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Once again, Hayao Miyazaki retired and broke his promise and released a new work "What kind of life do you want to live". The film tells the story of a young shepherd who grows up through a fantasy journey. There is a saying among Ghibli fans: "The works that Hayao Miyazaki created after revoking his retirement are masterpieces." "My Neighbor Totoro", "Princess Mononoke", "Spirited Away", "Howl's Moving Castle" and other works were created in this way, and they were all great successes. "How Do You Want to Live Your Life" grossed more than 10 billion yen in Japan and won numerous awards, including an Oscar for Best Feature-Length Animation. Interestingly, this work was snubbed by Japanese film critics, and ordinary viewers also commented that they "couldn't understand it" and "the content was too obscure".
An obscure expression of "anti-war".
Kenichi Yamakawa, a researcher at Hayao Miyazaki's animation, said that Miyazaki's later works have a huge amount of information, and each short line contains multiple layers of meaning, and even if the voice actor's skills are perfect, it is impossible to convey every layer of meaning to the audience.
There is another unavoidable reason for Miyazaki's obscure expression in "What kind of life do you want to live": the previous work "The Wind Rises", which is roughly the same time background as this film, featured the real-life aircraft designer Jiro Horikoshi, involving his design of the Zero fighter, which caused quite a lot of waves when the movie was released.
The content of "What kind of life do you want to live" also involves the history from the late stage of the war to the defeat, and he had to be careful, so he adopted the fantasy form of "from the real world to the other world" in "My Neighbor Totoro" and "Spirited Away", projecting his situation and ideas about people under the war to the other world, so as not to be blamed, so he can only be vague or blank, which inevitably increases the difficulty of understanding.
However, viewers who are familiar with Miyazaki's past works will see that this film continues the elements and expressions of many of his previous works, and even the theme is coherent, such as the title "What kind of life do you want to live", you should understand that this is obviously a continuation of the theme of "Survive" in "Princess Mononoke" and "The Wind Rises, Only Try to Live This Road", tells how people overcome pain in harsh environments, how to choose the right direction of life in the face of divergent roads, and become a useful person.
A rare obedient teenager
Real man is a rare image of a well-behaved teenager in Miyazaki's works, he lacks the smart, lively, and upright character of Balu in "Castle in the Sky" and Dragonfly in "Witch Home Delivery Service", unlike Kanta in "My Neighbor Totoro" who is naughty but eager to help others, and does not have the sense of responsibility and mission of Asdidaka in "Princess Mononoke". He has a gloomy and cold personality, keeps his father and stepmother at a distance, does not make friends at school, habitually lies, is cunning, and even bribes old people with tobacco. He did not show affection for the child conceived by his stepmother, nor did he care about the old maid, and even was full of murderous intent towards the heron, making a bow and arrow to kill it. It can be said that the real person at the beginning has no feelings for people, no respect for life, and exudes the dangerous and crazy passion of a teenager.
The negative energy personality of the real person is obviously influenced by the strange atmosphere of wartime: for example, his mother died in the flames of air raids, he suddenly has a pregnant stepmother, which makes it difficult for him to accept, his father is busy with work and is considerate of real people on the surface, but in fact he is perfunctory and fails to fulfill his fatherly responsibilities, students bully him as a freshman, and even the heron constantly harasses him...... In the face of a noisy and noisy environment, real people can only vent the anguish of not being able to integrate into the world with the reckless and impulsive behavior of teenagers.
Another world leads to growth
The adventures of a real person in another world can be seen as his mother and great-uncle (i.e., the mother's uncle) reclaiming the unattended real person from the hands of his father (who is busy with work) and stepmother (who is pregnant), leading him, enlightening him, and putting him through a period of trials and tribulations, and finally getting on the right track and reinventing himself. Interestingly, both of them use knowledge (books) to induce and indoctrinate him, but in different directions (one only uses knowledge to guide himself, and the other uses knowledge to control the world), so the results are also different. The reason why it is difficult to survive or survive is precisely because people are often faced with such a choice that is so far from the slightest difference.
His deceased mother left him a copy of Genzaburo Yoshino's book "What kind of life do you want to live", hoping that after reading it, he would have the ability to think independently, see the world with his own eyes, and uphold the belief that "no matter how difficult and cruel the times are, please always live as a 'person'", and of course, the anti-war spirit.
The author of the novel, Genzaburo Yoshino, was an anti-war activist who had always adhered to an anti-war stance. For Hayao Miyazaki, who was born in 1941, Yoshino's novel influenced his life, and Yoshino's anti-war ideas probably formed an important source of his political thought. Towards the end of the film, the real person hears from his uncle that he is entrusted to "create a world without war with your hands", which can be seen as Miyazaki's message to the audience.
