Miyazaki and ooze

[Arcane]

I just watched Howl's Moving Castle the other day, and lo and behold, there's once again a ton of black slimy ooze stuff in the movie. This is like his third movie in a row with black oozy gooey stuff in it. Anyone know what the deal with the black ooze is? I mean, there's the obvious correlation with evil and whatnot, but is there anything more to it than that?

[margot]

Well don't listen to me, but Miyazaki is a well known environmentalist and so I imagine black ooze generally symbolizes water pollution, ect.

[No Sad Endings]

Well as for HMC, in the book there was lots of ooze of varying types. Otherwise, what Lindsay said. xD

[Gundampilotspaz]

I haven't seen Howl's Moving Castle. But I know for a fact that Lindsay is right when in comes to Mononoke Hime. (Not JUST water polution, however)

In Mononoke Hime it repersented death and rebirth. I spread across the land as a dark of the night-walkers body killing the forest and destroying the human settlement. Then when it lifted the power of the Forest God took over, with the humans gone everything sprung back into life. But then the humans had plans to rebuild the city and restart the forge.

So it really was a symbol of the continuing battle between nature and humanity. The two will balance each other out once in a while.

[Samurai Drifter]

Mononoke and Spirited Away are the only other ones I can think of with ooze or ooze-like stuff. I haven't noticed it in most of his stuff.

There are common themes in a lot of his movies though. Notice how the sootballs in My Neighbor Totoro look exactly like the ones in Spirited Away, with eyes and everything.

[amy]

the sootballs are sooo cute <3

I never thought of the ooze that way but it definitely makes sense

now I want to see Spirited Away again xD

[Siendra]

Well don't listen to me, but Miyazaki is a well known environmentalist and so I imagine black ooze generally symbolizes water pollution, ect.

Bingo. He gave that exact explanation in an interview a couple of years ago.

[Wind]

the sootballs are sooo cute

I never thought of the ooze that way but it definitely makes sense

now I want to see Spirited Away again xD

I remember over the summer, I had my buddy Cip over and we got GPS to come in and watch spirited away with us, but we had to stop it like 30 minutes in cuz the fucking dvd kept SKIPPING over and OVER.

[Ceraziefish]

Also, if anyone's read the Nausicaä graphic novel, there's a serum in that that allows people to breath the poison in the forest. It seems to work about the same as the ooze from the abovementioned movies.

The difference is that it's not very evil, the way I saw it. In fact, the Wormhandlers treated it as a holy substance.