When Characters Begin to Live

When Admiration Does Not Become Conviction

For a long time, I wondered whether my inability to appreciate Hideaki Anno’s films revealed some weakness in my own judgment. Shin Godzilla, Shin Ultraman, and Shin Kamen Rider have all received considerable admiration. Their visual intelligence, cultural references, technical ambition, and unmistakable directorial style are difficult to deny. Many viewers regard Anno as one of the most important Japanese creators of his generation. Yet in my own experience, admiration never became conviction.

Whenever I watched these films, I experienced a persistent sense of distance. The dialogue sounded artificial. Characters often spoke in a manner that felt arranged rather than lived. Although the actors appeared in real rooms, wore real uniforms, and discussed matters of government, science, war, or national crisis, they did not seem to inhabit those situations as ordinary human beings would.

Their speech frequently reminded me of manga or animation. It carried the rhythm of written lines delivered for dramatic effect rather than words emerging naturally from people responding to one another. There was often something ceremonious, exaggerated, or self-conscious in the exchanges. The films were live action, but the people within them did not always appear fully alive.

At first, I assumed that I simply did not understand what others were seeing. Perhaps the problem lay in my own limited familiarity with Anno’s work. I had not followed Neon Genesis Evangelion closely, and I could not recognize every reference to earlier animation or special-effects television. Viewers with a deeper knowledge of those traditions might naturally appreciate layers that remained invisible to me.

The feeling did not disappear when I learned more about the intentions behind the films. I could understand that the stiffness was deliberate. I could recognize the quotations, the visual patterns, and the carefully constructed rhythm of meetings and commands. None of that made the characters feel more human.

Gradually, the question changed. Instead of asking whether I had failed to recognize the quality of the work, I began asking what kind of reality Anno was trying to preserve. That shift made the films easier to understand, even if it did not make me admire them in the same way as their strongest supporters. Anno may not be attempting to represent adult life as it is actually experienced. He may be reproducing something more personal and more specific: the way the adult world appeared to a child.

The Adult World Through the Eyes of a Child

When we are children, we often find adult forms impressive long before we understand their meaning. A child watching science fiction may hear officers repeat commands, technicians announce measurements, and specialists discuss complicated systems. The technical language itself creates authority. Uniforms, control panels, maps, gauges, and formal procedures suggest that the adults know exactly what they are doing. The child does not need to understand the system. Its appearance is enough.

I remember the famous line from Space Battleship Yamato: “Energy charge, 120 percent.” As a child, one can hear such a line and feel that something extraordinary is about to happen. The number exceeds the expected limit. The machine has gone beyond its ordinary capacity. A powerful weapon is almost ready. Engineers and officers are controlling forces that ordinary people could not understand.

As an adult, however, the phrase begins to sound different. One may wonder what the 120 percent is measuring and why a supposedly technical system has been designed around such a vague dramatic threshold. The line does not really communicate engineering. It creates a ritual. The repeated orders, formal responses, flashing displays, and rising percentages turn the firing of the weapon into a ceremony. What once appeared to be adult expertise is revealed as a child’s image of expertise, carefully expressed through sound and form.

This does not necessarily make the scene worthless. Childhood excitement has its own authenticity. The line may preserve exactly how mysterious and powerful adult knowledge once seemed. It recalls a period when complicated words and formal procedures could make an imagined world feel larger than life. Anno appears to preserve that perception with unusual fidelity.

His fascination with command centers, machinery, weapons, emergency procedures, official titles, and institutional language can be understood as an attempt to reconstruct the adult world as it appeared from outside. He does not merely remember the stories of childhood animation and special-effects television. He remembers their seriousness. He remembers what it felt like to believe that the people in the control room possessed access to hidden knowledge.

This helps explain the distinctive realism of Shin Godzilla. The film is often praised for its portrayal of government bureaucracy, legal procedure, crisis management, interdepartmental coordination, and the relationship between Japanese authority and American power. Its many meetings and rapid exchanges create an impression of institutional density. Viewers recognize details that resemble actual government operations, including the importance of titles, jurisdiction, formal approval, and chains of command.

