Studio Ghibli and the Allure of Unled Lives

もののけ姫 Princess Mononoke (1997)

My first Studio Ghibli movie was Princess Mononoke. When I saw it, I was sixteen and looking forward to a movie day in my Nature Writing class at Orange County School of the Arts; cockily, I thought I knew the extent of how deeply stories could affect me. Spoiler alert: I didn’t. I ended up stumbling out of that classroom in a daze, locked in a different, more beautiful world, unable to stop fixating on it even as the days passed and the blunt emotional force faded. Even now, when I think back to being in that darkened classroom, I get goosebumps.

I’m not alone in my wonder. Adam Savage, legendary co-creator of the show Mythbusters, is a passionate fan: in a Ted Talk entitled “My Love Letter to Cosplay,” he describes going to Comic-Con dressed as No-Face, a character from a Studio Ghibli film often pinpointed as one of their finest, Spirited Away. “If you don’t know about Spirited Away and its director, Hayao Miyazaki,” he says, “first of all, you’re welcome. This is a masterpiece, and one of my all-time favorite films.” He goes on to describe a scene where he walks the Comic-Con floor and, as No-Face does in Spirited Away, hands out gold coins to people who approach him. To his confusion, a few people immediately thrust the coins back into his hands — the confusion turns to delight as he realizes that, within the Spirited Away universe, it’s bad luck to take gold from No-Face. Though it’s not uncommon for fans to be so dedicated to a franchise that it bleeds into real life, Studio Ghibli stands apart in that the emotional attachments it draws with its audience seem as much a part of their “brand” as the movies themselves. This is a rare, pure achievement, and one that speaks to Studio Ghibli’s defining brilliance.Every Ghibli film leans towards the fantastical, albeit to varying degrees. Princess Mononoke is a full-fledged fantasy epic; Howl’s Moving Castle and Kiki’s Delivery Service imagine worlds not entirely different from our own, but still drastically altered by the presence of witches and demons and magical abilities; The Red Turtle and Ponyo find their footing by sprinkling fantasy into an Earth that’s, for all rights and purposes, the same as our own, if less violent and more beautiful.

崖の上のポニョ Ponyo (2008)

Every Ghibli film leans towards the fantastical, albeit to varying degrees. Princess Mononoke is a full-fledged fantasy epic; Howl’s Moving Castle and Kiki’s Delivery Service imagine worlds not entirely different from our own, but still drastically altered by the presence of witches and demons and magical abilities; The Red Turtle and Ponyo find their footing by sprinkling fantasy into an Earth that’s, for all rights and purposes, the same as our own, if less violent and more beautiful.

In all of these cases, however, I find that the most important parts of Studio Ghibli movies are often how they portray ordinary things. My Neighbor Totoro is one of the most easily quotable here: it fills a sunny home in the countryside with a loving, busy father, a loving, bedridden mother, and two imaginative and inseparable daughters. The bulk of the story is, of course, about Totoro, the Catbus, and other playful spirits that inhabit the world, but so much of the film seems to linger on everyday simplicities: a well-cooked meal, the dusty corners of an old house, the comfortable, proximity-based acquaintanceships we accumulate over the course of our lives. The worlds wouldn’t be what they are without fantasy, of course, but I think a strong case can be made that seeing the magic in the mundane is one of the reasons why Studio Ghibli is so effective.

This fixation can help us to look inwards, to rummage around in our own lives for the simple beauties that lie therein. Sometimes, we find them — the deep greens of the plants after a refreshing afternoon rain, the joy of smiling at an elderly neighbor, the meditativeness of a post-work-day bus ride where golden light echoes across every surface. When we keep our distance, Ghibli can help us appreciate them more, see them for the very real magic that they are.

