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The following article comes from Sister E's Little Fairy, the author Sister E and the beautiful girls
It was late at night when I walked out of the movie theater yesterday, and the heron, the boy, the tower, the pelican, the parrot, the sea of the dead, and the great uncle ...... The rushing imagery washed over me like a river, making it difficult for me to answer in one sentence: what exactly is the film about.
Starting from "The Goldfish on the Edge of the Cliff", Miyazaki has to some extent given way to a part of the story for the stream of consciousness and metaphor, this "What kind of life do you want to live" goes further, the second half is almost completely stream of consciousness, plus a slightly hasty ending, when the movie ends, many viewers are puzzled.
But Miyazaki's works can always be interpreted, just like Freud facing the visitor on the recliner, and although the visitor's dreams are intertwined in time and space, and the imagery is chaotic, there is always a code that can be successfully interpreted.
(There are deep spoilers ahead, so I don't like to be cautious.) ）
01 Another World: Hayao Miyazaki's "Time Imagination"
The title of "What Life Do You Want to Live" is taken from the novel of the same name by Genzaburo Yoshino, and the story frame is from John Connolly's "The Book of Lost Things" (Hayao Miyazaki wrote the foreword to the Japanese translation of the book).
"The Book of Lost Things" is about the boy David's mother dies and he moves to live with his father's remarried wife Rose, David does not accept his stepmother and locks himself in Uncle Rose's room all day long. In this mysterious room, where the uncle's avid scholar disappeared many years ago, David's dreams often appear in twisted people, informing him of his mother's whereabouts, books make sounds, and visions lead him to the garden one night and find the entrance to another world.
The movie "You" is also based on the story of the boy Shepherd's "Looking for His Mother in a Different World", which integrates many autobiographical elements of Hayao Miyazaki, and also adds his view of time and history. There are many interpretations of the film's historical metaphors on the Internet, but what I am more interested in is Miyazaki's imagination of "time" in the movie.
Like "The Book of Lost Things", the real world, dreams, and other worlds constitute the triple time and space of the film.
Real-world time is linear. Makijin's mother, Hisako, died in a bombing at the end of the Pacific War, and his father, Katsuichi, continued to open a munitions factory to make money, and continued to marry Hisako's own sister Natsuko. After Natsuko became pregnant, her father took Mato from Tokyo to live in the mansion where her mother's family lived. The mansion was built by Hisako and Natsuko's long-missing uncle, and there is a long-sealed stone tower near the house. On the first day he arrived at the house, he saw a mysterious heron, and this heron had been guiding him into the stone tower. The real person has always been very resistant to his stepmother, and he also has mixed feelings for his father. After seeing his father and stepmother hot, he smashed his head with a stone on the way out of school under the pretext of being bullied, successfully causing his father's concern and his stepmother's self-blame. Later, the stepmother Natsuko mysteriously disappeared, and the real person followed the heron into the stone tower and came to another world to find the truth about the life of her biological mother and stepmother.
The real-world story begins with the "Tokyo Bombing", which doomed the Japanese army to defeat in World War II, and ends two years after Japan's defeat. The boy lost his mother in the fire, went to another world to find his stepmother Natsuko, and finally reconciled with his father and stepmother, and also chose to face everything in the real world and live a good life.
Dreams are part of the non-linear narrative in the film.
Dreams are a bridge between the real world and the other world, and a way for characters from the other world to communicate with real people. There are two dreams I remember: one is a real person dreaming of a mother in the midst of fire smiling and telling him, "Mom is not afraid of fire." (implying that her mother Hisako exists as a fire girl in another world), and the other is that after being captured by the parrot army in the other world, the real person dreams that he comes to his uncle, who reveals to him the secrets of the building blocks and the world (the uncle communicates directly with the real person in the dream). The dreams in the film appear in bulk, which can be regarded as a kind of narrative trick, weakening the integrity of the story and paving the way for the grand imagery and complex allusions of the other world.
Another world is an imagination of "time" in Miyazaki's works.
As early as Spirited Away, I found that Miyazaki's view of "time" was similar to that of Proust and Benjamin. Rather than the "linear time" displayed by the physical clock, the old man prefers to imagine time as a labyrinthine "space", which is the common "different world" in Miyazaki's films.
The "soup house" in "Spirited Away" is such a space that folds the past, present, and future, and communicates the three worlds of people, ghosts, and gods. Physical time seems to stand still in the soup house (after Chihiro walks out of the other world, she finds that her parents are still in front of the car and nothing has happened), but everything that happens in the whole soup house and the other world is like a haha mirror that distorts the past, present, and future of the real world: the luxury that prevailed during the bubble economy, the money-worshipping culture that polluted even the faceless man with a pure nature, the river god who is filled with industrial waste, and the giant baby who symbolizes "Heisei waste......
What is the future?"Future" is when Chihiro helps Hakuryu regain his lost name, the past and the present overlap in Hakrayu's body, and the original god returns to its place and turns into a river. Just like his name - Hayami Amber River, out of the lost life will become an endless river, the "past" will never disappear, it will appear endlessly, waiting to be recognized by the "present", and then become the "future".
"What kind of life do you want to live" depicts "time" as a mysterious tower from the floor of the tower, from which you can sink into a different world where the past, present, and future overlap.
