Imaginary Worlds - Miyazaki Imagines an Environment

Episode Date: April 26, 2023

This summer, Hayao Miyazaki will be releasing his final animated film before retiring. Environmental stewardship has been a consistent theme throughout his work, from My Neighbor Totoro to Spirited Away to Princess Mononoke. But what exactly has he been saying all this time about our relationship to the natural world? I gather a panel of experts to discuss the worlds that Miyazaki creates, and how his stories tap into current debates around the climate crisis. Featuring Yuan Pan, lecturer on Environmental Management at the University of Reading, and environmental journalists and authors Isaac Yuen and Emma Marris.   This episode is sponsored by ExpressVPN and Factor. Our ad partner is Multitude. If you’re interested in advertising on Imaginary Worlds, you can contact them here or email us at [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Way back in the mid-1990s, I was an animation student at CalArts. Our teachers used to show us clips for inspiration, like scenes from old Looney Tunes or classic Disney movies. I heard about this great animation teacher who, at the time, was working on the Iron Giant. I was assigned to a different teacher who was good, but I wanted to hear this other guy that everyone was raving about. So one night, I snuck into his class.

The lights were dim, I quietly found a seat, and he was showing a scene from a Japanese animated film by Hayao Miyazaki. This was years before Miyazaki would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Film with Spirited Away. It was also many years before his other movies, like Howl's Moving Castle or Ponyo, would play in multiplexes across America. Back then, I didn't know anything about Miyazaki. And before the teacher played the clip, he was saying that American animation tends to come out of vaudeville.

The artists often treat the backgrounds like backdrops on a stage. But Miyazaki spends a huge amount of time building a sense of environment. And then he showed us a scene from the film My Neighbor Totoro. These two little girls are in a forest. It's raining. They're waiting for their father to arrive on a bus. The teacher said, notice how long this sequence goes on for. We see the rain hit every single object from all these different angles.

At one point, a man rides by on a rickety old bicycle. We even cut away to a toad slowly walking on the dirt. If this was a Hollywood animated movie, that toad would need to be part of a gag. But it's just there, setting the scene. The older girl is carrying her baby sister on her back because she fell asleep. And the older girl is h her baby sister on her back because she fell asleep. And the older girl is huddling under an umbrella. Suddenly, she realizes a gigantic furry creature is standing right next to her at the bus stop. They stand next to each other for a while, exchanging glances.

It's an awkward moment for both of them, even though this giant furry creature is more than twice her size. Finally, she breaks the tension. Totoro? The teacher stopped the clip and asked, Did you feel like you were there in that rainstorm? We all murmured, yes, totally mesmerized. And I became a Miyazaki fan for life. I learned over time that Miyazaki is interested in not just creating a sense of environment.

He cares deeply about protecting the environment. It's a theme in all of his work. And that theme is laid out the most explicitly in his movie Princess Mononoke. By the way, in this episode, we'll be hearing the English dubbed versions of the films. And we will be giving away a few spoilers. Although I don't think the plots of these films are as important as the experiences that you have and the feelings you have when you're watching his films. Princess Mononoke takes place in feudal Japan. It's about a battle between humans, who want to clear the forest, and forest creatures, who are led by gigantic animal gods.

The heroes are a teenage prince named Ashitaka and a teenage girl named San. San was raised in the forest by a wolf goddess called Moro. And in this scene, they're facing off against an army of 10 foot tall boars. We are here to kill the humans and save the forest. Why are there humans here, Moro? Humans are everywhere these days. Go back to your own mountain. Kill them there. The girl is San, my daughter. We will kill them here.

We will save this forest. What is that other human doing here? He was shot, and then the Great Spirit healed his wound. This man is not our enemy. The enemy that San and the other animals want to kill is Lady Abashi. She is the head of a village called Irontown, and she has a fearsome army. In a Hollywood movie, Lady Abashi would be a clear-cut villain. But she's nuanced and complicated. She does terrible things, but she's hard to hate.

