Transcription
[Music] There's a lot to love about Ohio Miyazaki films, and we all have our handful of favorites. Since choosing just one is too difficult, because throwing on any Miyazaki film means immediately being swept away by its romance, the adventure and friendships, the instantly iconic, endlessly imaginative creatures, the wonderfully charismatic characters.
But what binds all these things we love together, and it fills these worlds with life, are the spaces that these creatures and characters inhabit, and sounds that define those spaces. Each film, from its opening frame, establishes its own unique sound identity, a signature aural personality that develops throughout.
My Neighbor Totoro is Miyazaki's work at its most serene. It feels airy, whimsical, is lush. Our Boreas setting, filled with these grubs and bugs and birds that are all brought right to the front of the mix. Nature takes priority here, but you have those natural sound escapes, then juxtaposed against the more fantastical, almost Looney Tunes-esque sound effects for Totoro and the other forest sprites.
Princess Mononoke, on the other hand, uses nature as a backdrop to brutality. This is a world of blood and fire, speed and violent displays of strength. Every action feels blocked, dynamic, and vicious. Sound is what gives power and momentum to these images, charging them with aggressive energy. While Shika's arrows don't just fly from his bow, they screech through the air with enough force to split a man in half. Sword swipes are swift and dangerous. Explosions are fearful and hit you like a brick in the chest before echoing out into the distance, illustrating how the destruction that happens here has consequences that ripple through the natural world.
While Totoro lightly juxtaposes natural ambience with playful, cartoony sound effects, Mononoke counters serenity with raucous conflict, the eternal clash between nature. [Music] [Music]
Sound can do so many things. It's one of the most powerful tools in a filmmaker's arsenal. We can use it to communicate tone, build atmosphere, and maintain the illusion of movement by tricking you into thinking you're seeing more than you actually are. You see, Miyazaki typically animates on twos or threes, meaning you're only seeing a new drawing after every second or third frame. And the real, now on paper, that may seem like the animation would appear choppy or disjointed, and certainly not as smooth as something animated on ones, like Kiera.
But a constant bed of sound is what helps keep those static frames alive. And like I said, it tricks your brain into thinking you're seeing more than you actually are by filling in those gaps. Sound is what gives animation its texture. It's the depth of a two-dimensional image. And you can feel the crunchiness of the grass, the weight of that plane. You're not just watching the world, you're living in it.
Although, if you've only ever experienced the English dub versions of some of Miyazaki's older films, a lot of that texture has been obscured for you. I'll give you an example. Let's look at a scene from Laputa: Castle in the Sky. I'll show you two different versions, and you decide which gives you more information about the conflict happening below. First, the original. Now, let's take a look at the English dubbed version, distributed by Disney. Quite different, right? It isn't just the addition of music. It's the omission of everything that contextualizes what we're looking at: the wind, the screams, the gunfire. Every bit of information.
Joe Hisaishi, who's the composer for all of Miyazaki's films, said that during a North American distribution process for Castle in the Sky, Disney staffers told him that Western audiences start to feel uncomfortable if there's no music for more than three minutes. So he'd have to extend his original 60-minute score for the two-hour film into a 90-minute score. So those long seven to eight minute stretches of silence or atmospheric sound escapes were either buried under additional music or outright removed.
Luckily, Miyazaki put a stop to these changes with his more recent work. But if you grew up watching those English dub Ghibli films, there are probably a lot of atmospheric subtleties and aural world-building you missed out on. So I'd encourage you to go back and revisit them in their original presentation. You might get something new out of the experience. Plus, the voice acting is just a lot cooler.
Sound design is a language, and it's one that doesn't need to be translated, localized, or substituted. And it's unfortunate that many filmmakers working on animation typically don't have a lot of confidence in its storytelling potential. You see this far too often in a lot of Disney features. There isn't much ambient material in those films because atmospheric Foley work is usually de-emphasized in favor of the music. You hear music in every frame of these films, and they never get a chance to breathe.
