Now Go: On Grief and Studio Ghibli

by Karl Thomas Smith

Genres: Non-fiction
Pages: 90
Series: Inklings
Rating:

Synopsis:

Grief is all around us. At the heart of the brightly coloured, vividly characterised, joyful films of Studio Ghibli, they are wracked with loss - of innocence, of love, of the connection to our world and of that world itself. Now Go enters these emotional waters to interrogate not only how Studio Ghibli navigates grief so well, but how that informs our own understanding of grief's manifold faces.

Now Go is basically an essay about Studio Ghibli’s portrayal of grief and what that means to the author. It isn’t really just about grief in Studio Ghibli movies, and sometimes the link feels a bit tenuous. I can understand feeling a very strong personal connection to movies, and seeing things in them which reflect on one’s own grief and loss, but it ends up not being an inquiry into grief in Studio Ghibli, but very much the author’s grief and Studio Ghibli. The actual analysis of the movies as texts is fairly surface-level. In retrospect, maybe the title should’ve told me that was where it was going to tilt.

I also wasn’t super convinced that the author understood that, for example, Howl’s Moving Castle is based on a book by Diana Wynne Jones, and not something that Miyazaki came up with in his own head alone. He didn’t engage at all with the anti-war themes of this adaptation of Howl’s Moving Castle, which are very much Miyazaki’s thing, developed out of very small elements of the plot of the novel. It would have fit nicely with his themes, but… nope.

Rating: 2/5