The top Japanese animators have been creating complex and multilayered heroines, even in a time when there is much debate about the portrayal of women in film. They have strengths and talents, as well as weaknesses and tempers. They’re not properties or franchises; they’re characters the filmmakers believe in.
Like many teenagers, Suzu in Mamoru Hosoda’s “Belle” (released here this year and available on major digital platforms) has a life online that overshadows her daily existence: her alter ego, the title character, is the reigning pop diva of the cyberworld of U. In real life, Suzu is an introverted high school student in a flyspeck town — even her best friend calls her “a country bumpkin.” But she still wins sophisticated listeners, as her music reflects the love and pain she has experienced, especially since the death of her mother, who drowned saving a child from a flooded river.
Suzu misses her, but she’s also angry at her for sacrificing herself for “a kid whose name she didn’t even know.” Suzu went so far as to abandon her impressive musical gifts because her mother encouraged them. American heroines may express a longing for a vanished parent, but not the deep, complicated emotions of this reworking of “Beauty and the Beast.” The protagonist of the Disney version misses her father when she agrees to become Beast’s prisoner, but she never mentions her mother. Nor does Jasmine in “Aladdin.”
Hosoda stated that a significant shift in animation occurred when Disney artists made Belle an independent, intelligent, and modern young woman than her predecessors. She wanted a more exciting life than her “poor, provincial town” could offer — a desire Snow White or Cinderella never expressed. “When you think of animation and female leads, you always go to the fairy tale tropes,” Hosoda said through a translator. “But they really broke that template: It felt very new. Similarly, what we tried to do in ‘Belle’ is not build a character, but build a person: someone who reflects the society in which we live.”
The U-shaped beast Suzu meets is not an enchanted Prince, but Kei, an abuse adolescent who tries to protect his younger brother from his brutal father. To save the boys, Suzu discards Belle’s glamorous trappings and reveals herself to be the plain high school girl she is. She sings for herself and touches the boy she loves, as well as her grieving heart.
Directors can express their personal visions more freely because Japanese animated films are made with smaller crews and have smaller budgets than major American films. American studios employ story crews. Hayao Miyazaki and Makoto Shinkai, among others, storyboard entire films. Their work isn’t subjected to a gantlet of test audiences, executive approvals or advisory committees.
Shinkai broke box office records in Japan in 2016 with “Your Name” (now on digital platforms). It starts as a teen rom-com about body-swapping, but it quickly evolves into a meditation about the trauma many Japanese still experience after the 2011 earthquakes and tsunamis.
Mitsuha feels bored in her life in Itomori. Taki is a student in Tokyo and wants to become an architect. One morning, they wake up in each other’s bodies and have to navigate daily life not knowing where to find anything or who anyone is.
They learn more about each other by looking around, creating a bond that transcends time and distance. Mitsuha delights in Tokyo’s sophisticated attractions. Taki draws the Itomori he sees through Mitsuha’s eyes, but that leads him to a shattering discovery: The town was destroyed three years earlier by a devastating meteor strike.
He reaches out to Mitsuha through Shinto-inflected magic, desperate to warn her. They meet briefly at twilight when the boundaries between the worlds become more fluid in Japanese folklore. They act like awkward teenagers: they laugh, quarrel and shed tears, and then vow to be together again. But they also devised a plan to save Itomori’s people.
When Taki vanishes, Mitsuha acts. She’s not a princess on a quest to preserve her realm like Moana, or Poppy in “Trolls 2.” She’s a frightened girl trying to save her family and friends from a deadly threat. She defies her pompous politician dad and uses her intelligence to overcome her fear and save hundreds. But any capable high school girl could do what Mitsuha does: She doesn’t need superpowers to save the day.
“Ultimately, Mitsuha still loses her hometown; she moves to Tokyo,” Shinkai said in an interview via email. “Since the 2011 earthquake, Japanese people have been living with the fear that our cities may disappear. We live on regardless of what happens. We meet someone special. That’s what I wanted Mitsuha to do, who I wanted her to be.”
