It’s the year of our lord 2016 and people are still thinking that Miyazaki is someone that anyone should respect. Miyazaki is known to have yelled, “What’s wrong with falling in love with a 12-years-old girl?!” While drinking with another anime industry tian, Mamoru Oshii (Sorry for the lack of English source. I might translate the passage when I find the book again in my pile).
The fact that he makes young female characters his main character becomes really creepy once you realize that in a lot of ways, he’s living out his fantasy with what many otakus (and I use the term with huge amount of contempt) would describe as their waifu in different settings. Sure, they might be well done, but they’re just as self-indulgent as the otakus he claims to hate.
This sort of attitude would not fly if a German director made a movie praising their tanks since the extermination of Jewry was never his goal, but somehow Westerners conveniently ignore that Miyazaki made an apologist piece about a regime that carried out attempted cultural genocide of Koreans, carried out large scale massacres in China and Phillipines and carried out human experiments and large scale sexual abuse on unwilling subjects in their realms.
As a last bit of piece of information, both Arrietty and Howl’s Moving Castle were adaptations of female writers’ books and to be honest not enough credit is given to Mary Norton, creator of the Borrowers, or Diana Wynne Jones, who wrote Howl’s Moving Castle (though her later books do tend to get into a bit of stereotyping of islamic cultures). Miyazaki’s strong female portrayals aren’t always wholly from his efforts, but also from great female writers who also deserve credit.
