Hayao Miyazaki’s innovative approach to addressing climate change
The best directors of all time are very well-known by almost each and every movie fan across the world, with the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick being synonymous with top-quality filmmaking. Though, the very best names in the field of animation are lesser known, with Pixar’s John Lasseter, anime master Satoshi Kon and the Studio Ghibli icon Hayao Miyazaki helping to make the medium vibrant and world-renowned.
Whilst Lasetter has taken a step back from filmmaking to pursue producing and Kon directed only four movies before his untimely death in 2010, Miyazaki remains a titan in the industry, releasing what is believed to be his final movie, The Boy and the Heron, in 2023. Co-founding Studio Ghibli in 1985 alongside Toshio Suzuki and Isao Takahata, Miyazaki is responsible for some of the company’s greatest cinematic triumphs, including 1997’s Princess Mononoke and 2001’s Spirited Away.
With a remarkable filmography that includes some of the greatest animated movies ever made, the movies of Miyazaki are creative dynamos as well as important pieces of cinema that address the climate crisis, bottling one of the planet’s most urgent emergencies in watchable forms of art and entertainment.
This was the case since Miyazaki’s very first film, 1984’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, an eco-conscience animation that told the story of a warrior and pacifist who desperately tries to stop two warring natures from fighting in hopes of saving her dying planet. A remarkable piece of post-apocalyptic fantasy with an environmental message at its core that revolves around a forest called The Sea of Decay, an area that absorbed the pollution from the earth and released it into the atmosphere.
Still, Miyazaki admitted that this key plot point could actually be detrimental to the fight against climate change, stating: “The idea that nature is always gentle and will give birth to something like the Sea of Decay in order to restore an environment polluted by humans is a total lie. And… cling[ing] to such a saccharine worldview is a big problem”.
Addressing the issue of climate change is no easy task, with even Miyazaki still trying to figure out the best way to communicate such messages whilst being persuasive but not preachy.
Speaking about his approach to climate change ideas throughout his films, he told Lasseter during an interview: “It’s not that nature or ecology has become a growing concern for me. I think it’s just a part of our natural surroundings and it’s sort of my common sense to depict it. For example, I tell my artists and the team that we are working with to make it look smogier, then it looks more like the actual surroundings that we live in…So, it’s the kind of landscape that our children and we are used to living in”.
Indeed, there is a fondness for modern movies aimed at children to ignore the issues of the contemporary world and paint the cities around us as towering spaces where rain never falls, and dreams can come true. By simply painting the world as he sees it, Miyazaki is able to convey his climate change message with terrific conviction, using his “common sense” to depict the crisis, but also his responsibility as a world-renowned artist.
