Pigs in the Films of Hayao Miyazaki

Though the folkloric worlds of Studio Ghibli’s visionary co-founder Hayao Miyazaki are intricately unique, there are common threads to be found across the animation house’s output. Little girls who fight for what they love. Spirits who hunt you, spirits who help you, spirits who follow you around. Jolly pirates. Talking animals. Hang gliders and aircrafts and flying dragons.

There’s also Miyazaki’s profound love for the natural world, which comes through in the stories he chooses to tell. In 1984’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (風の谷のナウシカ), for example, a princess must save her kingdom from the toxic topsoil that’s devastated the land. But his gentle environmentalism also shines through in the moments of quiet he captures in animation: fields of grass undulating in the breeze, or clouds soft and pink against the sunset, or “water droplets slipping from pine needles,” as film critic Charles Solomon recalls, that “capture the feeling of a summer storm.” In fact, when Ghibli Park—a theme park inspired by the films—opened, it surprised visitors because it’s not filled with rides and games and food courts. It’s a forest. Which makes sense. After all, a reporter reflected, “If you want Miyazaki to love you, it might help to be a tree. He has a well-documented reverence for nature. Rivers and mountains and oceans are practically the heroes of many Ghibli films.”

Given the profound role that nature plays in most Studio Ghibli movies, it’s not surprising that animals play a vital part in telling the story of the natural world, and in helping humans find their place within it. But there are no simple answers. Several of Miyazaki’s films feature pigs—and the worlds they reveal couldn’t be more different.

“So the demon monster turned out to be a giant boar.” (Princess Mononoke, 1997)

In 1997, Studio Ghibli premiered Princess Mononoke (もののけ姫). Set half a millennia ago in a fantastical Japan, Princess Mononoke pits the gods of nature against the forces of industry. It’s through boars—also known as wild pigs, the ancestors of domestic pigs—that the film’s central tension between nature and industry comes to the fore.

Iron Town is a bastion of manufacturing. Led by Lady Eboshi, the settlement specializes in ironworks, pumping the bellows and lighting the forges to produce munitions. She’s a radical on social issues, employing sex workers and lepers—but she’s clearing the forest to mine for ore. This makes her an enemy to the forest, its deities, and its defenders. There’s the Deer God, who embodies the spirit of the forest. There’s its protector, Okkoto, the blind boar god. There’s San, the girl raised by wolves, who will do anything to save the forest. And there’s Ashitaka, the prince of a small tribe, who tries to broker a kind of peace between the natural world and the industrializing one.

The story begins with Prince Ashitaka, summoned to save a small village from a “demon” rampaging across the countryside. A writhing, swarming, spidery mass, the demon scorches a path across the hills, rotting everything in its wake. For a few moments, the figure of a boar is barely visible within it—but then the monster crashes on until Ashitaka manages to kill it. As the slithering tentacles dissolve, leaving the boar behind, he warns the humans with his final breath: “Disgusting little creatures, soon all of you will feel my hate, and suffer as I have suffered.” A village elder observes, “He had some kind of poison inside him, driving him mad.” She reveals an iron ball that was lodged in the boar’s body. “This is what turned him into a demon.” Iron Town is to blame for this: not just for the death of a boar, one of the protectors of the forest, but also for unleashing the very rage and resentment that corrupted him.

As the story unfolds, the boar clan fights to the very brink of extinction to save the forest—and to spare themselves from a diminished fate. “Look on my tribe,” Okkoto the boar god says. “We grow small, and we grow stupid. We will soon be nothing but squealing game that the humans hunt for their meat.” So the boars go to war. “Even if every one of us dies, it will be a battle the humans will never forget.” But as the hostilities mount, the boars suffer horrific casualties, betrayals, and—ultimately—tragedy. In Princess Mononoke, these powerful animals embody the spirit of the forest: wild, proud, and willing to make great sacrifices to defend their dignity as upheaval encroaches, engineered by humankind. And Okkoto’s fears turn out to be well-founded. In today’s world, the factory farming system has made pigs into what Okkoto predicted for them: mere units of production, raised in filthy stalls, and slaughtered en masse.

“A pig who doesn't fly is just an ordinary pig.” (Porco Rosso, 1992)

Studio Ghibli’s 1992 Porco Rosso (紅の豚) is one of Miyazaki’s many films that relish in the beauty of flight. Porco Rosso follows a former Italian Air Force pilot named Marco in the years between World War I and World War II. A strange curse transformed Marco during the Great War, turning him into a man with a pig’s head. Now he’s known as Porco Rosso, which is Italian for “Red Pig.” But the details of the curse aren’t that important. The film is far more interested in his interwar life as a bounty hunter wanted by the Italian government—and his battle against the air pirates commandeering the skies. The English dub is voiced by Michael Keaton, whose delivery is perfectly gristled for this cigarette-smoking fighter-ace-turned-bounty-hunter.