Yet I still hesitate to call this realism without qualification. The machinery of government may be presented in detail, but the human beings inside it often remain schematic. We see the external form of bureaucracy more clearly than the private lives, anxieties, ambitions, resentments, and compromises that make real organizations difficult to understand.

Actual bureaucratic life is rarely a clean sequence of precise statements delivered at high speed. It includes repetition, confusion, hesitation, fatigue, territorial behavior, personal loyalty, indirect resistance, and long periods in which no one fully understands what is happening. People do not cease to be human because they have entered a meeting room.

In Shin Godzilla, however, the meeting room often becomes a stage on which the idea of government is performed. The officials possess titles and functions before they possess inward lives. Their language tells us that they belong to a serious institution, but it does not always persuade us that they are people living through a crisis. The realism may therefore be described as the realism of visible adult form.

A child observes that serious adults use unfamiliar vocabulary, speak formally, gather around documents, and control important systems. The child concludes that these signs constitute the reality of adulthood. Anno reproduces those signs at enormous scale and with great technical skill. The result can be exhilarating to viewers who share the memory. Others may feel that they are watching an elaborate reconstruction of how adulthood once looked rather than adulthood itself.

American superhero cinema preserves another side of childhood imagination. Instead of presenting the adult world as a system of impressive forms, it offers the fantasy that ordinary human limits can be overcome. The superhero acquires extraordinary strength, intelligence, technology, magic, or biological capacity. Problems that would normally require institutions, communities, historical change, or patient cooperation become conflicts that exceptional individuals can confront directly.

The child’s desire is not merely to understand the adult system. It is to become powerful enough to rise above it. Both traditions preserve a form of childhood faith. Anno preserves the authority of systems, while superhero cinema preserves the authority of exceptional power.

Growing Up, or Returning to Childhood

There are several ways for adult artists to remain connected to childhood. Some works return us to emotions we once possessed. Others reveal meanings that we were too young to understand when we first encountered them. The difference between these two experiences may explain why certain works become primarily nostalgic while others continue to deepen over time.

When an adult hears “Energy charge, 120 percent,” the memory may produce affection. The phrase brings back the excitement of childhood. We remember how impressive the machinery sounded, how serious the officers appeared, and how eagerly we waited for the weapon to fire. The pleasure comes from emotional return. We recover, however briefly, the person we once were.

There is nothing contemptible about this. Nostalgia can preserve continuity between childhood and adulthood. It reminds us that the imagination of the child has not completely disappeared. Adults may need such moments, especially in a world where experience often replaces wonder with skepticism.

American superhero films work partly through this form of return. Their most successful versions address children and adults at the same time. Children may identify directly with the fantasy of power, while adults recover the desire to believe that courage, exceptional ability, and decisive action can still overcome evil.

These stories often contain an individualistic moral structure. The hero receives power through birth, accident, science, technology, magic, or training. The origin varies, but the central question remains personal: What will this individual do with extraordinary capacity?

The hero must accept responsibility, master weakness, discover an authentic identity, and choose the right use of power. This resembles the language of self-help. Transformation begins within the individual, and the transformed individual changes the world. Such stories can encourage willingness, the readiness to act, sacrifice, and accept responsibility. They can also encourage willfulness, the belief that reality should yield to sufficient determination and strength.

The distinction is significant. Willingness accepts obligation within human limitation. Willfulness treats limitation as an obstacle to be conquered. The first can produce courage. The second can lead to fantasies of domination, exceptionalism, and the conviction that social problems merely require the right powerful person.

Pixar offers a different relationship between adulthood and childhood. Films such as Inside Out do not attempt naturalism in the sense of reproducing ordinary human life without visible construction. The emotions are characters. Memories become objects. Personality becomes an organized landscape. The mind is transformed into an accessible system.

