Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner names her favourite Studio Ghibli film
While Michelle Zauner may be best known for her role as the head of the indie dream pop band Japanese Breakfast, she has also written a best-selling memoir Crying in K-Mart, which is set to be adapted into a feature film. However, Zauner’s talents do not end there, as she also wrote the soundtrack to the 2021 video game Sable.
Zauner notes that all of the Sable team are “all big Studio Ghibli fans” before adding that the game featured a lot of influence from Hayao Miyazaki’s 1984 film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. “This desert planet, and there being these large insects and stuff,” she said.
However, Zauner couldn’t help but be inspired by her favourite Studio Ghibli film Kiki’s Delivery Service. “I couldn’t get that narrative out of my head because it’s this young girl going on a glider and meeting different people and deciding what clan she wants to join and who she wants to be when she grows up, essentially,” she said.
She added: “And I feel like that’s what Kiki’s Delivery Service is about. It’s a young witch who goes to another town, and she meets all these people and decides what her trade and craft is going to be.” Indeed, Miyazaki’s 1989 film focuses on a witch in a new environment who has to use her flying skills to get by.
In that light, the comparison between Sable and Kiki’s Delivery Service is evident. The Slate interviewer then noted a scene in which Kiki fell from the sky onto her bed. Zauner was all too happy to hear this, as she felt that scene, in particular, could help to sum up the game’s mood.
“I literally was going to reference that scene because I feel like any young woman can relate to just life beating the shit out of you and not being ready for it,” she said, “And I just love that element of a coming-of-age story where it’s a young person that’s sort of on the precipice of adulthood and something outside of their control kind of pushes them in before they’re ready.”
Sable focuses on a young woman who traverses a desert landscape in order to find her calling in life. Zauner noted, emphasising her love for Kiki’s Delivery Service and how it inspired her Sable soundtrack, “I feel like that’s very much this story, and I’ve related to Kiki so much as a young adult just finding out how much a frying pan costs – just how exhausting adulthood is.”
