Miyazaki’s heroes wage a battle for pure good

Director Hayao Miyazaki’s films are almost entirely regarded as timeless classics, and one of the reasons for that is his talent for creating instantly unforgettable protagonists. You get one look at Kiki, or Porco, or San and you want to know their story. What is this teen witch up to? Why is that man a pig? Is this monster girl going to murder the hell out of everybody? But there’s more to Miyazaki’s heroes, and it’s actually a common thread throughout most of his movies: Despite being Good Guys, none of them are ever really engaged in something as simplistic as Good Vs. Evil. Instead, pretty much across the board, they’re all just fighting for good for the sake of good.

In part that’s because “evil” hardly ever exists in Miyazaki’s films. There’s greed and rage and self-centeredness and narrow mindedness, but what constitutes “evil” is usually either a misunderstanding or is casually written off in a way to make it clear how hollow “evil” really is—like the fascists in Porco Rosso, who factor into the plot in such a minor way that nobody could possibly come away thinking they have any sort of legitimacy. Porco, a pilot who returned from World War I having become an anthropomorphized animal (it’s a metaphor, though not one the film has any interest in defining), dismisses the ideology perfectly in the film’s most famous moment, saying he’d rather be a pig than a fascist.

Porco hates the fascists that are taking over Italy, but his fight isn’t with them. In the film, he fights for honor against a boorish American actor-turned-pilot who thinks he can just do whatever he wants through sheer charisma and (ironically) pigheadedness, but even that fight ultimately doesn’t matter for Porco. In the end, the movie is about choosing love and happiness more than defeating anyone.

A more overt example is Miyazaki’s arguable masterpiece, the Oscar-winning Spirited Away, which seemingly introduces multiple evil villains before gradually chipping away at their supposed terror. The hero of the movie is a young girl named Chihiro who stumbles onto a magical bathhouse for spirits and is forced to take a job cleaning it in order to earn her freedom and save her trapped parents. The owner of the bathhouse is an intimidating witch named Yubaba who steals people’s names in order to make them beholden to her, but she ends up being no more evil than the average boss at any job—she needs to keep the bathhouse running for the sake of the spirit world, and while she is often mean, she is also decidedly fair and obviously loves her giant monster baby.

The movie’s other apparent antagonist, a demon called No-Face, looks unsettling (he’s a black shadow wearing what looks like a mask) and becomes scarier and scarier as things go on, but he explains later that he’s just lonely. He produces gold for the bathhouse employees and they all like him for it and give him all sorts of food in return, so he starts producing more and more gold and eating more and more food until he starts eating the workers, thinking that’s what this exchange is all about. Rather than being scared or trying to destroy him, Chihiro empathizes with him and recognizes that he just doesn’t understand regular social interactions because he looks scary and everyone has always just ignored him because of it.

Nobody gets defeated, and while Yubaba is outmatched by Chihiro, it’s not because of her power. It’s because the bathhouse ordeal has helped her grow into such a nice person that she can’t help but do the right thing.

Even the Miyazaki movies with more traditional heroes—like Nausicaä Of The Valley Of The Wind and Princess Mononoke—don’t really feature those heroes triumphantly defeating the villain. Nothing particularly triumphant at all happens at the end of Mononoke, a movie where the antagonists essentially win but then have to reckon with the aftermath of their bad decisions, with San (the eponymous princess, though “mononoke” is a word for a kind of cursed Japanese spirit and not a name) and new friend Ashitaka remaining involved in society even though that same society tried to destroy the world with its greed and hunger. Sort-of-villain Lady Eboshi, who represents the unstoppable drive of industrialization, isn’t ever even really wrong so much as she is misguided, choosing to defend her people even if it comes at the cost of the natural world. San and Ashitaka don’t quite fight her, they simply show her the importance of balance.

Nausicaä, from her eponymous film, lives in a post-apocalyptic world that is a thousand years out from a war that rendered most of the planet uninhabitable and created a gigantic Toxic Jungle full of giant mutant bugs. The bugs are all grotesque, easily dislikable monsters, but the bigger threat to what’s left of mankind is—what else?—power hungry humans who think they should rule the world. Nausicaä recognizes that the bugs aren’t evil and that it’s possible to grow healthy plants in the Toxic Jungle if you do it right, but a rampaging tribe of humans doesn’t want to listen and instead tries to burn the jungle and kill everything inside, making the same mistake that the ancient humans made.

Tellingly, Nausicaä isn’t even really conscious for the final clash between the humans the bugs, having been injured in her attempt to talk sense into either side, but when the bugs are able to heal her, the people accept what she was saying and give up the fight. Even a classical fantasy hero like Nausicaä, who carries a cool Star Wars-y rifle and rides an awesome glider thing, doesn’t fight anyone in the end. She succeeds by encouraging everyone to just be kinder to each other.

There are, of course, exceptions that prove the rule about Miyazaki’s protagonists: The villain, Muska, dies at the end of Laputa: Castle In The Sky, and he was pretty much an outright bastard before that, but it’s more his lust for power that kills him than the direct actions of heroes Pazu and Sheeta. Howl’s Moving Castle is another one where the bad guys are just more or less misguided fools, fighting a war for reasons they don’t even really understand or care about, and hero Sophie saves the day not by directly confronting them but by just being a nice person who chooses to help her friends even in the face of terrifying, unfathomable opposition.

Even Miyazaki’s feature directorial debut, a tie-in with the beloved manga and anime series Lupin III called The Castle Of Cagliostro, drew controversy when it was first released due to the way it turned the scheming, thieving antihero Lupin into a more heroic figure—a Robin Hood-type who steals from people who deserve to be stolen from and will do whatever he can to help his friends or someone in need. He battles a villain, yes, but Lupin was originally a guy who kind of was the villain.

Subtlety in fiction is often overrated, especially since we live in unsubtle times, but while it may be clearly appealing to see a movie hero save the day by bopping the twisted, remorseless villain on the head with a magic hammer, Hayao Miyazaki has put together an entire canon of films where the heroes fight for a more honest kind of Good without needing to reduce anyone—even fictional people—to something as simplistic and limiting as “Evil.”