The iconic American war films Hayao Miyazaki hates the most
Hayao Miyazaki, the visionary behind Studio Ghibli, might have inspired thousands of American artists, but very few American pioneers have influenced him. In addition to his dislike for Walt Disney’s approach to animation, Miyazaki is also a staunch critic of American capitalism and the globalisation of American culture.
During a conversation with Toshio Suzuki in 2002, Miyazaki made several comments about American cinema, which caught the attention of his global fanbase. The legendary animator claimed American films were “too manipulative” and criticised franchises like Indiana Jones and The Lord of the Rings for propagating colonial fantasies.
Although Miyazaki previously named Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and John Ford’s My Darling Clementine among his favourites, he isn’t a fan of most things American cinema has to offer. While elaborating on the subject of war films produced by Hollywood, Miyazaki dismissed them as vehicles for rabid nationalism.
“There’s no way Americans could ever understand anything like this,” the celebrated animator commented while talking about historical awareness in war films. “They’re too busy making films like video games. You also can see that with Pearl Harbour. And Saving Private Ryan is one of the worst films of this sort. The aerial forces do their bombing, and then it ends”.
Miyazaki’s comments show that he despises Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg’s approach to war films. Although those two films can be categorised as commercial filmmaking, Miyazaki also objected to Francis Ford Coppola’s ambitious contextualisation of the Vietnam War within the narrative trajectory of Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’.
Miyazaki continued: “But the one war the Americans couldn’t win that way was Vietnam. Because the Americans made films about Vietnam, they had to make films about ‘not understanding’ things. Films about ‘not understanding Asians’, like Apocalypse Now. I really can’t understand why Coppola made a film like that. They say that airplane fans loved to watch the scenes of the choppers flying with Wagner’s music playing, but most airplane fans are idiots”.
In order to provide a counterpoint to the American approach to dramatising war, Miyazaki gave the example of the 2001 Czech war drama Dark Blue World. According to Miyazaki, Jan Svěrák’s directorial effort is the perfect war movie because it explores the brutality of war from a human perspective.
While talking about the film’s brilliance, Miyazaki explained: “I see Dark Blue World as a film that’s aware of this problem; it’s not made from a sense of nationalism or pent-up historical grievances, but as an attempt to show how people truly lived in a difficult period. And that’s the nice aftertaste the film leaves us with”.