Prince Ashitaka tries to be a peacemaker between the humans and the animals. This is the latest rifle that I've asked these people to design. The ones we brought here have turned out to be too heavy. These will kill forest monsters and pierce the thickest samurai armor. First you steal the boar's forest from him, then transform him into a demon. Now you're making even deadlier weapons. How much more hatred and pain do you think we need? Yes, I'm the one who shot the boar. And I'm sorry that you suffer. I truly am.

That brainless pig. I'm the one he should have put a curse on, not you. This summer, Miyazaki will be releasing his final film. Supposedly, he's retired more than once before. But this time he says he is actually really going to retire. A generation of people have now grown up on his films. And the movies are a joy to watch. But the messages aren't always clear.

They require a lot of contemplation. So I gathered together a panel of experts to discuss what Miyazaki has been saying for the last several decades, and whether audiences have been closely paying attention. Our panel includes Isaac Ewan. He is a Canadian journalist who grew up in Hong Kong. And I asked him, what was the first Miyazaki movie that he saw that made him think about environmental issues? It's a formative memory for me.

I was in Hong Kong and I was about five or six when I first went to the movie theater with my aunts and saw this movie called Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, and I was like, oh, this is another cartoon. Great, you know. But then, you know, at the end, I remember this, the scene at the end where she kind of sacrifices herself to protect the insects or the insects sort of overrun her. This is a common theme in Miyazaki's work. A hero or a heroine is willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. The magical animals, in this case giant insects, respond with a power of rebirth and renewal.

This is just something that connected with me in a way where I think it kind of almost shaped the trajectory of my life in terms of what I care about, in terms of the environmental message, which is steeped all throughout the film. But this idea of protection and stewardship was really meaningful for me. Our next guest is Yuan Pan. She is a lecturer on environmental management at the University of Reading in the UK. lecturer on environmental management at the University of Reading in the UK. I guess for me, because I'm British born Chinese, so I do go back to China as a child. It is a massive, he is the most massive cultural icon Miyazaki in the whole of East Asia, like Disney. So I guess like Totoro was always in the background. I always saw Totoro everywhere. And I saw snippets of the film when I was younger, but I don't remember much.

But obviously as I grew older, I really wanted to be a conservation scientist. And I remember I think one of my friends saying you should watch Princesses Mononoke. And I think I saw that as a teenager and I think that really resonated with me. I think what's interesting is as a lecturer now, now those things are in the film are massive buzzwords right now in my field of research, apart from, you know, Miyazaki picked up on them all those years ago. Finally, we have Emma Maris. She is an environmental journalist who challenges how we view the concept of nature. She also first discovered Miyazaki when Princess Mononoke came

out. In 1999, it was the first film of his to get a major theatrical release in the United States. At the time, Emma was in high school, working in a movie theater. One of my jobs was to go into the movie for the last, you know, sometimes we'd go in for like the first couple of minutes, a couple of seconds just to make sure that it was lined up right. And also I would go in at the end to kind of supervise the emptying of the auditorium. And so I saw the end of that movie, I don't know, a hundred times or something like that. And for me, the fact that it was an environmental movie seemed really obvious. movie seemed really obvious but what really puzzled me was actually the end of the movie where the protagonist says okay i've been through this incredibly harrowing brutal war between nature and

civilization and so now i'm going to go back to irontown and help them rebuild and i was so confused by that i was like but those are the bad guys because i was stuck in this really uh good guys bad guys humans are the bad guys nature is the good guys kind of this was Seattle in the 90s with the old growth forests and the timber wars and I just couldn't wrap my head around that ending um but I just re-watched it today and it makes so much more sense to me now and now that I've written two books trying to deconstruct the human nature dichotomy it actually uh kind of resonates with me in a way it didn't. But I had the poster up in my teenage bedroom.

