James Cameron’s Avatar and Hayao Miyazaki have the same war obsession

Through a mix of cold and unnatural technological processes, James Cameron’s The Way of Water: AvatarIt is a beautifully crafted display of nature’s beauty. It’s a romantic fantasy of a world untouched by the depravities of modern, capitalistic, and militaristic civilization, one in which there exists the freedom to coexist with nature, and to find family and love.

At the same time, all the impressive visual-effects energy put toward portraying the natural wonders of Avatar’s setting, Pandora, is also equally committed to rendering vehicles and weapons of war in similar, painstakingly realistic detail. A few steps away are the fictitious airships. These include hydrofoil whaling ships that leap over the waves with incredible speed, diving robots like crabs and armor that is mechanized so you can have a hot cup of Joe. All of them are terrible, but beautiful inventions. They’re love letters for futuristic military technology.

It might be difficult to imagine this tension if not for Hayao Mizaki, the founder of Studio Ghibli. Miyazaki, as you can see from his extensive film and TV collections, is an environmentalist and peace-lover. Miyazaki also admits to an attraction for military machinery. Many of his films contain messages that urge against violence, imperialism and protecting nature from the sins of men. They are also filled with beautifully drawn tanks and aircrafts as well as other military equipment.

Image courtesy of 20th Century Studios

Miyazaki was raised in Japan after the Second World War. Miyazaki’s father owned an aircraft parts factory and built fighter planes for Japan. In Studio Ghibli’s 2013 film The Wind Rises, a fictionalized biography of Jiro Horikoshi, the famous inventor of Japan’s deadly WWII “Zero” fighter planes, Miyazaki reflects not just on world history, but on his own life as an artist, and the way his upbringing shaped his paradoxical interests. At one conference, captured in The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, a documentary about Studio Ghibli, head producer Toshio Suzuki says that Miyazaki “finds himself fascinated by military aircrafts. He’s a man who’s lived with this contradiction. He’s torn by what he loves. He’s drawn to war planes, yet he’s anti-war. How is someone like him even possible?”

Similarly, Cameron’s directing philosophy is informed by his father’s engineering career. In an interview with The Talks, he says: “My father was an engineer, very rational and logical, while my mother was an artist. I’ve always felt that cinema is not a pure art form; it is a technical art form. It involves complex equipment, and there’s a mastery of a technical side of it that you have to have in order to express your emotions and your feelings. Engineering is my passion, but storytelling is what I really love. In my mind, those two things go hand in hand.”

And, indeed, Cameron’s movies often deftly deploy both sides of this equation. The Terminator and his two Terminators The futuristic designs of enemy aircraft, tanks, and exoskeletons that are featured in films have been a hallmark of their movies, which are mainly about love and parenthood. True LiesJump jets are used to create a tale about absent fathers. Aliens birthed an entire aesthetic around the surly space marines making up its cast while mainly being a story concerned with a mother’s love for her adoptive child. His love for sentimental epics about friendship and love is second to his meticulous attention when it involves mechanized mass destruction.

His most recent piece, The Lovers The Way of Water are, oddly enough, the son of protagonist Jake Sully, Lo’ak, and the teen boy’s whalelike tulkun buddy, Payakan. Lo’ak and Payakan are both misunderstood by their own tribes, and through their shared pain stemming from feelings of isolation, they become friends. The relationship they have strengthens both of them in two important ways. First, it helps them discover their own place within their societies. Second, it helps them resist the human attempts to endanger their tribal homes and tribes. The hurting tulkun represents not only humanity’s divorce from nature but from each other. The symbol represents that the most destructive force lies within nature and not in us. Cameron examines how we tend to view nature as something to fear or control. He then guides us towards a more compassionate and visual relationship.

Cameron’s committed romanticism toward nature manifests as grand adventures, not unlike the stories that have entranced Miyazaki. The first Avatar, Jake Sully is only able to abandon his dead-end life as an injured military grunt and gain access to a life in Pandora with the guidance of the Na’vi princess Neytiri. Miyazaki is a master of the urban setting. His characters start in small towns and cities. Then they are introduced to nature’s wild secrets by a magic interlocutor. The magical fish-girl Ponyo’s love for the young Sosuke requires the human world to find balance with the oceanic one or be swept away. This is In Princess MononokeThe wild princess San lets Ashitaka (a prince exiled from a village of humans) ride with her wolves and helps her to save her forest. It’s as if these stories must forever twist between the poles of rigid, patriarchal social order and the idealized freedom of untrammeled nature.