In another world, time takes the form of space: on the other side of the sea is a cemetery with golden arches, the spirits of the dead become the sails of the sea, and the fish of the sea nourish the "warawara" that is about to fly into the air and reincarnate with their internal organs......
Miyazaki's "imagination of time" is most clearly expressed in the hotel-like corridor in his uncle's temple, with many differently numbered gates on both sides, each leading to the real world and corresponding to a different time and space. How interesting, time is not an infinite line, but a complex and intertwined space, the past and the future exist at the same time, and it is not immutable, it all depends on the choice of the person who opens this door "at this moment". Mato and Natsuko choose to go back to the day they disappeared, but Hisako (Fire Girl) rejects Maru's invitation to "go back together" and opens another door - she accepts her fate of dying in the Tokyo Fire in order for Majin to be born.
By the way, there is another "evidence" in the "time spatialization" in the film: the book "What kind of life do you want to live" left by her mother Hisako to the real person.
After her mother's death, Majin accidentally found the book her mother had left for her in Natsuko's mansion, and the title page read "For Majin when she grows up". Mother's note strengthens the determination of the real person to follow the heron to find his mother in another world, and in the other world, the young girl Hisako (Fire Girl) also calmly walks through the door to death because of her encounter with her son, leaving the real person with kind advice and blessings in advance.
I'm reminded of a quote from Benjamin:
"There is a secret agreement between the people of the past and the living. Our arrival is in earthly anticipation. Like our predecessors, we have been endowed with a faint messianic power. ”
Fate is whirling, time is complex and intersecting, and the beginning of everything also contains the seed of the end. But in Miyazaki's world, brave and pure young people are always blessed, and they will eventually redeem the past, face the present, and walk into the future without looking back.
02 The River of Imagery: A Metaphorical Interpretation in Film
It is much easier to solve the problem of "time imagination in another world", and then interpret the imagery and metaphor in the movie according to the map.
But I don't recommend doing this strictly, because it will inevitably over-interpret, misinterpret, and destroy the grand imagination and artistic conception.
First of all, Ghibli has publicly interpreted some of the imagery: Makijin's origin and life are taken from the childhood experience of Hayao Miyazaki himself, who also had a father who ran a munitions factory during the war and followed his mother's death. Miyazaki does not shy away from the dark side of real people in the film (deliberately smashing his head with a stone), and he makes a sincere and weighty confession of his childhood.
Toshio Suzuki, chairman of Ghibli, said in an interview that "Uncle Tai" is Takahata who led Miyazaki on the path of animation, and "Heron" is himself—"The scene of Makima and Heron sitting side by side and chatting is a detailed representation of the conversation between the two of us." In the movie, Hayao Miyazaki refused to inherit the different world of his uncle and chose to live his own life, while also completing his farewell to his old friend Takahata.
As for the metaphors of other images, there are already many voices on the Internet, some I agree, some disagree, and many details still need to be supported by two or three brushes:
For example, the Black Tower that fell from the sky in the Meiji era symbolized the history of the "Black Ship Incident" that broke Japan's isolation from the rest of the world. The pelicans that devour the warawara may be soldiers who have been drawn into wars under the colonial expansion policy that began in the Taisho era, or they may be thieves and rogues among the Japanese people.
The Parrot Legion symbolizes militarism, and the Parrot King once had to compete with his uncle for the management of the world, and in the end, it was the Parrot King who destroyed the world built by the uncle's building blocks, so the other world collapsed with the reality of Japan as an invader during World War II. Natsuko, who was imprisoned in the delivery room by the Parrot Legion, may be the Showa people who were kidnapped by militarism, and the Parrot Legion intended Natsuko to give birth to a baby in the delivery room in another world, that is, to brainwash the new generation with militarism.
The image of the Fire Lady is more complicated, she belongs to the part of the enforcers in the other world, helping her uncle maintain order and punishing the pelicans for rebellion, but she does not hesitate to burn the innocent Warawara in the pursuit of the pelicans; she and the parrot army do not interfere with each other, but if you interfere with what the parrot army wants to do, the parrot army will also be taken hostage by the parrot army to discuss the transfer of power with the uncle.
Miyazaki's anti-war intentions are obvious, but it is difficult to solve the puzzle of the imagery of the whole film, after all, the old man himself said: "Maybe it's incomprehensible." I have some parts of myself that I still don't understand. ”
epilogue
More than once I thought of Benjamin, the "new angel" he mentioned in his Theses on the Philosophy of History.
His face turned to the past, to the ruins and corpses. The angel wanted to stop and wake up the dead and redeem this broken world, but a storm called "progress" blew from heaven, which irresistibly swept the angel towards the future with his back to him.
Hayao Miyazaki's face is also forever facing his childhood and youth, facing the ruins of time that are piling up higher and higher in front of him, he tries his best to resist the storm and physiological aging of the AI and short video era, stopping to sculpt the ruins into soup houses, cliffs and towers......
This is a book of life for an elderly creator, who inscribed it on the title page and placed it in an old mansion, where someone would find and read it.
It doesn't matter if you can't find it, the title of the book is not a declarative sentence in the first place.
-❤️ This article is reprinted from Sister E's text-only self-reserved place: Sister E Little Fairy ❤️-
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