I mean, I loved the film at the time. So those are our three panelists. And our roundtable discussion is after the break. One thing I love about Miyazaki films is that there aren't clear bad guys, per se. The antagonists might do bad things, but in the end, they're always redeemed, or we come to understand them. I mean, today, that's more common in Hollywood movies, but when I first started watching Miyazaki's films in the 1990s and early 2000s, started watching Miyazaki's films in the 1990s and early 2000s, that felt revolutionary to me.

So I asked our group, how does Miyazaki's sense of morality play into the stories that he tells about the environment? Yuan answered first. So I think this ties to a lot of different things. The fact that Eastern philosophy and religion is fundamentally different from Western philosophy and religion. That in fact, if you look at Princess Mononoke, there is a duality of nature. So the forest spirit in Mononoke, the spirit, I'll call it they, they're not inherently evil. They're not bad or good. They just are. That's what nature is. So I think in my teaching in environmental sciences, it can be quite easy to say, now in my research, we have these things called ecosystem services, which is a big buzzword right now. The benefits that we get from nature. It can be quite

easy to say that nature brings us these benefits. Nature also brings us these benefits or these services, we can call them. But it just does. It isn't good or evil. Nature doesn't really care about humans per se. It just exists by itself. And I think it can be quite easy for conservation scientists, especially in the West, to kind of romanticize nature. To say that nature is this pristine place with lots of beauty, which it is. But let's not forget, you know, things like COVID, bacteria, viruses, they also come from nature. But nature isn't good or bad per se. And I think Miyazaki captures that quite well in his films. Well, yeah, people keep bringing up Princess Nemanja. Okay, let's just let's talk about the film because it's the movie that is the most

explicitly environmental in its themes. You know, what can we in looking at that film and the messages of the film and the way that the story plays out in the characters what you know what are the issues that he's wrestling with and how do they reflect issues he continues to wrestle with but perhaps the most kind of explicitly in princess mononoke so i think one of the things that is still a major thing right now in the environmental sciences is deforestation, or as sometimes we like to call it, but some researchers do no longer like to call it that, human-worldlife conflict. That is a common theme right now that is happening around the world. Can you hear me, princess of beasts? If it's me you want, here I am. If you seek revenge for all the animals we've killed,

well, there are two women down here whom I'd like you to meet. They want revenge as well for husbands killed by your wolves. Come on out, you little witch. My husband's dead because of you. Lady Eboshi is a really interesting character. And I've seen this play out in real life, that a lot of people can think we can label things like poachers, you know, as the bad people. But when you get to know them, you know, not saying all poachers are

great people, but some of them is because, you know, if they get a critically endangered species that can feed their family for an entire year, and they're living below the poverty line, they need money. And if that way of money is sometimes destroying nature's resources, that might be the only way for them to move forward. And I think that question still stands today, looking at Mononoke. It still has a lot of the important research questions we're trying to address right now in environmental sciences. I just noticed this when I was re-watching Mononoke on the train today that just blew my mind because I can't remember noticing this the 10 other times I've watched the movie but when um the forest spirit is walking um plants sprout up from its footsteps um which one might kind of predict it's a forest spirit but

then they instantly die before he or it ever takes its foot away and i hadn't noticed that tiny little detail before and i love it so much because this forest spirit is not just the spirit of life it's also the spirit of death on the other side the every footstep is the entire ecosystem cycle from the spring the fall the winter the decay the rot the. It's all there in every single footstep. And I think it's maybe because of that craft of animation, the time spent with every frame, all that hand-done work, that each footstep kind of contains within it almost like the entire film. I'm just thinking of another film in the 90s as a parallel, something like Ferngully.

We did it, Zack. Now Hexes can never harm Ferngully again. But humans still could. That's why I have to go back. you know compare this with princess mononoke and how the message is is very different even though you know you're dealing with certain forces that are the same deforestation industrialization but it's like you get this this you know i'm gonna say it like avatar-esque white protagonist that goes in and understands from this natural world, not like this is wrong. And then there's like these forces that are so black and white.