Image: Studio Ghibli

Both of them display a certain alienation to the modern world with its wasteful and ingenious ways. Cameron is driving a Kia Rio 2013. He’s a vegan and a committed environmentalist. Miyazaki similarly leans away from philistinism and rejects others’ overreliance on technology. His life is depicted in various documentaries. He seems to live the life of an artist, regardless of his immense influence within the industry. In spite of, or perhaps in response to, their roles directing huge teams of people and using advanced technology to produce their films, each director’s personal ethos stands in stark opposition to contemporary modes of productivity, efficiency, and large-scale production.

At the core, there is a tension between the things they inherently cherish — the innocent, grounded adventures they shape their films and lives around — and their own natures. Both want to create great art. This requires resources and teams. They also desire to be able to sell it. Disney’s production budget for Water is the Way and Cameron’s three planned follow-ups, if they are all completed, is expected to top $1 billion. As much as he and Miyazaki desire coexistence between humanity and nature, both directors’ films are driven by the same capitalist economy that exploits people and brings ruin to the natural world.

The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, Miyazaki admits as much: “People who design airplanes and machines, no matter how much they believe that what they do is good, the winds of time eventually turn them into tools of industrial civilization. It’s never unscathed. They’re cursed dreams. Animation, too. Today, all of humanity’s dreams are cursed somehow. Beautiful yet cursed dreams.”

Water is the WayThis is yet another cursed fantasy. To create Cameron’s vision of pristine natural fantasy, the big wheels of industry had to turn. Twentieth Century Fox was bought by Disney and ballooned ever higher. This vision was realized by hundreds of visual effects professionals who sacrificed years to realize it. It could only exist as something made from within the imperial core, from within the belly of capitalism’s beast. It must entertain with CGI characters and high-stakes shootouts. In an interview with Esquire Middle East, despite a contrite look at his action film legacy, Cameron admits: “​​You have to have conflict, of course. It doesn’t matter how you view it, violence or action are one and the same. This is the dilemma of every action filmmaker, and I’m known as an action filmmaker.”

Miyazaki’s films, though no match for Avatar in scale, also require investment, infrastructure, and the commitment of squadrons of talented artists. Though Ghibli’s films are intended to tell earnest stories about love, companionship, and the overcoming of obstacles, they must, at the same time, be impressive and expensive visual spectacles. The audience is more eager and harder to please with each new Ghibli movie. In 2014, even the threat that Miyazaki might retire at 72 was enough to close down the studio. Miyazaki currently works on a film. What is the best way to live?.)

This drive to be released from “the work” and its constricting expectations exists not only in both directors’ artistic output, but also in the way they live their lives and relate to nature. Miyazaki, despite being a workaholic, still manages to find time to clean up trash from nearby rivers, something he’s done for many years. Cameron uses the time between films to go on yearslong oceanic expeditions — an effort, it seems, to lose himself within the welcoming natural womb of Earth’s oceans. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Cameron suggests he prefers this way of life to his far more successful day job: “Do I even want to make another movie, let alone another Avatar movie?”

Image by 20th Century Studios

When Cameron did eventually sit down to give us more Avatar after the success of his 2009 film, he aligned the sequel’s point of view, once again, with the Na’vi — not our own species, which is portrayed as villains who ravage everything they see. And when we watch a film like Miyazaki’s Princess MononokeWe may sympathize fully with Lady Eboshi (the charismatic, shrewd leader of frontier logging colonies), but we are moved by the suffering and loss caused by her colony. Princess Mononoke is a lens of the past, tinged with regret; a view of Japan’s industrialization and evolution from the point of view of what is left behind and what is destroyed. Miyazaki wrote it to be a present-day tribute to the forests burned and cleared and to beasts long ago silenced and resigned.

We cannot escape the legacy of what is happening today. Cameron and Miyazaki, directors, cannot separate themselves from what they’re made of, who they know, how they make it money and why they get so much fame. Yet it’s clear that they both yearn for something beautiful and true. He shares his essay/memoir collection. Start Point, Miyazaki explains how movies or animation can “achieve a type of satisfaction, by substituting something for the unfulfilled portion of our lives.”

Their ability to keep hope alive despite all odds is another area where the two directors have a lot in common. Regardless of — or perhaps because — the rest of us have become cynical and beaten down by our tenuous relationship to the environment, they continue to make breathtaking and earnest work in an effort to make visible and expand our relationship with nature.

To Cameron, movies may not be “pure,” but they can still tell stories that have reach and impact. In the Hollywood Reporter interview, he says: “We skipped from complete denial [of climate change]To fatalistic acceptance and missed the middle step. The filmmaker’s role is not to make it all gloom and doom anymore but to offer constructive solutions.”

Their films are unique because of the clear-sightedness displayed by both directors. Their films leave us in awe and with an overwhelming sense of wonder at the world they have captured. We also feel a renewed hope that our species might be greater than we are. While we remain grounded by our family and the natural world around us, we walk away in amazement.