Between Toei Doga and Leatherface: The Function of the 'Mask' in Hayao Miyazaki's Works

The 'Joy' and 'Curse' of Toei Doga

The starting point for animator Hayao Miyazaki lies in the tradition of the 'joy of movement' established by Toei Doga. There, characters were required to expressively change their faces and embody a 'goodness' loved by all. However, the creative ambition held by the young Miyazaki was not satisfied by this alone. He sought to depict the heavy weight of tank iron, the impact of destruction caused by intense gunfire, and above all, a world where dry death was a matter of course.

Here, a decisive problem arises. The Toei-style characters, with their large eyes and soft outlines, were simply too cute. To have them fire guns and commit slaughter while maintaining those features, the charm radiating from the art style inevitably becomes noise, causing the realism to dissipate. Miyazaki faced the problem of how to depict cold-blooded violence while maintaining this 'cute art style'.

Acquiring the 'Mask' and Stripping Away Humanity

To break through this contradiction, Miyazaki introduced the device of the 'mask.' Consider the shadow-users in 'Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro' or the Tolmekian soldiers in 'Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.' By placing inorganic faces or masks on opposing forces, Miyazaki stripped them of their individual humanity.

The moment they put on a mask, they are purified into 'functions' without names.

In 'Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,' even the protagonist Nausicaä appears for a significant portion of the beginning wearing a 'mask' or respirator, with her face completely hidden. Because he covered the protagonist's face with a 'mask' and focused on 'function,' the moment her face is revealed later becomes all the more vivid. Furthermore, with the Dorok army and the Ohmu handlers who appear in the original manga but not the film version, 'Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind' has become a work that could be called a feast of 'masks' for Miyazaki.

Resonance with Splatter Horror

There is a genre other than Miyazaki's works that makes maximum use of this act of bestowing a 'mask' upon a human to strip away not only their expressions but also the humanity they possess, thereby purifying their functionality. It is the horror film, which traces its origins to the legendary masterpiece 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre'.

It goes without saying how important masks are in stripping humanity from killers, such as Leatherface in 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre' or Jason in 'Friday the 13th'.

I do not know if Miyazaki was directly influenced by horror films. However, it is very interesting that the splatter horror that blossomed from the 70s to the 80s and Miyazaki, who debuted and released works during the same era, resonated at the root of their expression through the 'mask'.

Muska: The Culmination of the 'Transparent Mask'

In Miyazaki's exploration of the 'mask,' one pinnacle reigns supreme: Muska from 'Castle in the Sky.' Muska does not wear a physical 'mask' like the soldiers seen previously. However, the sunglasses that constantly cover his eye sockets are a culmination of the 'mask' expression that Miyazaki arrived at.

While Muska always wears an intelligent, gentlemanly smile, only his eyes—the place where his true intentions and madness reside—are completely frozen behind the lenses. He refuses to meet the gaze of others, controls his humanity with a single transparent lens, and calmly directs massacres.

Having shed heavy physical armor and transformed everyday glasses into a 'mask,' Muska is the culmination of Miyazaki taming the 'sweetness of the art style' he had struggled with since his Toei days into 'cold-blooded intelligence.' The reason Miyazaki was able to perfect 'evil' in his works is precisely because of the existence of this versatile 'mask'—which sometimes reflects a sharp, ambitious gaze, and at other times completely covers the eyes to strip away humanity, reflecting only the functionality of coldly taking human lives.

Miyazaki and the Mask Thereafter

Since the culmination that was Muska, no villain as clear-cut as him has appeared in Miyazaki's works. However, the mask continues to play a very important role in subsequent works.

'Porco Rosso' features a protagonist who wears a double mask—he transforms his own appearance into a pig and then puts on sunglasses—and the mask that the heroine San wears at the beginning of 'Princess Mononoke' and the moment it shatters could be the subject of an entire essay. If Muska's mask is for discarding humanity, then No-Face from 'Spirited Away' is a mask for filling an empty interior; in that sense, couldn't one say he is the ultimate masked character?

For Hayao Miyazaki, who began his career at Toei Doga and sought intense forms of expression that could not be contained within the framework of animated films meant for everyone from children to adults—without sacrificing their charm—the item and motif of the mask served as a groundbreaking move that solved multiple problems with a single idea.