Newsweek Interview
In March 2002, Dana Lewis from Newsweek Japan interviewed me about the success of Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli and Princess Mononoke. Almost two years later in November 2004, she was back again, this time with questions about Miyazaki's newest film, Howl's Moving Castle. Edited transcripts of both interviews appear here for the first time.
There's been a lot of speculation about the weakness of Princess Mononoke overseas. How do you assess that film? Would you put the blame for its weak showing on the audience? The distribution strategy? Or perhaps on the movie itself?
I truly believe Buena Vista did the best they could for Princess Mononoke, but they were, at least partly, misled by the Japanese. As Steve Alpert's online production diary makes pretty clear, Ghibli/Tokuma representatives let Buena Vista think they were buying a children's movie like Totoro, until it was too late. Then Buena Vista were stuck with a cartoon for adults, which they would never have wanted. You can stand outside the cinemas and yell at people that "cartoons aren't just for kids" too until you're blue in the face, but unless they've grown up with the concept, people won't care.
I think Ghibli's best chance in the English-speaking world is now Howl's Moving Castle, because its author is British, and it will seem to be rooted in "our" (ethnic Europeans') local culture. But what does this "success" mean? Like any other children's movie, it will come, and it will go. I don't see it ever having the all-permeating influence of Disney. If it did, most anime fans would stop liking it. They want something that everybody else isn't watching. An anime fan is often created as a reaction to mainstream culture. If anime is perceived as part of mainstream culture, it loses some of its transgressional appeal.
As a corollary, what anime really is popular? Over here, folk say they love Miyazaki but they get far more worked up over Gundam Wing and Ranma when they're actually sitting around talking on the net…
As with any other part of the film business, there can be a dividing line between critical and commercial succcess, further subdivided between fans and non-fans. The lunatic fringes often insulate themselves with a deluded and defensive cultural relativism: "if you don't like this anime, there must be something wrong with you" or "if you just watch another 75 episodes, you'll start to appreciate that show." This is nothing unusual in any form of fandom; you'll hear the same posturings from defenders of bad opera and trendy art.
In a way, you can write off the entire 1990s as something of a false dawn. That was the time that anime was first sold as a Japanese product, instead of being smuggled in as an American product with Japanese staff. But most of the companies who began in the field then were targeting a limited group with a finite lifespan. The average anime fan stayed interested for two years, before finding something else to occupy him. Today, the anime that achieve true success are beamed directly into living rooms: TV anime that are dished out free like their Japanese counterparts.
The effect of Pokémon has been palpable. I saw it in the letters I received as the editor of Manga Max magazine. In 1998, the average fan was 19 or 20, and male. Two years later, I was getting letters from boys and girls, with a mean age of 13. From a marketing point of view, hooking someone into a closed circle of consumption like anime/manga for their entire teens means you can milk that audience for double the profit.
This, for example, is what Viz Communications have done with Ranma ˝. There's lots of it, the animation quality holds up, and the costumes are easy to do at convention masquerades. Stores have been badly burned by racking numbered tapes (nobody wants to buy part five before part one), but Ranma can be watched out of order with little or no difference. Few fans stay with Ranma for long, but while they're interested, they know they can walk into the store and grab any episode for another fix of the same thing they had last week. Viz have been throwing money at Ranma for a decade, and now it's paying off, because it's good backlist material that doesn't rock the boat but lets kids in hicksville think they've stumbled onto something new and special. Ranma occupies that very lucrative space between passive Pokémon-watching child and active anime-nut teenager, and it's a phase that most fans will go through, much to Viz's financial betterment.
Miyazaki's films are the pinnacle. He is responsible for many of the best anime ever made. Any fan is eventually going to stumble across his work and begin to appreciate what anime can really do. But if you listen on the internet, the law of averages tells you that for every person wanting to talk about the wonders of Kiki's Delivery Service, there will be a dozen attention-starved ten-year-olds shouting "Dragon Ball r0xx0rs!" Don't believe everything you read on the net
Miyazaki isn't Disney, but is there a way in which he is more Disneyesque than other animation directors and their studios are in Japan? After all, he's the only one with a solid audience outside of otaku culture. He aims for a mainstream audience. Is he really even *anime*, or more akin to a mainstream movie maker who is just using the anime medium?
I would disagree that he is the only animator with a "solid audience outside the otaku culture". The highest rated anime show on Japanese TV remains Sazae-san, while its nearest competitors are kiddie shows like Chibi Maruko-chan and Crayon Shin-chan. And porn anime sell vastly more copies than can be explained by sales to every known fan. Porn anime chiefly sell outside the fan market, though of course the media pretends otherwise.
Sadly, I suspect that the greatest similarities between Miyazaki and Disney will only become apparent in the future. Who knows where Ghibli will be in 20 years time? Miyazaki can't stay at the top forever; he's already tried to retire twice! He did train a protégé, Yoshifumi Kondo, but he died unexpectedly. Without a steady hand on the rudder, Studio Ghibli could become much more like the Disney Empire. There are already signs that it is drifting in that direction.
Miyazaki isn't 100% of Ghibli; Takahata and Suzuki play significant roles, too. But when Miyazaki goes, the party is over. Ghibli is, ironically, slowly turning into a clone of the Disney corporation, resting on past laurels, revisiting old favourites, and branching out into branding exercises instead of new product. The Ghibli clothing label is the beginning of the end; the company's stock will still rise, and the business may even enjoy greater success in the short term, but the best chance they had for replacing Miyazaki was Kondo. Ghibli has always run on creative genius, and I'm afraid that's a finite resource. I don't see any obvious sources of alternative energy. I wish there were.
Do you think China, Korea (even Philippines or India) will start producing anime that can rival or even displace the Japanese?
Firstly, anime is by definition Japanese. I understand that you are largely thinking in Japanese, and that in Japanese, "anime" is any animation, but in English it is pointless to distinguish between anime and cartoons unless anime actually means something, and anime means cartoons from Japan. So there is no such thing as a Chinese or Korean anime, much as US marketers would like to imply otherwise.
Secondly, although studios elsewhere in Asia have been picking up the shortfall in the anime labour market, the top echelons of the non-Japanese market remain relatively untrained. Chinese and Korean animation can do what it can to reverse-engineer anime's appeal, but they are still lacking in directors, key animators, designers and writers who can fill the posts that, in co-productions, are still filled by Japanese people. There is still a lot of slavish imitation, it's relatively easy to watch The Lotus Lantern, Wonderful Days (aka Sky Blue), My Life as McDull or Grandma and Her Ghosts and to see which foreign works the creators are attempting to emulate. The result, as with any cloning, is largely soulless.
If Miyazaki ever retires, will foreign fandom even notice?
That's a loaded question. Fandom doesn't need new works to continue to notice Miyazaki. My Neighbor Totoro will always be a work of genius. Ghibli don't need to make Totoro: The Return to remind true fans of that.
How it affects the balance sheet is different. With Miyazaki gone, certain foreign animation conglomerates will lose their greatest threat, and with it, I suspect, much of their alleged interest in Japanese animation. Anime as a whole has been in recession since 1997, and the foreign success of Miyazaki has largely concealed that fact. With him gone, the foreign carpet-baggers may discover that there is not a whole lot left.