The film’s running gag is this: Marco is a pig. He’s literally a pig—cutting a Humphrey Bogart-esque silhouette in his canvas trench, donning a detective’s fedora, regarding the setting sun with a pink snout poking out over his handlebar mustache.

But he’s also a pig in a figurative—and largely negative—sense. In Porco Rosso, pigs are base, beastly, and boorish—a popular misconception. We meet Marco in a state of fallenness, no longer a war hero, now a vigilante on the run. He’s not exactly living a life of honor. He’s a hog. He’s swine. He lives in a ramshackle hideout on an abandoned island. Early on, the Italian government issues a warrant for his arrest, citing “refusal to cooperate with the state, illegal coming and going, decadent thoughts, being a lazy pig, and display of indecent materials…” An old Air Force buddy urges him to come back and rejoin their ranks in order to sidestep the warrant. Marco’s response? “I’d rather be a pig than a fascist,” he says with a dark laugh. To be a pig is to be a scoundrel and a scumbag. To be a fascist is somehow even worse. In Porco Rosso, pigs are pretty close to the bottom of the barrel.

But here’s the thing: Marco is the hero of the film. And heroic he is. Dogfighting in a flame-colored plane over the blue waters of the Adriatic. Slugging the braggadocious American movie star in a high-stakes, highly photographed fist fight. Ending up with Madame Gina, the enigmatic hotelier who keeps all the air pirates and bounty hunters in line. Marco prevails. Not because he’s a pig, and not in spite of being a pig. His piggishness is a physical fact with no bearing on the content of his character. So he’s a pig. So what?

“I’m sorry she turned your parents into pigs.” (Spirited Away, 2001)

2001’s Spirited Away (千と千尋の神隠し) was the first Japanese anime to win an Oscar for Best Animated Feature. A story about growing up, Spirited Away follows ten-year-old Chihiro as she stumbles upon a bathhouse for the spirits. “It’s where they come to replenish themselves,” the proprietress—an evil witch named Yubaba—explains, puffing on a long cigarette. From the river spirit to the radish spirit, Chihiro makes both friends and enemies of the bathhouse staff and guests as she overcomes her fears, works for her keep, and ultimately saves her mom and dad from Yubaba’s clutches. Along the way, she learns how to trust her instincts and believe in herself. She’s got more pluck than she knows.

In Spirited Away, pigs aren’t gods or pilots. They’re just plain pigs. In the beginning, Chihiro’s mom and dad discover heaps of delicacies at seemingly vacant food stalls near the bathhouse—and, to Chihiro’s horror, they stuff their faces. Before she knows it, they’ve been transformed into massive pigs. She recognizes them—but they can’t recognize her. “You humans always make a mess of things,” Yubaba hisses later. “Like your parents, who gobbled up the food of the spirits like pigs. They got what they deserved.” In the world of Spirited Away, to be turned into a pig is to be punished for greed and gluttony, and Chihiro has to save them from their own fate—or lose them forever when they’re eaten.

Spirited Away takes it for granted that pigs are oblivious, indistinguishable, and destined for the dinner table. “Turn them into bacon,” Yubaba sneers. This is a world where these pigs—her parents—will absolutely be consumed. And it’s up to Chihiro to remember which ones her parents are. She doesn’t just lose her parents to an animal consciousness that’s presumed to be less-than-human, unable to speak, unable to reassure her, unable to save themselves. She also stands to lose them in a crowded mass of other pigs, each one just as big and pink as the next. And she stands to lose them to a food system in which pigs exist solely to be farmed for food. On one visit to their open-air pigpen, picking out the two that are her parents, Chihiro shouts, “Don’t you worry, I promise I’ll get you out of here. So just don’t get any fatter or they’ll eat you!” For Chihiro, the nightmare is that her parents have been reduced to mere animals who face a seemingly inevitable death sentence.

Miyazaki’s pigs show us who we are

If there’s anything the pigs share across Princess Mononoke, Porco Rosso, and Spirited Away, it’s what they reveal about people. Whether humans are kind or cruel, courageous or cowardly, trustworthy or treacherous. The loss of the boar clan is one of Princess Mononoke’s deepest tragedies. The honor Marco defends in Porco Rosso brings some hard-won dignity to the pig. The worst case scenario in Spirited Away is one in which your parents get turned into pigs in a society that raises them just to eat them. The pigs in Studio Ghibli’s films clarify the boundaries between the natural world and the human world—and offer glimpses of how to find balance between them.