCay's work led to a belated/delayed influence; maybe the horrible experience of the actual production caused him to suppress any direct acknowledgement of the aesthetic style of the film, and these influences only came out years later, the suppressed finally making a return into Miyazaki's conscious design choices?

It's impossible to say, of course. It is also difficult to really recommend Little Nemo on the basis of its enjoyment-factor, but for those interested in the work of Miyazaki, for those in love with his particular visual style, it might not hurt to give the film a go, just to see a bizarre prophetic vision of the aesthetic that was yet to be born in Miyazaki's own work.

                                                                                                                                - P.S.