Porco Rosso (1992)
Hayao Miyazaki | Japan | 93 min | Voices: Shuichiro Moriyama, Tokiko Kato, Akemi Okamura.

CHAPTER I: NAKED LUNCH

KICKING THINGS OFF, chronologically wise, is the 1984 film, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. With all of the similarities at play, it's hard for this eco-prop piece not to get a little lost in the shadow of its more polished descendant, Princess Mononoke. Like that film – mixing blood-and-dirt mysticism with antiquated Japan – Nausicaä seems to be a study in contrasts, a case of medieval windmill-dwelling meets post-nuclear fallout. Naturally, water is sparse and clean air almost non-existent. But Miyazaki has more important things on his mind than dwelling in misanthro-chic. He's more interested in the sight of nature swarming technology, punctuating the general flow of machine decay and gas mask-strapped faces with dense forest-havens. Meanwhile, the two come to meet in the intoxicating opening scene, where the eponymous protag shields herself from pin drops of snow.

As things progress, Miyazaki arranges a triumvirate of forces at conflict over the state of the land: the Torumekian army are hell-bent on starting things over, and wiping out the Wastelands – a creeping forest area that discharges poison – in the process. In between trying to occupy Nausicaä, they also come to grind wills with the smaller colony of Pejite, over possession of an exhumed demigod, along with a steadily amassing herd of Ohmu (which are insects that would make Bill Lee sputter with glee).

Wearing its ecologically-minded heart on its sleeve, as these threads come to coalesce, what the plot amounts to is really just a convoluted way of saying that pollution sucks. Yet, in spite of his unfortunate habit of falling back on your typical underdog-versus-the-faceless-masses-of-imperialism binaries, Miyazaki tweaks the fantasy blueprint enough to maintain interest. This comes to surface particularly during his co-ordination of a series of empowered female figures, who circulate their more submissive male counterparts. Nausicaä – best thought of as a raven-haired Doolittle cum eco-warrior – is a given; she talks with the animals, but may still tear things up a little when inclined. She also tends to skirt about on a hand glider – which, combined with her scanty lower-end fashion sense, ushers in a small lineup of nymphet ass-shots, strangely undercutting the more asexual strains of grrrl power. There's also Kushana, who carries obvious echoes of Princess Mononoke's Lady Eboshi, in both her graceful and charismatic depravity, along with her myopic bend on technological progress. Filling out the obligatory wise and/or old person slot is the blind shaman, Grandmother.

Conceived largely as a string of set-pieces, the narrative moves along in locomotive shunts. However, while all the blowing-stuff-up does tend to get a little tiresome, there's a weird sense of fascination that propels the insect-machinery encounters; the site of giant maggot-like creatures huddled over an aircraft wing faintly rings with that Cronenberg-ian frame of biological transformation and the juncture between flesh and metal. A little levity does go a long way though, and it's no coincidence that what comes to hail tall is one of the movie's quietest interludes, one shared by Nausicaä and Asbel of Pejite, where they wax ecological in an ice-encrusted cavern beneath the Wastelands.

CHAPTER II: GET ON THE CAT BUS

>>AH, NOW this is more like it. Miyazaki packs up his enviro-angst and channels it into My Neighbour Totoro, making the filmic leap from 'show' to 'tell'. In this case, fire-parched skies and brazen chests fall away to the gentle rhythms and sun-dappled plains of...well, nowhere, really. Geography¹ is as much of an empty receptacle as the waif-like Satsuki and her more modestly shaped parrot of a sister, Mei. It's within them that Miyazaki allows to flow a universal experience of childhood that is not unlike Takeshi Kitano's 2000 foray, Kikujiro. And while he doesn't quite manage to make juggling balls of time and space the way Kitano did, his narrative is similarly fashioned around the shapeless centre of discovery, rather than glib life lessons.

