Porco Rosso: How Hayao Miyazaki evokes emotional closeness through sensory stimuli

Fig. 1 - Porco Rosso (Hayao Miyazaki, 1992).

Porco Rosso (1992) is the sixth feature-length film in the colourful and expansive repertoire of Japanese animation giant Hayao Miyazaki. Miyazaki’s film is certainly an unsung masterpiece, frequently branded “underrated,” such as in Rob Bricken’s assertion that “it is unfairly overlooked in [Miyazaki’s] oeuvre.” But with his 12th feature on the way (How Do You Live, upcoming) I feel the need to hark back to Porco Rosso (Fig. 1) through the analysis of one scene. Within this sequence, I would like to draw attention to Miyazaki’s manipulation of “haptic visuality” to encourage the viewer to imagine themselves into an otherwise abstract animated space. A sense of haptics—as in a sense of touch—can be communicated via audio-visual methods, which provide the viewer with the means to imagine tactility. As Laura U. Marks suggests, this entails a process wherein “the eyes themselves function like organs of touch. Haptic visuality…draws from other forms of sense experience” (2002, 2.). Maurice Merleau-Ponty puts it best in that “the form of a fold in a fabric of linen or of cotton shows us the softness or the dryness of the fibre, and the coolness or the warmth of the fabric…[or] I hear the hardness and the unevenness of the cobblestones in the sound of a car” (2012, 238-239). Simply put, the scene in question demonstrates how Hayao Miyazaki’s animation forefronts a delicate language of sensory stimuli to create the impression of physical space, allowing us to detail this animated world within our minds and inhabit it.

Set against the backdrop of the Adriatic Ocean in the 1930s, Porco Rosso follows WWI veteran-turned-bounty hunter, Marco Pagot. Despite such a grounded narrative—which is itself something of a departure from Miyazaki’s fervour for the supernatural a la Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986), Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) or Princess Mononoke (1997)—the film maintains a core fantastical thread. Marco has been cursed to resemble a pig under ambiguous circumstances, and this—in tandem with his distinctive, red plane—has earned him the title of “The Red Pig,” or “Porco Rosso” (Fig. 2). The setup for the scene is fairly simple. Marco sits at a coffee table upon the shores of his small island hideaway. In the dead of night, he examines bullets beneath the dim light of a gas lamp. His engineer, Fio, sleeps on the ground beside him. Upon waking, she sees Marco in his true, human form for but a brief moment. The second he realises he is being watched, he returns to his allegorical pig body.

Fig. 2 - Porco Rosso’s Marco Pagot.

The audience is primarily inspired to imagine themselves within this location by Miyazaki’s creation of an acutely haptic space. Said space is characterised by specific animation details that imbue the setting with an intense degree of physical tangibility. The sequence opens on a shot of the waves licking the shores. Miyazaki makes use of an abundance of detail in his animation to evoke a powerful sense of physical place, stirring our imagination of said place, which immediately situates us within the setting. The intricate sounds of the water pushing and pulling upon the sand arouses their texture, as do the shifting, shimmering glimmers of light reflecting upon the water’s surface. There is thus an extraordinary impression that we, as an audience, are sharing this space with Marco. The ‘camera’ pans upward to establish Marco at his table, and the miniscule radius of light emanating from his gas lamp (Fig. 3). This dim and ambient light source is crucial, for when the next shot depicts a close-up of Marco’s hands examining bullets, we understand how the limited lighting implies a physical closeness with Marco (Fig. 4). In other words, Miyazaki’s implementation of lighting physics likewise imbues the scene with a sense of haptic atmosphere; the gas lighting invokes an imagined space wherein we must be situated within close proximity to the subject in order to perceive them.

Fig. 3 - Marco is presented in human form in Porco Rosso.

Fig. 4 - Marco examining the bullets.

That the point-of-view of the shot is an extreme close-up of Marco’s hands is self-evident of such a physical proximity, but there are miniscule sensory stimuli to be observed in the following few shots. In each of the following instances, Miyazaki’s elaboration of physical detail enables our intricate apprehension of his physical presence and the surrounding physical space. Marco’s hand fumbles through a pile of bullets, and what instantly jumps out within this action is the sound design. Every physical movement is accounted for through sound – from Marco’s fingers interacting with the surface of the bullets, to the chink of each bullet as they interact with one another, to the light thud of the rounds tumbling upon the wood of the table. Later in the sequence, the rough surface of the table is revealed by the course scraping of a bullet against its wood grain. Once again, our fantastical inhabitation of this space is here suggested by our strong sense of physical situation in the moment – these elaborate and specific sounds allow us to conjure the tactility of every object and their respective surfaces in our mind. The way the lighting responds with these surfaces likewise grounds the scene in a tactile tangibility. Individual bullets reflect light in idiosyncratic patterns as they are disturbed by Marco’s hand, as does the hand itself. The highly contrasted lights and darks – particularly as they are cast over Marco’s skin – again demonstrates how Miyazaki harnesses lighting physics in his animation to place us within the physical reality of his film. Miyazaki then lingers intently on the depth of a single bullet as Marco raises it to the lamp, turning it beneath the dim glow. With this lingering, our implied physical closeness is again intensified as we are encouraged to mentally materialise the haptic aspects of the scene, inhabiting the fictional space. In this case, the chiaroscuro lighting accentuates the three-dimensionality and depth of each object, reinforcing the haptics of the image in a manner that stimulates the viewer’s apprehension of on-screen matter and its physical palpability.

When Marco’s supernatural façade is withdrawn and his human body revealed, it further enhances the audience’s ability to project themselves within the diegesis. Miyazaki creates a haptic, multi-sensory response in order to situate us closely within a tactile space, but our embodied perception or identification with Marco is greater in this state because he more closely resembles our own corporeal form and our own sensorial engagement with the world. Lilly Husbands elaborates, stating that a subject’s “prior lived experience informs [their] body’s redirected sensual response to familiar figural objects, bodies and states of affairs” (Husbands 2018, 79). As an extension of this, our identification with Marco—on a haptic level—is stronger when he resembles a form familiar to our own. Miyazaki thus creates a dialogue between the fantastical aspects of his animation and our ability to identify with the space through haptic familiarity.

Within this brief yet crucial sequence lies the delicate physicality of Porco Rosso and the world that Miyazaki creates therein. Within every detailed close-up shot and intricate piece of sound design, there exists a haptic response which places us so firmly within the space. Imbuing the space with such physical reality creates a situation whereby the audience is encouraged to manifest themselves within the location. Miyazaki’s animation in Porco Rosso therefore aptly demonstrates haptic visuality, a tool which can be used to embellish our impression of physical closeness or embodied identification within a scene.

**Article published: March 12, 2021**

References

Marks, Laura U. 2002. Touch and Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012 [1965]. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge.

Husbands, Lilly. 2018. “Fantastical Empathy: Encountering Abstraction in Bret Battey’s Sinus Aestum (2009).” In Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres, edited by Christopher Holliday and Alexander Sergeant, 73-90. London and New York: Routledge.

Biography

Tom Nel is a freelance film journalist, video essayist, and illustrator. He has an MA in Film Studies from King’s College London and a BA in Film from Falmouth University. You can check out his YouTube channel here, his Instagram here, or follow him on Twitter.