Earlier today, I came from a video on Youtube on why Miyazaki, the legendary Japanese animator, does not like Tolkien.
I must say it was enlightening, and it showed me a lot about the different points of view of the two genius legends, once I thought about it a bit.
Imagine my surprise when the video began talking about Miyazaki's dislike of Hollywood's glorification of war!
Tolkien certainly did not glorify war!
But then they started talking about colonialism, and a Eurocentric point of view, and once I thought about it a while it made more sense.
And after thinking about it a while I realized that there were two great conflicts coming into play between Tolkien's point of view and Miyazaki's.
First of all, the European point of view vs. the Asian point of view.
Tolkien tells his stories from the point of view of what he is familiar with, and that is a late-19th Century European point of view.
Miyazaki sees things from the point of view of Japan.
But below the surface there is another conflict.
And that is this: Tolkien is setting out to bring back, revive, what is beautiful in our world's deep past.
Miyazaki is a social activist. He is like Bob Dylan. He may love beauty, but he is also devoted to causes, and preaching them to the modern world.
And so Tolkien, to bring back the deep beauty of the past, and the beautiful universal things in that deep past, sets out and creates a world, a self-contained world of his own, for those beautiful deep things.
One that is different from the contemporary modern world of the early 21st Century.
And Miyazaki looks at this from his activist's point of view, from the point of view of modern causes, and picks up on a lot of things that are not really there.
Well, see, Tolkien's powers are just like European colonialist powers, making war on the east and the south, on Asia and Africa.
Only this is Middle-Earth, and there is no Asia and Africa.
Tolkien's works are meant to be taken through the inner logic of the world of Middle-Earth, not through percieved parrallels to our world.
Sure, Gondor is Byzantium and Constantinople, but they fight no Huns.
They fight the Dark Lord.
Sure, there are men from the east fighting heroes from the west. But the men from the east are just pawns of the Dark Lord, victims of the Dark Lord.
Even the Orcs are merely victims of the Dark Lord.
The whole thing is totally alien to anything in the modern 20th and 21st Century world.
And so Miyazaki goes looking for his causes, and naturally they are in all the wrong places.
And that's okay.
Miyazaki has his story to tell, Tolkien has his.
Miyazaki has his gospel to preach, Tolkien has his.
They would agree on a great many things!
But they are not telling the same stories!
And that's okay, because Tolkien has already told his stories!
Miyazaki has stories to tell too, wisdom and deep beauty!
And that's the truth!
God loves you!
Sincerely,
David S. Annderson
P.S. Don't ask me to choose who between the two is greater. It would be like choosing between two sides of my own soul.