And I love to rewatch things to see if they hold up. And that is not something that holds up. Yeah, I think what Isaac said is actually quite important. I think fangully is definitely interesting. So I have talked about this with my fellow researchers. So lots of them have children and they have compared their children watching Fern Gully. Now, some of them are a bit too young.

I was like, don't watch Princess Mononoke. It's a bit too violent. But even compared to Totoro, they were saying they feel like as environmental researchers, they probably wouldn't recommend their children watching Fern Gully again because it is quite a simple film. It isn't something that I would, it's not that I didn't like it.

I liked that film. It was environmental. But it's not something that you would go back to watch again and think. I think that's the issue with the main thing with Miyazaki's films, that it challenges you to think by yourself. It doesn't preach a message to you. You have to think about complexity. Yeah, and one thing that really stood out to me on this just this re-watching that i just did because i just wrote

a book about animals is you know that in the movie there are a bunch of different characters from the forest side and they don't always agree they're not always on this exact you know they have differing sometimes orthogonal agendas apes how dare you show such disrespect to the wolf clan? This is our forest. The human, give him to us. Give us the human and go. You go before my fangs find you. And I think that's really sophisticated to think of the natural world

as not just as sort of like one big Mother Earth faction that's all the good guys and they all are on the same page. You know, what the boars want is different from what the apes want, is different from what the wolves want. And that's also accurate to sort of how ecosystems work. You know, everyone's got their agendas out there. Yeah, I did an episode when the Dune movie came out, the recent one. I did an episode about Frank Herbert because a lot of people think, oh, Frank Herbert, great environmentalist. But I talked to an environmentalist, two different environmentalists with very different kind of agendas. And it ended up becoming a discussion about environmentalism versus conservation, you know, and that Frank Herbert was more of a conservationist, actually. He felt like you need to preserve nature because we need to use it as a resource. And we're shooting ourselves in the foot if we don't protect the

most valuable resource we have to sustain human civilization. Where does Miyazaki fall along that in terms of, you know, is the health of the environment the most important? Or do we need to continue to understand that nature is a resource to be protected? I think I would say, again, this is the thing I think sometimes predominantly, I think in the past in the West, because again, this is a thing in our own field. You're either on the side of ecocentric that you think nature should be at the center of everything, or you're anthropocentric. You think humans should be at the center of everything. I think Miyazaki falls

somewhere along that spectrum. I don't think he believes in binaries. He doesn't believe that you should be one or the other. Because I think his philosophy is heavily influenced by Shintoism, and again, by Taoism from China. In Taoism in China, if you look at the yin yang symbol, it's the black within white and the white within black. I don't think he believes in that you you know, you can take one side. I think he believes both, to be honest. He believes that we should protect nature for its intrinsic value and the spiritual value. But he also knows, if you look at Totoro, there's a lot of agricultural landscapes existing side by side with still semi-natural slash natural in the forest. So I think he lies somewhere on that spectrum. Yeah, I think he, in a lot of ways, he rejects that sort of dichotomy between, you know, you have to

be one side or the other. In Totoro, this is the idea of children growing up in a natural or environment that's not so manmade and artificial artificial in the sense that there's opportunities for unstructured play. But even in that case, these are all technically man-made environments as well. Farms, even the woods in the area are carefully husbanded over centuries so that they're sustainable.

People use them for wood. And there's a scene in Totoro where the father goes up with the two daughters to worship the local tree. Thank you for watching over May and making us feel so welcome here. Please continue to look after us. Please continue to look after us. You know, it's like the tree is part of this world.