Everything is artificial, but the artificiality serves psychological recognition. Pixar simplifies emotional life so that its complexity can be understood. Sadness, jealousy, fear, attachment, memory, grief, and identity are organized into stories that children can follow while adults recognize the psychological ideas behind them.

These films often feel informed by contemporary therapeutic and developmental thinking. They present the inner life as something that can be understood, accepted, and integrated. Painful emotions are not merely enemies. They serve functions, and growth requires recognition rather than suppression.

The result is a form of realism, though not naturalism. The world is fantastical, but the emotional lesson feels grounded in adult reflection, psychological research, and careful observation. Pixar films also feel less like the expression of one unmistakable individual than many Japanese animated works. They have directors, writers, and personal origins, of course, but the studio process tends to produce the impression of collective responsibility.

The films seem shaped by groups of adults asking what emotional truth they can offer children without speaking down to them. They resemble a collective adult conscience. This quality gives the films balance. Personal obsession is moderated by discussion, revision, testing, and collaboration. The message is often clear without becoming openly preachy, while humor, adventure, and visual invention keep the educational intention from dominating the experience.

There are also limitations. Emotional difficulty may be organized too neatly into growth. Conflict often leads toward integration, healing, or a lesson that families can recognize and discuss afterward. The psychological world is complex, but it remains carefully guided.

Takahata’s realism is less reassuring. His characters do not necessarily become healthier, wiser, or more emotionally integrated. Life may remain unfair. Good intentions may fail. A person may behave badly for understandable reasons. Love does not abolish hunger, pride, social pressure, or history.

Pixar helps children understand emotions. Superhero cinema helps children and adults imagine power. Anno helps adults recover the fascination of childhood forms. Takahata does something more difficult to classify: he allows children to encounter a world that does not simplify itself for them.

When Characters Begin to Live

The difference becomes visible in 3000 Leagues in Search of Mother. The story of Marco is deeply connected to labor, migration, family obligation, poverty, and the unequal movement of people between countries. Marco’s father remains in Genoa, working as a doctor and maintaining a clinic for poor patients. His mother travels to Argentina to earn money for the family. When communication from her ceases, Marco leaves Italy and begins the long journey to find her.

Even this basic arrangement contains a social reality larger than the child’s adventure. The father and mother are not simply parental figures placed at opposite ends of the plot. Each has chosen a difficult responsibility. The father remains committed to medical service despite financial strain. The mother leaves her home and children to work abroad. Their decisions cannot be reduced to simple goodness or failure. They belong to the pressures of adult life.

Marco’s journey also depends on people who have lives unrelated to his goal. Fiorina and the Peppino family are not merely companions created to assist the protagonist. Their traveling performances, financial insecurity, pride, quarrels, loyalties, disappointments, and affection create the sense that they existed before Marco met them. One can imagine them continuing after he leaves.

This is one of the clearest signs that a character has become alive. A character who exists only for the plot disappears when the plot no longer requires him. A character with a life seems to continue beyond the edge of the screen.

The Peppino family does not always behave according to a clear moral function. They can be generous, unreliable, theatrical, practical, selfish, or kind. Their actions emerge from the conditions of their lives, not merely from the needs of Marco’s journey. The same quality appears in small scenes involving people who may never return.

One scene has remained with me for decades. Marco encounters a poor Indigenous brother and sister. The younger sister is given a piece of candy. She raises it toward the sky and looks at it, but she does not eat it. She carefully places it in her pocket. Her brother then breaks his own candy into two pieces and gives half to her.

Nothing is explained. No one tells us that the children are poor. No dialogue informs us that the candy is rare and precious. The brother does not announce his affection or sacrifice, and the girl does not describe her happiness. The meaning exists entirely in the action.

The girl may be saving the candy because she has never possessed anything like it. She may be unable to consume immediately something that feels so precious. She may want to keep the happiness rather than allow it to disappear. The scene does not reduce the gesture to one official interpretation.

