What I love about Miyazaki isn’t his recurrent themes of nature or his depictions of children growing up in a fantasy world. What I love is how he creates images, moments, and scenes of wonder. He doesn’t try to jazz them up with fancy editing or camera angles, distractingly trying to convince us of just how much wonderment they contain; he simply displays their essential features and movements and then lets us marvel at them. He often takes advantage of the unique capabilities of cinema by focusing on motion and change, on moments that unfold in time. For example, in Princess Mononoke, when a forest god walks, foliage grows and dies in his footsteps, and Miyazaki shows this in a single shot, emphasizing the continuity of the process. (Only a few minutes later, this moment is contrasted with an event of such rapidity that it collapses the flow of time to its limit, as a severed wolf’s head springs through the air and bites off a woman’s arm, all in a split second. Again, motion and change are emphasized (extending even to violent changes in the bodily forms of an iron monger and a wolf god), and the moment of lightning speed gains much of its impact from its contrast with the preceeding slowly unfolding moments.)
The point: Princess Mononoke is so filled with wonder that it’s in danger of bursting. It follows the usual mythical journey of a hero into a land of the unknown, but it’s not overly concerned with the hero. Instead, it’s all about the unknown—in the proper fabular sense of folk tales, in which bizarre events seem to happen with no sense at all, or at least with a grand ambiguity, even an arbitrarity. In this world, everything is always in motion, always metamorphosing; there is nothing fixed, nothing certain…especially physical forms, which frequently transform and are dismembered with alarming frequency (reminding me of the utter lack of reverence for the human body displayed by English legends, particularly in their wondrous beheading contests). As soon as the hero begins his journey, his arm is transformed into a wriggling gargantua. Later, a god or two is killed as if such a thing were an everyday event. And all of this is marvelously evoked by Miyazaki’s emphasis on the motion of wonder (or the other way around).