You know, we interact with the woods. We're here. It is human-centered in some way, even though there's an ecocentric component to it. And I think that kind of concept is not only present in Shintoism. I mean, it's present in a lot of Chinese philosophies too. I mean, when I was growing up in China, it's just quite common that in my granddad's generation, they believed that ancient trees generally had a spirit inside them. And I think that kind of evokes a connection. So we have more of a relationship between humans and nature, but also the fact that you have more kind of respect towards nature,

that, you know, inside this ancient tree, there might be an ancient spirit. So Emma, I'm wondering, are there ways in which like your work sort of there's a sort of synchronicity between your work and the themes in his films and there's certain things in his films that particularly resonated with you? dichotomy between humans and nature that's so common in Western conservation, Western environmentalism, just in the way we all think. And how this can not just be sort of inaccurate, but also damaging, right? So, you know, the idea that North America was a sort of a virgin wilderness when Europeans got here is something that's sort of woven into conservation at a really deep level, but it's just completely untrue. There were millions of people living here with an ongoing land management process, and they had made a lot of significant changes. So North America, South America, the Americas were completely humanized when colonists got here. And ecosystems are super, super dynamic, and they change all the time. And so the idea that

there's sort of like one correct timeless state that nature must be returned to, and that is the state that's defined by the lack of human interaction is one that I think can become really toxic and lead us to weird places where we're spending money on the wrong things, we're emphasizing the wrong things.

So, I mean, one thing I like a lot about Miyazaki's films is that they are not about, Mononoke is a good example, it's not ultimately about removing humans from nature because humans are a bad polluting toxin. It's about fixing the relationships between the humans and the non-humans in the story. And I think this is the model that we need to move to, is fixing our relationships with other species rather than severing our relationship with other species and kind of walling ourselves out of Eden in shame, which is sort of the environmental model that I grew up with. So I think that in some ways, these films offer models

for us to imagine what those good relationships look like, you know, from very small scale stuff, like with Totoro, where you just imagine having a childhood where you are allowed to romp in the woods to so much more sort of spiritual or even religious ways of interacting with the non-human world. You know, it's interesting. I mean, Isaac brought up Ferngully. I was thinking of American movies, too, and the way that they do approach the environment. I mean, from Bambi to WALL-E. How are some other ways that in the West we tend to or American movies tend to frame these environmental messages in ways that are not actually quite helpful compared to Miyazaki films?

Don't get me started on WALL-E. I hate that movie so much. Really? Why? Well, I don't know, because I mean, yes, because it kind of does this in a lot of ways. I mean, you know, there's a possibility at the end, there's a redemption arc. But, but the basic setup is that humans were so destructive to Earth that we completely trashed it and lost the battle that we like failed at environmentalism and left. Time for lunch. In a cup. And then, of course, there's just, like, massive ongoing fat shaming throughout the entire film,

which also really drives me nuts. But this sort of notion that humanity is just, like, polluting by its touch. Operation Cleanup has, well, failed. Wouldn't you know, rising toxicity levels have made life unsustainable on Earth. Unsustainable? What? Contrast that with Spirited Away, where the river spirit, who has been polluted by humans, also goes and a human girl helps him unpollute himself.

And so you see a sort of a positive interaction there look a valued customer welcome to our baths if you haven't seen spirited away it's about a girl named chihiro who finds herself in a magical bathhouse for spirits and other supernatural characters at one point a disgusting stink spirit arrives. It oozes this gooey mud and causes a huge amount of chaos. Chihiro is able to save the day by reaching deep into the stink spirit to figure out what's inside of him. A bicycle? I thought so. Get ready now. Everybody in the bathhouse pitches in to help Chihiro pull this bicycle out.

And an avalanche of garbage spews forth until we get pure, clean water. And then we see a simple face. It looks like a wooden mask of a happy spirit. Well done. spirit. Well done. So I think that is an important point that Miyazaki himself really believes, he's talked about. He really believes in the power of the community.

That part of the issue with losing our connection with nature and nature becoming more polluted is that we're also losing these kind of community connections. So he has said he himself volunteers in a local environmental group and he's cleaned up the river with a group of people and they pulled out a bike. That's where the kind of, the kind of like inspiration

for the Stink Spirit came from, that he believes, I think. So he describes himself, which I describe myself as one. He describes himself as a kind of pessimistic optimist. I think most of the time when I do environmental management as a lecturer, a lot of it is quite depressing. Most of the time, I think sometimes maybe humans should just go extinct.

