英文原文:
- Please tell us about the hero, Ashitaka.
Miyazaki (M): Ashitaka is not a cheerful, worry-free boy. He is a melancholy boy who has a fate. I feel that I am that way myself, but until now, I have not made a film with such a character. Ashitaka was cursed for a very absurd reason. Sure, Ashitaka did something he should not have done - killing Tatari Gami. But there was enough reason to do so from the humans' viewpoint. Nevertheless, he received a deadly curse. I think that is similar to the lives of people today. I think this is a very absurd thing that is part of life itself.
- How about Yakkul?
M: I made Yakkul because I somehow felt it would be easier to draw an imaginary animal. The other reason is that if I had a boy riding a horse with a Japanese sword and a topknot (a typical hairstyle of Japanese in period dramas), he would be a samurai. Then he would associated with the image of a samurai which existing period dramas have built. But I didn't want that. I wanted to have a boy, not a samurai boy, in the movie.
Ashitaka is at a loss as he comes into the outside world, that is, town, from his village. At this point, he is hiding his face to show that he is a non-person. Actually, at the moment he cut his topknot off, he was no longer human. Cutting one's topknot in a village has that meaning. So, it looks like Ashitaka leaves (the village) of his own will, but actually, the village forces him to leave, I think. Ashitaka, as such a boy, cannot negotiate well when he goes to the market. The Northeast area, where Ashitaka's village was, used to produce gold. So Ashitaka just offered a gold grain instead of money, not knowing the value of it.
- Judging from her attire, Eboshi looks like a Shirabyoushi (prostitutes who danced in men's attire).
M: I also have that image (about her). I think that she got there after going through considerable hardships. So from Eboshi's standpoint, she must feel that Ashitaka's karma is nothing.
- So she did go through a lot of hardships.
M: Yes. I thought up a story that she was a wife of a Wako boss (Japanese pirates/smugglers who raided the Chinese and Korean coastlines), or something like that. And what Eboshi is trying to do is to build a paradise as she thinks of it. Hence, she is a person of the 20th century. She has a clear ideal and can take action. Well, I just think so (laughs).
- And if she was interfered with...
M: She wouldn't hesitate to kill, sacrifice, or even sacrifice herself. I think that she is that kind of person. And that somehow jives with the big experiments humans conducted during the 20th century, or what socialism did.
- How about the war between the Samurai and Tatara Ba?
M: Such things were rather common. Tatara Ba eroded the valleys and mountains with water to wash out iron sands. Water is conducted through a gutter, and hits a cliff. Then, the muddy water is conducted through (another) gutter to allow the iron sands to precipitate out gradually. The process pollutes the water, and washes mud downstream. So the villages and the river downstream get buried in mud. It was a disaster for those who grew rice.
Therefore, the farmers downstream and the Tatara people were often in conflict. When the local Samurai attacked Tatara Ba, they were not doing something bad; they were doing something rightful. In that time, Samurai and farmers weren't clearly separated (i.e., some Samurai were also farmers). So it's natural to have a conflict when Tatara Ba's presence became bigger.
However, since these Samurai said they are (Samurai of) "Asano Kubo" ("Kubo" is a title for a noble high-ranking Samurai, such as a Shogun), they are (men of) noble Samurai such as Kanrei. So they treated Ashitaka honorably, as a Samurai, when he hurried to Tatara Ba. If they feel that Ashitaka is coming to meet them in single combat, they say "Come on!". When they see a great (combat) technique, they appreciate it and think, "I saw a good thing." I wanted them to be men like that.
I don't consider the Samurai as bad and the Tatara people as good. So, in the scene where the porters were eating, I tried to put several unlikable guys. Kouroku doesn't say a word to the Ishibiya guy, although they were both wounded.1 Even a guy as good-natured as Kouroku could not be free from the social restrictions of the era. The Ishibiya people are functioning as mercenaries, but at Tatara Ba, they are not treated as people with feelings or personalities.