Uncle Tai wants to let the real person go another way. This person is one of the most interesting characters in the film, and Miyazaki projects his subtle words on this character. He was undoubtedly a well-educated intellectual—as soon as he entered the tower, he saw a library full of classic books, which was where his uncle studied. In the film, the old maid mentions that this person has read too much and gone crazy and disappeared. He disappeared from the human world, but became the lord of the underground world. The film points out that the tower and the giant meteorite above the head of the real man later saw by the Taigong suddenly fell from the sky before the Meiji Restoration, and the Taishu Gong made the stone into white building blocks of various geometric shapes in an attempt to build a smooth and pure perfect world (alluding to the utopian experiment of the intellectuals and elites at the time who tried to appropriate Western ideas and concepts to transform the country). Uncle Tai invited a real person who was related by blood to be his heir, and asked him to build a stone building block of his own to maintain the stability and balance of his perfect world that was about to collapse. Without hesitation, Majin rejected the invitation of his uncle, pointing out that it was impossible to build a pure and perfect world, because the so-called building blocks were not building blocks, but stones used to build tombs, which had been polluted by evil.
Uncle Tai didn't give up, and when the two met for the second time, they invited him to join the building block game again: "Look, these are unpolluted building blocks. You can use it to build your own tower, create a kingdom free of evil, and build a rich, peaceful and wonderful world. The real man pointed to the wound on his head and said, "I made this wound myself, and it is proof of my wickedness." I can't touch those stones, and I'll return to our world with Natsuko's mother (stepmother). ”
Uncle Tai is not the first person in Miyazaki's works to try to create a utopian world, and the villain of "Castle in the Sky" Romuska tries to seize the power of the Flying Stone to seize the power of the Castle in the Sky so that he can conquer and destroy the world at will, and he famously says: "The power of Laputa is the dream of mankind." It is not difficult to deduce from his ambition that "the tragedy caused by humanity stems from the dream of changing the world for the better." "Uncle Tai is clearly one of Romuska's kind, and it is even more terrifying to go one step further and make the world perfect and flawless.
The real person did not accept the guidance and temptation of the Tai Uncle because he saw that the underground world kingdom established by the Tai Uncle was not as pure and perfect as he said, and there was also a power hierarchy. The militaristic Parrot King and his army are at the top of the hierarchy, wielding the power to kill other creatures. The Parrot King even took control of his uncle in turn, shattering the perfect world he had built (a most likely allusion to the Japanese military department over the government during World War II). The experience of the real person in the underground world also made him realize that human nature is not a white stone, it has too many hues, and the world is full of mutilation and damage, and people can only survive in such a complex environment.
A woman's love opens up goodness
The real person admits that he also has an evil and dark side, and it is the love of many women in the film that opens his good side. "What kind of life do you want to live" left by my mother is a catalyst for the real growth of real people. In another world, she appeared as a girl and took care of real people everywhere, but she would rather be burned to death by fire in the future than leave with him, and decided to stay in her own time and space, so that she could give birth to him in the future. For her, being able to give birth to a real person and share some time with him is a kind of happiness (the understanding of the straight man Hayao Miyazaki).
Stepmother Natsuko was willing to die on the Grim Reaper platform, and she didn't let a real person come to save her, so she hurried out of the dangerous place. The old maid Kiriko is the guardian of real people in the real world and in the other world, where she is also a brave ferryman, she catches fish and feeds the souls of the dead named Walawala, so that they can be reincarnated again.
In contrast, the adult men in the film are miserable: the real man's father is busy building fighter jets and lacks love for his family. The uncle from another world is a madman who wants to create a perfect utopia, the parrot king is obviously a power-hungry and tyrannical militarist, and the middle-aged heron is both good and evil, cunning and treacherous, and a liar. A large part of the reason why the world has become a mess is due to them, and women use love and kindness to mend the world, so that people can see the beauty in the incompleteness. It is they who make real people understand how to live their lives honestly in this world of beauty, ugliness, good and evil.
13 blocks with another conjecture
In fact, the story of the uncle can be interpreted in another way. The Lords of the Other World, the Princess, represent the creators of closed-door ideas, who are often seen as "weirdos" and are isolated from the world because of their addiction to creation. The grandfather said that the world he created could only be inherited by relatives of direct blood, or he was alluding to the hereditary system of the Japanese art world.
In the film, Uncle Tai wants to build a perfect world out of 13 bricks, and 13 is said to be the number of feature films Miyazaki has directed so far. If the different world in the film is regarded as a symbol of the creative and artistic world, then for Uncle Tai, maintaining the order of this creative world is the meaning of his creation. For Miyazaki, how to maintain and continue the Ghibli animation career is a question that he has been thinking about.
Uncle Tai asked Zhenren to take over the responsibility of maintaining order in another world, hoping that he would create a better world. However, the real person refuses this request and wants to create something new on his own. In reality, Miyazaki tried to raise multiple heirs, including his son Goro Miyazaki, but they all failed. This film may also embody Miyazaki's bitter reflection and cold introspection on his creative life and animation career.
If "What kind of life do you want to live" is Miyazaki's 13th block, then will he take out the 14th block in the future?
(Beijing Youth Daily)