It's hardly a point of contest to say that the biggest impediment of discovery is a fear of traversing the unknown. If you were to regard My Neighbour Totoro as a "children's" film, the label could only really apply in the sense that it taps into a pool of largely child-orientated fears, extinguishing them almost as soon as they're conjured. It's the equivalent of being cradled – as the house-raping gusts of a storm are met with a chorus of laughter, or the migration of the ghostly "soot spreaders" becomes quasi-spiritual. Miyazaki never really lets go of nudging towards these black smears of the unknown, but he at least eases his grip for a while, when Mei's world splays out into a playground, and she trails after Chu Totoro and Chibi Totoro through a network of leafy underpasses. Eventually stumbling upon the not-quite-a-rabbit/cat/sloth guardian of the forest, Totoro, the film comes to orbit his portly presence. And with Miyazaki draining his sensibility here of the didactic tirades that plagued Nausicaä, things are free to flourish into self-consciously exuberant displays of the fantastical, such as the duly noted Cat Bus arrival, a dance of light and colour and motion.

Yet, amidst all the bouts of take-off, things sit squarely in a contemporary, countryside milieu. This seems to tie into the recurring motif of drawing, where in Satsuki and Mei set their sights to paper with a crude charm – the idea being that animation is merely a filter-piece for the world, a way of recording what's, in effect, 'already there'. Which is not to downplay Miyazaki's sleight of hand. His eye for rendering is nothing short of incredible, holding a small procession of object detail in relief at all times, which are allowed to play off of the relatively congealed backgrounds. Often it's all about the slightest gestures – Mei sneezing; Satsuki's face crumpling, as she sticks out her tongue; the texture of hair being brushed. Even the orchestration of Totoro's whiskers is a minor miracle.

At one point, returning to a collection of sprouting seeds, Mei and Satsuki enter into a small match of exchanges, crying out "It was a dream" versus "It wasn't a dream". All I know is that if it is, don't ever wake me up.

CHAPTER III: THE HOG OF WAR

ROUNDING OFF the Miyazaki festival triptych is 1992's Porco Rosso, performing audacious tailspins through the décor cliches and character tropes of Pre-WW2 Italy. It's all here: the earth-brown attire, smoky nightclubs, old-time radios, expatriate American scum. Yet, as much as Miyazaki feeds off an historical vein, it's almost impossible to ignore the pulpy stylisations at play, milked for all the joys of hokey unrequited love and moustache-twirling villains. Meanwhile, filling in the role of the chain-smoking, swaggering rogue is Porco himself, a fighter pilot that is cursed with the head of a pig, after a bizarre Twilight Zone incident involving blinding white light and the disappearance of his fellow pilots.

Unfortunately, the promise of a surface-dwelling exercise in Euro nostalgia is quickly lost under Miyazaki's schizophrenic brushstrokes. He seems too torn between trying to please both poles of the age spectrum, resulting in something that has the Frankenstein feel of abated half-pleasures; it's difficult to justify the existence of marvelously tongue-in-cheek lines like "I'd rather be a pig than a fascist," alongside the platitudes of those wacky Anime facial distortions! and oh-so-inept bad guys. As a result, the political context feels like mere lining – a way of driving the narrative gears, while Miyazaki frustratingly veers off course.

Thankfully, though, things are reigned back in for the majority of the middle stretch, during which Miyazaki sets his feminist impulses loose in a male-less Depression Era workforce. Laboring under a principle of power in numbers, a small army of female kin gathers at the site of Porco's wounded airship, under the guide of 17-year old Fio. And while Porco's libido-whipped asides may come across as mildly disturbing, it's the relationship he develops with Fio that becomes the film's most interesting dynamic – a case of the blasé exterior met by pile-driving optimism. Playful rapport and a few swell pieces of combat aside, however, and this is just a case of middling burn out.

–David Levinson

Originally published in: Lumière 4, Winter 2004, ISSN 1176-4082

(1) Apart from the distinct Japanese-ness of the family values, as noted in the Chicago Reader capsule.

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