The Ghibli fans who come to my Seed Talks ask some really interesting questions. So I’ve started recalling as many of them as I can at the end of each session, and I plan to revisit my answers here in a series of news posts, with a bit more detail than I can give in a busy Q&A.
This question brought me back to a topic I first looked at in the entry on Castle in the Sky in my book on Hayao Miyazaki in1999: haircuts in Miyazaki films. Sophie’s hair doesn’t just change colour in Howl’s Moving Castle – it gets completely restyled from a long braid to a short bob. This happens to characters in other Miyazaki films. What’s the significance of cutting hair in Miyazaki’s films?
Sophie’s hair gets its first restyle in the transition from Diana Wynne Jones’s novel to Miyazaki’s film. In the book, Sophie’s hair is described as “reddish-gold”, “reddish-straw” or “straw-coloured”, so fair with red overtones. Miyazaki gives her long brown hair to begin with, and she wears it in a single braid. When she is transformed into an old woman it turns white in both the novel and the book. It changes again in both as she gains confidence; at the end of the novel she regains her original hair colour, at the end of the film it is a greyish-silver shade that Howl likens to starlight.
Miyazaki has Sophie sacrifice her braid at a critical point in the film when Calcifer is about to die from hunger. She cuts off her braid and feeds it to him to save his life. This is a powerful rite of passage, symbolising both her growth in confidence and her commitment to those she loves and their place in her family.
This ritual has been used explicitly or hinted at in several other Miyazaki films. In Princess Mononoke, Ashitaka cuts his hair before leaving his home village in search of the source of his curse. It signifies his leaving of his past life behind to undertake a journey beyond everything he knows, which is sure to change him profoundly. San always wears her hair short, which means that she deliberately chooses to cut it (since human hair grows long even after death.) Her rejection of her humanity is also an identification with her short-haired, rough-coated wolf mother and brothers, a commitment to the family that rescued her when she was abandoned. In the same way, Christian nuns cut their hair on entering a convent – Buddhist nuns shave their heads. They are entering a new life and aligning themselves with a new family.
In Castle in the Sky fifteen-year-old Sheeta is kidnapped and taken far from home. When we first meet her she wears her dark brown hair in quite an elaborate style, with a choppy fringe (bangs) surmounted by a bright red hairband, the rest of her hair brushed back and braided into two long braids, each wrapped in matching red bands at the end. It’s a schoolgirlish style that speaks of her innocence and insecurity, but also of her lost life, when she had a mother and a nanny to teach her how to fix her hair. At a climactic moment in the story her braids are literally shot off, one at a time – and by a long-lost cousin, adding to the many reasons not to put her trust in her former family. Now sporting a short bob with her red headband, she echoes back to Nausicaä, who wears her hair short presumably from choice although many people in her culture keep their hair long, and to Kiki, who hangs on to her choppy fringe and defiantly red hair ribbon with its huge bow even when she has to leave her pretty outfits at home and dress for her probationary year as a witch in a strange town.
The style-obsessed Howl’s hair follows a similar but more dramatic trajectory. When Sophie meets him he sports a long, messy blond bob with a long fringe framing those big blue-grey eyes. After an unexpected and hilarious switch to red, and a couple of magical disguise transformations, he finally settles on a shorter choppy cut in his natural raven shade, prepared to be his true self now that Sophie has shared her true self with him.
So hair is a rite of passage – from one world to another, one life to another, from birth families to self-chosen families. There’s a lot to say about Miyazaki’s preference for self-chosen families over the ones we’re assigned at birth, but that’s a whole other question.