Week Six Anime: Miyazaki, messages for the young

And my conscience feels slightly stricken now after reading what J.A Lent and D Cavallaro had to say about anime. Until late I had completely turned a blind eye to this pop culture phenomenom that accounts for half the movie tickets sold in Japan. In the past I kept on chalking it off to a childrens genre, but I was utterly mistaken. I could not agree more with J.A Lent (2000) when he stated in his introduction: "Japanese animation merits serious consideration as a narrative art-form, and not simply for it's arresting visual style."
I now harbour, and rightfully so, a very high regard for the masterful Hayao Miyazaki.

I think what appealed most to me while watching a few of his films (Mononoke, Spirited away, Howls moving castle) was the depth of thought involved within the narration and the importance he places on the challenging underlying themes of the story that carry worldwide relevance.
These important and often neglected issues/themes include things like feminism (very inherent with Miyazaki's frequent use of a Shojou as a protaganist in his films), the fate of the eco-system, pacifism, the abscence of or ambiguity around villains, and also the feelings of discontent towards the foolishness of war etc - All of these are positive messages if recieved and interpreted correctly.
I think these undertones speak a stark truth to all children watching his films. Children are often sheltered from these realities in the world, and Miyazaki is telling them, showing them, through his narrative, that things aren't so black and white in real life, life is messy, you don't always get a happy ending, there isn't always a clear-cut bad guy, there is violence in the world; which is such a scorching contrast to the messages that a disneyesque or Western animated film would more than likely portray.
Cavallaro, D (2006) encapsulates it perfectly: "Miyazaki is eager to show that no ostensible resolution to the quest for self-fulfillment is ever likely to be conclusive. His endings, therefore, steer clear of consolatory, tidying-up messages, offering instead purely provisional closures which audiences can scarcely anticipate or presuppose. The plots themselves tend to follow life's own unpredictable flux more than the narrative and dramatic criteria codified by mainstream spectacle."

Miyazaki tries to offer children (and adults) a positive world view, a world view free from over simplified conventions of good and evil, and he does this in a way that the audience may not be accustomed to. His films show more transparancy towards life's sorrows and intricacies and truths. The issue is not that children should'nt be exposed to worldwide problems and violence - children know that there are problems and violence in the world - the real issue, I think, that comes across in his work is: How do we control these problems? How do we find a balance?
Miyazaki's films call upon self-examination, world-examination (as difficult a task as that may seem to prove), and cyclical harmony all throughout society and the environment.