As someone who writes about books by day and about cartoons by all the rest of the times, very little makes me happier than to read something about both. Well, here’s the good news! Literary Hub published just such a something today with Gabrielle Bellot’s “The Magic of Hayao Miyazaki’s Literary Imagination,” and it turned one more overcast sweatbox of a New York day feel a little less bleak. Be forewarned—it’s dense, putting an analytic eye to pretty much everything in Miyazaki’s oeuvre and the works of his son and his associates, and name-checking everyone from novelist Kenji Miyazawa to Little Nemo in Slumberland’s Winsor McKay. But it’s also good! Observe:
In an afterword to his Nausicaä manga, Miyazaki explicitly states that the main character, the eponymous Nausicaä, is a blend of the figure of the same name from Homer’s Odyssey and of an eccentric princess from a twelfth-century Japanese tale, “The Lady Who Loved Insects.” However, Miyazaki’s Nausicaä is not particularly Homeric; indeed, he reveals that he first read about her in Bernard Evslin’s Handbook of Greek Mythology, where she was defined somewhat peculiarly as a “lover of nature,” and it was this modified version of Nausicaä the director fell in love with. Later, when Miyazaki read The Odyssey, he was disappointed to find that Homer’s version was little like Evslin’s, and he decided that Evslin’s character was the true Nausicaä — both of poem and film.
See? Don’t you feel better for knowing that? I certainly hope you do. Read on, watch more, let your imagination soar.
