Sevenfold Silence

I watched My Neighbor Totoro, directed by Hayao Miyazaki, last night. It's a cute little movie, very fun, mostly inoffensive, and clearly inspired by Disney.

It got me thinking about Hayao Miyazaki's stuff in general, and particularly as it relates to us (otherkin, that is). It all happens in what tvtropeswiki happily calls Ghibli Hills, a pastoral, magical land filled with Shinto land spirits (a modern take on them, generally). Often the world's out of whack and needs appeasing, setting back into that natural-mankind balance where humans live in and understand nature. Miyazaki's stuff isn't Buddhist in the slightest (although I maintain that Nausicaa's got an Amitabha Buddhist streak in there somewhere); it's overtly Shinto with a smidgen of Taoism.

What's this have to do with us, though? I'm not sure. I try to shy away from a lot of the typical conceptions of otherkin, because a lot of them just don't fit me or don't fit me as well as they could. (Otherkin think nature's super! Otherkin are all in-tune with the natural world!) But that sense of and connection with a natural flow, which is so often cited as being something we have and do, is overtly present in nearly all of Miyazaki's films.

I think, though, that what I personally react to that's "so very 'kin" in Miyazaki's work, is instead just the sense of wonder and amazement. A protagonist goes about her normal life (she's usually female) and then something happens, and all of a sudden she's aware that the world's a much bigger (cooler, scarier) place than it had been, and she's not the same for it. That's not an uncommon theme--hell, that's like half Joseph Campbell's monomyth right there--but the particular way Miyazaki does it, with otherworldly spirits and a childlike sense of wonder, tweaks my otherkin sensibilities like nothing else.