But then, you know, I see younger generations. I see different groups are doing important work out there that are more applied. They might be environmental charities. And I think it is important to have that optimism and to believe, you know, the joint community that there is hope for the future. And I think deep down, he still believes in that, even though generally he is a quite a pessimistic person. For me, from his work, we talk so much about Princess Mononoke. And I actually really gravitate towards the manga version of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, which is kind of a template for Mononoke. It came out in 94. And there's this message in there. It's

that the world he constructs in that sort of graphic novel form is such a bleak world, where things have gone really badly, escalatingly badly, and most of the world is lost. And there's a couple of scenes in there, though, where you can see that his struggle as an artist to incorporate these ideas or things that he's seeing in the world in terms of how can we manage these situations, how can we manage these problems and catastrophes. And he has these couple of minor

scenes in there that just like speaks to his mood and struggles, because it took him really long time to sort of grapple with these things over the course of his life as an artist as well. And there's a scene where these two tribes come together. And one of them is sort of a refugee these two tribes come together. And one of them is sort of a refugee fleeing from the eco catastrophe. And the other one is looking at them and saying, you know, what do we do in this situation? Do we offer them aid? Do we, you know, fight them and kick them out? And there's a scene where there's a ceremony or ritual where one is offered a sword, on one hand, it's a sword. And the other hand, it's a loaf of bread. There's this element of a rare exercise

in sort of his own narration going in where he says, you know, in these times of hard trying times, I'm paraphrasing now, this was a happy exception to the world going on where these two tribes come together and actually unite and sort of make the best out of this situation and try to live. And at the end of this huge saga that he's written in the graphic novel, his end message is like, no matter how difficult things are, we must live. You mentioned something, Isaac, where you said that he struggled for a while to figure

out how to talk about this. Did his environmental messages change over time, or is he very consistent? Can you look at a film from 40 years ago, and it's the same as the things he did decades later? I think politically he shifted

over the years. So Nausicaa is sort of like his groundbreaking films. He's made other films before, but that one put him sort of up there on the map and then he formed the studio afterwards. That one, the message is quite clear. It's almost simple in that being with nature, great. It's an exercise, coming together and understanding. So it's a very upbeat tone in terms of that particular film. And you can see his questioning of how that model of the world can work. And he figures, I think, over the course of it, it really cannot. He introduces like these people called the forest people,

which are sort of more of the deep ecology movement, where they live and subsist wholly in the forest people, which are sort of more of the deep ecology movement, where they live and subsist wholly in the forest. And he actually, I think, actively questions in an interview, like whether these people can survive in a world that's degraded. Like, is it a dead end? So there's over the course of this 10 years or so that he worked on this manga, you can see a shift in how he perceives nature and how he values life in general. I mean, do you think where is he now in terms of optimism and pessimism, do you think, with his messages? Well, he is making his last film that he keeps saying is last film, but who knows?

His last film is, so I just read his book. It is not environmental themed, but I think it ties in to some of his thinking. So Miyazaki has said this book is one of his favorite childhood books, and it's influenced his thinking massively. And it's called How Do You Live? And in there, there's a lot of philosophy about, I think he is at a point where thinking about, he wants other people to think, his viewers to think,

how do you want to live your life? Now, this book is not, I would not say, I don't think it has that strong environmental themes, but it has a lot of, I recommended it to my students as well, because I think it has a lot of themes about how do you want to be as a person? How do you want to have relationships with other people? And I think that in turn will influence how people interact with their relationships with the natural world. That's true, because I feel like one of the things I love about his films is that they're more empowering than didactic. You know, it's not like this is my final film, I shall decree and

hope, you know, it's very, it's sort of like the last thing I can do is this sort of teach a man to fish and he'll feed forever kind of thing, to use actually a fairly complicated environmental message in that old saying. Another duality that I think about a lot in my work, which is the sort of like nature technology duality, not just nature humans, but technology itself. Because I think that he, as much as he adores nature and the beauty of the nature, the flower, the movement of water, he also really likes technology. Like he loves airplanes. He loves the way that things are constructed and built. And he loves imagining insane flying machines that, you know, are just like cool and

