Miyazaki’s Little Mermaid: A Goldfish Out of Water

Two Animators and the Problem of Animation

When Hayao Miyazaki’s spirited away reached American theaters in 2002, children by and large were enthralled, but some of us adults were confused. This English-language version of the original Japanese film bore the Disney logo, but it was clearly not Disney. It was longer, for one thing, with odd pauses during which the characters seemed to be pondering,¹ and the line between good and evil seemed blurred and shifting. On the other hand, it also did not fit the American stereotype of Japanese animation—too detailed, too expensive, and with a surprising absence of exploding robots. One thing about this movie did strike a familiar note: like many Disney features, it presented imagination as a sometimes dark and dangerous thing.

That imagination is both a gift and a curse is hardly a new idea; its double-edged presence in children’s literature has long attracted scholarly attention. But for an animated film to warn viewers of the hazards of something without which it could not begin to exist seems downright hypocritical. When the most creative, surrealistic animated images are made to serve a story that preaches reason and restraint, they seem almost to erase themselves, like the path through Tulgey Wood rubbed out by broom dogs in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951). Disney publicity has never officially acknowledged any ambivalence about its chief product; what would a commercial for a Disney movie or theme park be without the word “imagination” or its near relative, “dream”? Yet even the post-Walt animated films of the neoclassic period, which began in 1989 with The Little Mermaid, may convey, in the tension between their pictures and their plots, a deep sense of unease.²

Miyazaki, on the other hand, has been open and straightforward about his misgivings about the fantasy trade. “No matter how much we pride ourselves in being conscientious,” he remarked in 1987, “whatever experiences we provide for [children] are in a sense stealing time from them that otherwise might be spent in a world where they go out and make their own discoveries or have their own personal experiences” (84). Whereas Walt Disney’s distrust of his own medium arose from his growing conservatism—his biographies reveal a man who sought an ever tighter hold on his staff and, as many believe, on the subconscious of his young audiences³—Miyazaki’s unease arises from an opposite ideological tendency. Instead of wishing for more discipline and control, he has spoken of the need to liberate both his team and the “overmanaged, overprotected, suffocated” (251) children they serve. Although he differs so markedly from Disney in both his politics and the directness of his commentary, Miyazaki does share his American predecessor’s awareness that he is working with dangerous magic—and therefore, there may well be a sense in which his films also, like Disney’s, are observably conflicted.

The release of the English-language version of Ponyo in 2009 has provided a convenient opportunity to test this hypothesis because we now have Miyazaki’s own interpretation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” to compare to Disney’s in search of similar signs of strain. Not surprisingly, given his conscious recognition of the problem, Miyazaki has been more successful in working through it—in exploring with his audiences how imagination can best be integrated into a fulfilling life away from the screen. The sections that follow contrast the plotlines and the imagery of these two films in order to illuminate the ways in which each deals with, or evades, this essential challenge of the animator’s art.

Beyond the Binaries

First, however, some words of caution. Western audiences have been all too ready to use Disney as a reference point when discussing Japanese animation in general (Napier 6) and Miyazaki in particular. When anime first started to catch on with young people in the West in the 1980s, their elders expressed their bewilderment through such comparisons, as Luca Raffaelli observes, because they were unable to appreciate the distinctive artistry of Japanese manga-derived...