Ophelia and Ponyo, Millais and Miyazaki: How the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood Influenced the Animated Films of Studio Ghibli
By Nicole Entin
In the NHK documentary Ten Years with Hayao Miyazaki, the animator and film director of Studio Ghibli fame recounts the moment at which his artistic vision was challenged by a rather surprising source. The documentary’s director, Kaku Arakawa, narrates how:
‘A trip to the UK left [Miyazaki] with a stunning revelation. It happened during a visit to the Tate Britain art museum. He found himself transfixed by the works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, particularly a painting called Ophelia. Miyazaki was startled by the artist’s minute attention to detail, by how different amounts of light rendered subtle changes in the painting’s appearance. “I thought, my work is shoddy compared to those artists. I was just astonished. At that point, it became clear to me. Our animation style could not go on as before.”’1
10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki, directed by Kaku Arakawa. Tokyo: NHK, 2019.
The artwork that stunned and inspired Miyazaki was, of course, John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1851-52), one of the iconic hallmarks of Pre-Raphaelite painting depicting the drowning of its titular subject in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Millais interprets the passage in which Queen Gertrude retells how Ophelia, stricken with madness and grief for the death of her father and the strange behaviour of her love Hamlet, fell into a brook while collecting flowers and drowned under the weight of ‘her garments, heavy with their drink, / Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay / To muddy death.’2 The painting is, as Miyazaki observes, incredibly detailed and precise in its brushwork – as well as in its careful attention to symbolism, and floriography in particular.
John Everett Millais, Ophelia, oil on canvas, 76.2 x 111.8 cm, Tate Britain, London.
While Miyazaki’s encounter with Millais’s Ophelia came relatively late in his animation career, several comparisons can be made between the core creative beliefs in the works of Studio Ghibli and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Although the Pre-Raphaelites were perceived as one of Britain’s earliest avant-garde movements, they looked to traditional subjects while seeking to express a modern Victorian ethos in their artworks. This is epitomised in paintings such as Ford Madox Brown’s Work (1852-65), which valorises the virtue of labour and craft in the urban expansion of London.
Ford Madox Brown, Work, oil on canvas, 137 x 198 cm, Manchester, Manchester Art Gallery.
Like the moral didacticism of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s early paintings, Miyazaki is known for his engagement with contemporary social concerns within his animated films. Princess Mononoke (1999) expresses a complex tension between the natural world and human greed, while scenes of cities in flames and distant hordes of bombers in Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) illustrate Miyazaki’s ‘great deal of rage’3 regarding the Iraq War.
Resonating with Brown’s Work in particular, Miyazaki depicts collective and personal virtues as contributing to the growth of his characters. In Spirited Away (2001), frames of the protagonist Chihiro working in Yubaba’s bathhouse focus on small actions such as a close-up of her hands wringing a wet towel, or her struggle to clean a bathtub twice her size. Although these frames are more microcosmic than Brown’s monumentally-scaled Work, the importance of relative size in the illustrations demonstrates Chihiro’s persistence at these physically arduous tasks despite her vulnerable position.
Spirited Away, directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Tokyo: Studio Ghibli, 2001.
The unexpected meeting between Studio Ghibli and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and the two seemingly distant artists, Millais and Miyazaki, is perhaps not as unusual as it appears on the surface. As Alexander Huang writes in ‘The Paradox of Female Agency: Ophelia and East Asian Sensibilities’, the presence of Millais’s Ophelia in Japanese culture dates back as early as 1906. The painting is central to the narrative of Natsume Sōseki’s novel Kusamakura and has interested Japanese audiences ever since in art exhibitions and popular culture alike.4 Furthermore, in ‘Ophelia and her Magical Daughters: The Afterlives of Ophelia in Japanese Pop Culture’, Yukari Yoshihara establishes a parallel between Shakespeare’s Ophelia and the character of Granmamare – or the sea goddess – in Studio Ghibli’s Ponyo, released in 2008 after Miyazaki’s visit to the Tate Britain.5.