The trend toward complex heroines isn’t new in anime. Miyazaki’s Oscar-winning “Spirited Away” (released in Japan in 2001 and now on HBO Max) grew out of his dissatisfaction with the superficial entertainments offered to adolescent girls in Japan. “I wanted the main character to be a typical girl in whom a 10-year-old could recognize herself,” he explained through a translator in an interview. “She shouldn’t be someone extraordinary, but an everyday, real person — even though this kind of character is more difficult to create. It wouldn’t be a story in which the character grows up, but a story in which she draws on something already inside her that is brought out by the particular circumstances.”
The protagonist, Chihiro, begins as a petulant adolescent: Her “skinny legs and sulky face” symbolize her overprotected, underdeveloped personality. The trials she faces in Yubaba’s Bathhouse, a spa for nature spirits sullied by human pollution, force Chihiro to develop untapped resources of strength, courage and love. The film ends with a young, confident and capable woman who cares about others replacing the sulky girl. In the animation, you can see her transformation. She runs like a child, her eyes half-closed, and runs like a fussy child. Later, she is all out when she saves a friend.
In Isao Takahata’s “Only Yesterday” (1991, now on HBO Max) Taeko has a boring job and a tiny apartment located in Tokyo in 1982. But she’s 27 and single at a time when Japanese women were expected to marry before 25. She is bored with her daily life and decides to visit the country cousins she lived with years ago.
Taeko is shocked to find that her fifth grade self has joined her on the trip. The ghostly presence of the girl she was once triggers a flood memories: School friendships and fights with her sisters. It also marks the beginning of puberty. Taeko discovers who she is by exploring her past. This is a moving, understated portrait about a woman at crossroads in her own life.
Like Greta Garbo, Chiyoko Fujiwara in Satoshi Kon’s “Millennium Actress” (released here in 2003 and available on the Roku Channel) retired from the screen at the height of her fame. After 30 years in seclusion, she gives Genya Takibana, a documentarian, an interview. As Chiyoko reminisces, Tachibana and his jaded cameraman find themselves inside her tangled memories — and movies. Chiyoko fell for a wounded artist in the 1930s as an adolescent, fleeing from the dreaded thought cops.
Kon effortlessly shifts narratives from reality to memory to film. Bandits attack the train that the teenage actress is riding in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. Chiyoko plays the role of a princess who wants to die with her lord. As a 19th-century geisha, she shields the artist from the Shogun’s troops in Kyoto; as an astronaut, she goes on a mission to find him, knowing she won’t be able to return. The visual complexity of the film mirrors Chiyoko’s personality. Kon portrays her as an independent woman, who made her own decisions about what profession she would like to pursue, when she would marry and whom, when she would divorce, what roles she should play, and when to retire.
Despite the fact that almost all Japanese animation directors are men, there have been more women in important roles such as producers, writers and musicians in recent years. Their contributions have a significant impact on how women and girls are represented onscreen.
O-Ei, in Keiichi Hara’s “Miss Hokusai” (released here in 2016, and now on digital platforms), is based on a real person, the daughter of the great printmaker Katsushika Hokusai. O-Ei, despite only a few of her works being attributed to her, was an artist in her own right and many historians believe that she assisted her father in his decline in his artistic abilities.
Rapunzel in “Tangled” covered the walls of her tower room with paintings, but she shows little interest in art once she escapes. O-Ei, however, moves confidently through 19th-century Edo, confident both in her talent and in her place in the vibrant artistic culture. She focuses on her drawing and can’t be bothered with the traditional female duties of housekeeping. “When the place gets too dirty, we move,” she says bluntly.
O-Ei is a reflection of the experiences of modern Japanese women who are trying to escape the sexism of Japan’s traditional culture. It also includes the female artists who worked on it. Hara explained via email: “I have no direct experience of O-Ei’s state of mind: I can only guess. But co-producer Keiko Matsushita, actress Anne Watanabe (who provides O-Ei’s voice) and singer-songwriter Ringo Sheena, who are very strong-minded, creative women pursuing their goals with great determination, may have related to O-Ei at a more personal level. The film reflects the love and dedication they put into it.”
Source: NY Times