となりのトトロ My Neighbor Totoro (1998)

Character arcs go unresolved; conflict stretches out meaninglessly, egged on by insurmountable hatreds and prejudices; the hand of the writer is as invisible as it is merciless, just as quick to toss a speeding cement truck at you as to shove you into the arms of a person you’ll fall in love with. This chronic unfairness is the source of a uniquely Ghibli feeling, one that mixes our sensibilities about wanderlust, romance, adventure, natural beauty, encroaching mortality, and countless other distinctly human preoccupations into a poultice of cosmic FOMO that can color our experiences with the fictional universes we love so much. We’re desperate, in a way, to yank that magic out of the animated world and spread it across our own lives like jam on a bone-dry piece of toast. We have to believe that, for every viewer of My Neighbor Totoro, there’s a charming old house waiting for them in the countryside, long, relaxed decades filled with love and trifling problems eager to be experienced, and an environment of stunning beauty crying to be pranced in. All we have to do is pack our bags, get in our cute, primary-colored cars, and go to it. Right?

I recently read an article in The New Yorker by journalist and writer Joshua Rothman titled “What If You Could Do It All Over?” It’s a brilliant, multi-faceted take on the topic of imagining alternate lives. I can’t hope to cover it all here — in fact, Rothman seems to spend a good deal of the piece just coping with the amount of material the topic generates — but he brings up a story that pokes holes in our conception of what an “alternate life” can promise. His mother, a lawyer, led a successful life, but never found contentment. She decided to buy a remote house in the Virginia countryside — a lifelong dream, but where, “unsettled and lonely, she grew isolated and drank too much.” She ended up having a stroke that destroyed most of who she was. “Not long after the stroke, I made one last visit to her house, to clear it out before it sold. I took a photo of her vegetable garden, gone to seed — the closest she ever came to living the life she’d pictured.”

魔女の宅急便 Kiki’s Delivery Service

Yeesh. Suddenly, making a drastic decision to move to the countryside and live out My Neighbor Totoro sounds less appealing. But the agony of beholding our alternate lives is chiefly derived from the fact that we don’t know what awaits us: for every story of someone who tried to make a massive change to their life and ended up destroying it, there’s the story of someone who sold everything they owned, bought a one-way ticket to Alaska, and is now happier than they ever thought they’d be. When it comes down to it, everything we do has implications for ourselves that are impossible to know and more numerous than grains of sand on the beach. With every life decision, we could be creating and destroying potential friends, lovers, career paths, stories, and moments of joy without realizing it; the bigger the decision, the bigger the destruction left in its wake. It’s an incredibly frustrating thought — our mortality is never more apparent than when we consider what we will and won’t be able to do with our time on Earth — and can send us into spirals of depression and inaction.

Then again, I don’t think the solution is to become fantasy-obsessed or close-minded. This existential issue is like most existential issues in that its solution is not binary — our best possible relationship with our unled lives (as well as the one that Studio Ghibli by nature encourages) depends on a careful balance of reality and fantasy. Sometimes, we’ll take ridiculous risks to create a life that may not be possible for ourselves. Other times, we’ll exercise restraint, stick to the job that pays and the city blocks we know and the life we’re comfortable with. Assigning the label “positive” or “negative” to either feeling is trivial; it’s most important to realize that both are an essential part of being human.

One day, after feeling trapped by the pandemic, my studies, and feelings of general dissatisfaction, I took a walk. It wasn’t the first walk I’d taken since March of 2020, nor would it be the last, but something was different about that day. I was wearing one of my favorite jackets (a fleece-lined khaki barn coat — my dad’s) and my Docs, which I loved to hear clonking along on the asphalt. The sky was the pinkest I’d seen in ages — the clouds, which had been casting a light rain for most of the day, were parted in tufts and shot through with soft, Monet-worthy plumes of color. As I ambled peacefully down the sidewalk, I waved to a couple of neighbors, listened to the joyous shouting of the neighborhood kids, and kicked a few of the pebbles foolish enough to stand in my way.

In that span of time, the world seemed to be so full of magic that I was desperate to cling onto it, to remember every detail, to lock it up in a miniature chest so I could experience it again someday. I was home, a place I often dream of escaping, and yet it was the most Ghibli-esque moment I’d experienced in a long, long time.