Taking up this comparison from Yoshihara’s perspective as a literary scholar, one frame from Miyazaki’s Ponyo has significant visual and thematic resonances with Millais’s Ophelia. In this image, Ponyo’s mother has arrived to speak with the wizard Fujimoto, Ponyo’s father, about the imbalance in the natural world created as a result of Ponyo’s transformation into a human. Cradling Fujimoto’s boat in her hands, Granmamare’s floating pose seen from a high perspective is reminiscent of the composition of Ophelia, in which the viewer looks down on Ophelia’s head and upper body surfacing from the water while her lower body remains submerged.
Ponyo. Directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Tokyo: Studio Ghibli, 2008.
Millais and Miyazaki both pay attention to how water diffuses light and distorts shape. In Ophelia, the intricate detailing of the beaded lace dress is less distinct where the garment is submerged, with the outer edges of the layered skirt becoming entirely blurred into the surrounding water. The shape of Ophelia’s left wrist is slightly distorted from the refraction of light in the water, although the precision of Millais’s brushwork doesn’t entirely render the effect at its most naturalistic. The ripples that originate from Granmamare’s head breaching the water, conversely, distort the shape of the figure more than Millais’s Ophelia. The lines of the goddess’s hair, arm, and dress are all curved by the rippling waves. There is a distinct difference between the bright patches of light that are cast on the surface of the water by the moon, and the soft glowing light diffused beneath the surface. Miyazaki’s inventive use of light sources, emanating both from the moon outside the pictorial space and from Granmamare herself, echoes his revelatory interest in the effects of light created by Millais in Ophelia.
Both images convey a sense of tranquillity in their depictions of women in the natural world. In Millais’s painting, Ophelia’s drowning is an almost peaceful scene. Her parted lips, half-closed eyes, and soft expression are akin to a woman about to fall asleep. Granmamare in the frame from Ponyo shares Ophelia’s calm and untroubled expression, even though the context of the two images – one of grief and death and the other of tenderness and familial love – couldn’t be more different. At the same time, Granmamare’s arrival is necessitated by potential disaster: if Ponyo remains caught between the human and mythical worlds, a catastrophic imbalance will be created. Even with these stakes, Granmamare’s physicality is rendered by Miyazaki as calm and collected in comparison to Fujimoto, who in this frame anxiously crouches to speak to Ponyo’s mother. Millais and Miyazaki imbue their female figures with a sense of serenity even when faced with death and destruction. Their harmony with their natural surroundings becomes a source of empowerment in a narrative moment of catastrophe.
A side-by-side comparison of Millais’s Ophelia and the frame of Granmamare from Miyazaki’s Ponyo.
While the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Studio Ghibli appear to be distant in terms of geography, time period, and the kind of art that they produced, one fateful trip to the Tate Britain influenced Hayao Miyazaki to draw on the stylistic practices of artists such as John Everett Millais in the development of his animated films. Although Miyazaki’s tendency to imbue his works with social and moral messages resonates with the Pre-Raphaelite movement before his encounter with their work in 2006, frames from his 2008 film Ponyo demonstrate the evident influence that paintings such as Millais’s Ophelia had on the developing animation style of Studio Ghibli.
Notes:
Arakawa, Kaku (director), 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki, episode 1, ‘Ponyo is Here’, Tokyo: NHK, 2019. https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondemand/video/3004569/
Huang, Alexander. ‘The Paradox of Female Agency: Ophelia and East Asian Sensibilities’, in The Afterlife of Ophelia, edited by Kaara L. Peterson and Deanne Williams (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012): p.81
Miyazaki, Hayao, interviewed by Devin Gordon, Newsweek, 19th June 2005.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2016): pp. IV.7.156-158.
Yoshihara, Yukari. ‘Ophelia and her Magical Daughters: The Afterlives of Ophelia in Japanese Pop Culture’ in Shakespeare and the Supernatural, edited by Victoria Bladen and Yan Brailowsky (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020)