- I thought the strength and toughness of the women at Tatara Ba are traits we find today.
M: It's not that I wanted to make it modern. It's just that depicting Tatara Ba under the rule of men would be boring. And if I made the boss of Tatara Ba a man, he would be a manager, not a revolutionary. If it's a woman, she becomes a revolutionary, even if she is doing the same thing.
So I didn't make them women who have to be protected by men, or women in their families. I intentionally cut them off (from such things). I think that actually there were children at Tatara Ba, but it would make things complicated if I put children there, so I didn't. Eventually, many children will be born there, but I wanted to portray Tatara Ba as not yet in such a stage.
And not all the Tatara men are good guys. I wanted to make crowds that included disagreeable guys. "This is a disagreeable guy, so let's kill him" - I didn't make the end (to the story) like that.
Kouroku is not a special guy. It's the first time that I made a movie in which an ordinary guy didn't do anything heroic, right to the end.
I made the character of Jiko Bou without knowing what kind of role he would play. He could be a spy of the Muromachi government (the Samurai regime which was ruling Japan at that time), a henchman of some religious group, or a Ninja, or he could actually be a very good guy. In the end, he became a character who has all of those elements.
- I thought that he was all of what you have just said.
M: And still, he isn't a bad guy. I wanted him to be that kind of person.
- In that sense, this movie does not have what you could call a bad guy.
M: No. When you talk about plants, or an ecological system or forest, things are very easy if you decide that bad people ruined it. But that's not what humans have been doing. It's not bad people who are destroying forests.
- Humans have their own reasons to do it.
M: Yes. Hard-working people have been doing it. During the Edo era, many beautiful forests were raised, but that was because trees were planted to finance a Han (feudal domain). So if someone cut even one branch off, they cut his arm or head off. That's how they protected and raised the forest. And since the farmers around the forests were really poor, they hoped that they somehow could cut the trees in the domain.
If we had only talked about this situation from the human's side, there would have been no forest. Because of such terrible power, the forests were born. Then, there is actually a dilemma between the issue of humanism and growing a forest. It is exactly the problem of the environmental destruction we are facing on a global scale. This is the complexity in the relationship between humans and nature. And since this is a big theme of this film, I didn't want it to be a story about a bad guy.
I think that the Japanese did kill Shishi Gami around the time of the Muromachi era. And then, we stopped being in awe of forests. Well, I don't know if it was really during the Muromachi era or not, as there would certainly be regional differences, but at least from ancient times up to a certain time in the medieval period, there was a boundary beyond which humans should not enter. Within this boundary was our territory, so we ruled it as the human's world with our rules, but beyond this road, we couldn't do anything even if a crime has been committed, since it was no longer the human's world - there was such asyl (a sanctuary which is free from the common world. It is a free and peaceful domain), or a sanctum. It is written in books by Kin-ya Abe or Yosihiko Amino (both are historians). I think that there were such things. As we gradually lost the awareness of such holy things, humans somehow lost their respect for nature. This film deals with such a process in its entirety.
- We lost our awe (of such things)
M: Yes. After all, this film is just reenacting what humans have done historically. After Shishi Gami's head was returned, nature regenerated. But it has become a tame, non-frightening forest of the kind that we are accustomed to seeing. The Japanese have been remaking the Japanese landscape in this way.
- So, San's last word was...
M: It is a thorn that stuck in Ashitaka without being resolved. Ashitaka is the kind of person who is willing to live with the thorn. So, I think that Ashitaka is a person of the 21st century, who decided to live with the thorn, San. He does not say "well, I can't do anything about it."
If Ashitaka says "I'll become a deep ecologist", things are easier, but it doesn't work like that. In our daily lives, things that humans can do to protect nature are limited. And Ashitaka also has a distrust of the humans' acts to survive in the ecosystem as a thorn. And at the same time, he can not turn a blind eye to people dying from starvation. Ashitaka has no choice but to suffer and live, while being torn between such conflicts. That's the only path human beings can take from now on. |