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Theophanic Platypus: Or Why I Love the Films of Hayao Miyazaki

I love watching the films of Japanese director and animator Hayao Miyazaki.  At this point, I've seen almost everything of his I can get my hands on.  There's a simple why to this: great production value and great story-telling.  The closest thing I've seen to it in American film is Pixar, and Lasseter makes no bones about the intellectual and creative debt he owes to Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli.  To put a finer point on it, however, I love Miyazaki's films for their theophanies.

Many, if not all, of Miyazaki's films has a moment in which the world as it appears to us, physical and mundane, is pierced by a deeper spiritual reality.  This moment, the revelation of the divine (or theophany), leaves the charaters of Miyazaki's dramas transformed.  Whether it's the Spirit of the Forest in "Princess Mononoke," the Sea Goddess in "Ponyo," or the cloud of slain pilots in "Porco Rosso," these moments of spiritual revelation form the linchpin of the story.  In this way, all of Miyazaki's films function as a journey into fairyland with the protagonists being drawn out of their noramal lives to have a radical encounter with the Other that offers the opportunity, sometimes taken and sometimes rejected, for growth and empowerment.

Again and again I find myself comparing the effect with that produced by the writings of George MacDonald.  Myazaki knows how to re-mythologize the world; to take our daily lives, hallow them, and give them back to us with a renewed sense of the sacredness of existence.  In rapidly secularizing America, that comes as a breath of fresh air.
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