Animated Anecdotes

I am very lucky to have Charlie from The Little Island and the Hungry Dog. Charlie is a copywriter working in tech. He is releasing an illustrated grade school children's novel in serial instalments

Charlie is a fantastic author and has a treat in store so read on for fun :)

Porco Rosso's Hideout and Hayao Miyazaki’s 'Interesting Clouds'  

There are so many things to love about Hayao Miyazaki’s 1992 animated film Porco Rosso: its dynamic depictions of real-world aircraft from WW II; the complexity of Marco, the protagonist who is depicted (mostly) as a pig pilot; the production’s hand-painted backgrounds that are rich with the historical milieu.

But perhaps the most alluring part of the film for me is Hayao Miyazaki’s rendering of Marco’s hideout in a tiny cove at the base of a cliff. I can still see it now: Marco’s seaplane bobs in the water. He’s sleeping, his feet propped up under an umbrella, a magazine folded over his face. On a table nearby a radio hums and hisses. A tumbler awaits more wine from a nearby bottle.

I suppose, in Marco’s hideout, I saw reflected back a bit of my own story. When I first watched the film, I was working in China as a reporter. Like Marco, I was a loner. When I wasn’t in the office, I craved the refuge of my little apartment in a high rise overlooking a country I was struggling to understand.

In the ten times or so I’ve re-watched the film since, the reflection of myself persists. Today, I’m not particularly lonely — I have a wife and three kids that fill my days with conversation and joy. But I am still more or less a loner. My hideout in the basement of our townhouse wouldn’t fit a seaplane or even a tent. But there’s a tumbler of iced coffee, quiet jazz music playing, and a sense of shelter that helps to refuel me each night for the next day’s work, family life and hobbies.

I’ve never aspired to pilot a plane, but neither, it seems, did Hayao Miyazaki. Here’s what he had to say in a 1997 interview with Animerica magazine:

“Even now, if you were going to give me a plane ride, I'd like to fly through a sky with some interesting clouds. I would enjoy seeing what kind of view there is, but I'm not really interested in flying for the sake of flying. A lot of different flying sports have come into being, so I suppose I could do it if I wanted to, but in order to do that, I'd probably have to give up something else. For example, I wouldn't want to have to cut back on time spent relaxing in a mountain cabin or pouring all my energy into creating a film. I'd like to have a seaplane, but there wouldn't be any point without a beautiful body of water to maneuver on and a place to hide out in. And most of all I would need a society where one could fly and land as one pleased. I'd be in trouble if I were forced into speaking with an air traffic controller in English.”

Solo flight is actually a theme that surfaces in many of Hayao Miyazaki’s films, but one gets the sense that, for him, flying is less about arriving at a destination and more about looking for “interesting clouds” and discerning the shape of untold stories.

You might say that Hayao Miyazaki’s own hideout was in the air, surrounded by massive cloud mountains — some dark and heavy with moisture, some shot through with refracted sunlight, some illuminated briefly by sudden bolts of lightning. The sky was a place — physically and metaphorically — to dream and evolve and create without distraction.

As for me, I have to settle for my table in the basement. There are no clouds visible from where I sit, but, then again, with animators like Hayao Miyazaki harnessing “interesting clouds” for us, their hand-drawn worlds offer inspiration enough.