might, you know, just would blow your mind. And I think that that's a really interesting tension to play with because it's one that also exists in environmentalism. You know, you have your sort of environmentalists that hate technology that see it as the cause of all of our environmental problems and really kind of hunger for some sort of return to a pre-technological existence. And then you have your sort of, you know know technophile environmentalists who see sort of renewable energy and electric cars and new gadgets as the way to sort of solve our environmental problems and i think the tension between those two kinds of green people is a really interesting one and one that sort of i think you can play with in the worlds that miyazaki creates i think

one of his films that probably is less talked about is Laputa, Castle in the Sky. One of my favorite scenes in there is you can see on this floating city in the sky, there's a massive robot that was left by the previous civilization, holding out a tiny flower to the two protagonists who find the city. You've picked another flower for the grave.

How kind of you. Oh, thank you. He must be the only one left. It looks like all the other robots stopped working a long time ago. And I think what Miyazaki is trying to say, like, one, he is quite obsessed with technology, which Emma is right. He's trying to say, I think technology is not the real evil.

Human greed and corruption is. That robot before, when it was governed by greedy and corrupt people, was destroying the earth and killing other people. But one left it to its own devices. It became a gardener to nature, and it created this whole greenhouse. You know, there's a lot of stories. I mean, I've looked at this over the years in my show, being with sci-fi and fantasies, how many people joined NASA because they watched

Star Trek as a kid. Do you know any sort of environmentalists, even budding environmentalists, who say that they were Miyazaki fans first, and that's kind of what got them into environmentalism as a career? I definitely, this is actually something I would study if anybody wants to sponsor my study. So I first wrote my paper as a hobby because I realized that all my friends in the UK who are either conservation scientists, environmental academics, some have gone on to NGOs, or gone on elsewhere, they're all hardcore Miyazaki fans. Many conferences I've attended, many PhD students tell me they've been, since they were a child,

a hardcore Miyazaki fan, and it's partly what inspired them. So I think there must be something in these films that resonates with people. The values there is something that's common between all of us. Yeah, but you've got to do that study because I feel like everybody is a hardcore

miyazaki fan right like i feel like there's a possible conflicting variable here which is that that's true i mean my hypothesis is there are two types of fans that i've talked to so there are some people who claim they are hardcore miyazaki fans but they like it simply for the animation i mean i do like it for the animation, right? And the world that he's created. But I think the ones that I'm talking about who share similar values with me, they can always say what you two have just said, what Isaac and Emma have said here, they pick up the complexity on this morality questions. I do feel I mean, this might just be purely anecdotal evidence. I do feel there is something about that, you know,

maybe our value systems are similar to pick up on those things. Yeah, to touch on that point, like the world building, for me, is something that's fascinating, because it's, you know, sometimes people do the world building for the story that they're about to tell. And I feel like the worlds that he builds are for the worlds themselves, if that makes sense. There's a vastness to it. This really connects with that idea of life and continuation that's really embedded in his movies, where it's a slice of this world that you see, that you're privy to. But life itself goes on in all directions. And there's a scene in Spirited Away. It's a scene at the train station

where Chihiro is just on the train and she's looking out. You know, she's on her own journey through this wonder scape and she stops and she looks out at this little girl that's on the platform and you wonder it's like who is this girl what is her journey and then later on you go through the landscape and you see this house in the middle of the island and there's just one house but there's like a laundry line and it's like these little things where it just hints it doesn't beat you over the head with it it's, this is a world that's beyond

anything that is indicated now. Yeah, I totally agree with everything you just said. The way that the world keeps going off the page has always really, really impressed me. Like, you know, that train has lots more stops on it. When it comes to the environment and the climate crisis, in a way, that's all we want. To know that the world will keep going after the credits roll in our lives. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Emma Maris, Yuan Pan, and Isaac Yuen. Also thanks to the listeners who have suggested this topic over the years.

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