I get some absolutely fantastic questions from audiences for my Seed Talks on Studio Ghibli. They often raise points I hadn’t thought about before, or give me completely new angles on topics I’ve been over many times. Having let so many of these brilliant insights vanish down Memory Lane I thought I’d try and recall at least a few from each event and how I answered them.
This one comes from my last Seed Talk in Bristol: why does Sophie in Howl’s Moving Castle dress so much like Yubaba in Spirited Away?
That’s a true observation. Sophie dresses like an old lady, wears her hair in an old-fashioned braid and always looks glum. She’s a very serious and reserved young woman and Yubaba is an outrageous old madam – but when you compare their clothes, there’s a very strong similarity. The only real difference is that Yubaba and her twin sister Zeniba love makeup and jewellery.
It all comes back to Miyazaki’s love for sparky, feisty old ladies. In the very first Studio Ghibli movie, Castle in the Sky, the pirate queen Ma Dola dresses in the same style as Yubaba, though with a few piratical variations. We know from Miyazaki’s own writing that Dola’s character was inspired by his mother, but that’s as far as the inspiration went. If we look at the photos that survive of his mother, she was a smartly dressed woman with carefully styled hair and discreet jewellery. I haven’t seen any photos of her in old age, but she most definitely would not have dressed like one of Miyazaki’s feisty fantasy old ladies, because they dress in a way that was out of style long before Miyazaki was born. I very much doubt he ever actually saw any old ladies dressed in this British-Victorian fashion in 1940s Japan.
But it’s a fairytale kind of style, and Miyazaki uses it to signal that the wearer is a classic comic creation, almost a pantomime dame. Because of Dola, Yubaba and Zeniba, when we see that style of dress on an old lady, we’re ready for her to be energetic, active, and assertive. It doesn’t really suit shy, mousy young Sophie except for that one moment when she let her inner old lady show and orders the Witch of the Waste out of her shop. But she grows into it.
By dressing Sophie like an old woman, Miyazaki is both showing how she tries to make herself invisible, and hinting at how old age will allow her to claim her power. She’ll become part of that line of old women who can run pirate enterprises or bath-houses or anything they choose. If you think about dressing for the job, Sophie is dressing for the job she really wants – to be a woman with no fear, shame or embarrassment: to be old enough to behave and be treated as a proper grownup, not a girl. She doesn’t feel she can do that when she’s young because she feels she isn’t pretty and vivacious like her sister, but once she’s old, she joins that lineage of Dola and Yubaba and Zeniba.
Of course, this works even better if the audience already knows Miyazaki’s earlier films. So the Japanese audiences who saw Castle in the Sky in 1986, either as children or with their children, and later took their children or grandchildren to see Spirited Away in 2001, just might have guessed what would happen when they saw a mousy young girl dressed in the same way as those naughty old girls from 2001 up there on the screen in Howl’s Moving Castle in 2006. Their children or grandchildren might know Ma Dola from home screenings, but they’d definitely remember Yubaba and Zeniba. It’s a crumb in a trail that starts to lead you from what you already know about Miyazaki’s other movies into this one. You don’t need it to enjoy the film, but once you make the connection you know more about Sophie than she does herself at the beginning of the story.