Joe Hisaishi's score is too good to be used arbitrarily. You don't get numb to it because it's not invading every second of the film. It's used sparingly and purposefully, and that's why that music is so powerful when it shows up and so memorable when it goes. The wall-to-wall score in Disney films, as beautifully composed as it may be, is generally used as a band-aid to cover up empty sound escapes or very sparsely populated environments.
So in films like Hunchback of Notre Dame, you either get completely barren exteriors or these massive CG crowd shots with hordes of unsettling, expressionless robots with looped animation cycles. It's a cheap and efficient way to sell a bustling city, and it gets the job done, but it doesn't hold up to much scrutiny. Disney has some of the best-looking foreground animation in the industry, there's no denying it, which is why it's such a shame that their backgrounds leave a little more than a lot to be desired.
Miyazaki never treats his backgrounds like a background. We see dozens of expressive, fully realized characters on screen, some for only seconds at a time, but they'll have spirit and personality, and the entire frame has direction because of it. They don't just pencil markings on the page. These communities feel like places our characters inhabit rather than wallpaper for them to stand in front of. Hundreds of meticulously animated tiny movements with hundreds of accompanying tiny sounds, a beautiful tapestry of space and sound and motion, all woven together to create life.
Sound is information. So a lot can be learned about a place by how it sounds. And if the audience is given a chance to listen, it can be a fantastic narrative communication tool. Spirited Away has some of my favorite examples of world-building through sound. When Chihiro approaches Yubaba's bathhouse for the first time, after strolling through a mostly silent village, you'll notice Miyazaki has her attention zero in on three specific auditory details that cut through the silence: the crackling chimney, the shuttering windows, and raging waterfall. And this bit of foreshadowing represents the elemental sound profiles of each of the three major locations Chihiro journeys through on her journey: the fire of the boiler room, the wind of the bath.
These elemental forces always play a big role in Miyazaki's work, humanized through their sound design, given as much life as any other character on screen. A notion that gurgles, flames, the screams of a blizzard, their roars. But The Wind Rises takes the personification of these elements to the next level by incorporating actual human voices into the mix. Everything from the wind due to earthquakes, planes, we're all created by the amount of this man, Koji Kustom Otsu.
But this is, like, his only film that's rooted in history with a real-life protagonist. So why steer away from the realism? Well, the opening moments of The Wind Rises are set in a dream, and that dream has dreamlike qualities, including the sound. But when Jiro wakes up, he takes that dream with him and carries it throughout his life. This world is explored through the lens of a dreamer, and there's a distortion to that reality. The vocal sound effects reflect that distortion. And historical fiction balanced on the edge of fact and fantasy, in the midst of the war, presented with the narrative characteristics of a fairytale, as if Miyazaki is tucked us in and it's reading as a bedtime story.
But as much as I love the man, and we all do, you can't just put it all on his shoulders. We tend to deify the auteur at the expense of the crew and the recognition of their contributions to these projects. When you're dropped into these worlds, it's important to remember that in addition to the more visible animators and voice actors, there's an entire team of brilliant sound engineers, technicians, Foley artists, and background painters, all working below the line to bring these environments to life. People like Shigeyuki Kōno, the sound director for Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Totoro, or an artist like Kōji Kōno, who created all that beautiful Foley work you hear in Porco Rosso, or a master like Kazuo Ōga, who's responsible for painting many of those painstakingly detailed backgrounds that house all these sounds.
That's all gushing over just a few of the unsung heroes of Studio Ghibli. His work is the essential lifeblood of these films, but often goes unnoticed. Sound is exactly one-third of how we experience cinema. The other two are what we see and how we feel, and they each deserve equal care and attention by the part of the filmmaker, and I think also equal appreciation by we, the audience members.
So if you're looking for an excuse to rewatch some of these films, there you go. What better time than now? Hopefully, with a pair of fresh eyes and fresh ears, you get to experience them in a way you never have before. And who knows, maybe that long list of favorites will become even longer. [Music]