The brother’s action adds another layer. He does not wait for the sister to ask. He divides what little he has. His generosity is small in material terms, but the scarcity around him gives the act enormous moral weight.

As a child, I may have seen only two children receiving candy. As an adult, I see poverty, restraint, dignity, tenderness, and the way deprivation changes the value of an ordinary object. The scene has remained the same, but my life has gradually given me the ability to recognize what was already there.

This is different from nostalgia. The memory of a heroic command returns me to a feeling I once possessed. The memory of the candy reveals a meaning I did not yet possess. One memory allows the adult to become a child again. The other allows childhood itself to mature.

Takahata’s restraint makes this possible. A more demonstrative director might have emphasized the girl’s expression, added emotional music, prolonged the brother’s gesture, or inserted dialogue that clarified the lesson. Takahata allows the action to pass quietly. The scene does not insist on being remembered, and perhaps that is exactly why it remains.

Heroes, Ideals, and Human Beings

Hayao Miyazaki occupies a fascinating position between Takahata’s human observation and Anno’s preservation of childhood fascination. Miyazaki’s worlds possess extraordinary physical credibility. He understands how people work, cook, repair, clean, carry, climb, run, fly, and become tired. Food has texture. Machines possess weight. Clothing responds to movement and weather. Kitchens, workshops, engines, and homes feel used rather than merely designed.

This attention to material life connects him to Takahata. Yet Miyazaki’s central characters often belong to the tradition of heroic imagination. Conan in Future Boy Conan is not an ordinary boy. His physical abilities are almost superhuman. He is brave, direct, loyal, and extraordinarily resilient. Lana possesses a purity and inward strength that place her close to an ideal figure.

Pazu in Castle in the Sky is courageous, industrious, dependable, and morally clear. Sheeta combines gentleness, dignity, and quiet strength. Clarisse in The Castle of Cagliostro resembles an idealized princess, innocent without being entirely passive. Nausicaä possesses compassion, courage, intuition, and moral insight far beyond those of most human beings.

These figures are deeply appealing because they show us forms of humanity we might wish to trust. Yet they do not always feel independent of their creator. They carry Miyazaki’s hopes. They embody courage, labor, loyalty, mercy, resistance to domination, and respect for life. Their actions frequently express an ethical design that is already present in the structure of the film.

Takahata’s characters seem observed, while Miyazaki’s characters seem imagined toward an ideal. The difference does not make Miyazaki inferior. Idealization has its own artistic power. Human beings do not live by observation alone. We also need images of what courage, loyalty, and moral clarity might look like.

Miyazaki’s films offer such images with unusual force. His protagonists invite viewers to believe that brave and compassionate action remains possible even in a damaged world. The difficulty appears when the director’s intention becomes too visible. A character may begin to feel like a beautifully designed vehicle for a moral principle. The viewer can sense the hand moving the figure toward a meaningful act.

That is the quality I described as being like a puppet. The word may sound severe, but it identifies a genuine difference in how fictional people are constructed. A puppet can be vivid, lovable, and artistically powerful. Yet its movement remains inseparable from the intention guiding it.

Takahata’s characters often seem capable of resisting the director. They can behave inconveniently. They can remain selfish, confused, weak, contradictory, or morally unresolved. This becomes especially clear in Grave of the Fireflies.

Seita and Setsuko are victims of war, but they are not presented only as innocent symbols. Seita loves his sister, yet he is also proud, immature, and unwilling to accept humiliation. His decisions cannot be separated from the social conditions around him, but neither can they be entirely excused by those conditions.

The aunt is often remembered as cruel, yet she is not simply a villain. She has her own household, limited supplies, fear, resentment, and obligations. Her behavior becomes harsh, but it remains intelligible from within her situation.

No exceptional hero arrives to correct the tragedy. No hidden strength allows the children to overcome hunger and war. The characters remain inside history. This is almost the opposite of superhero cinema. In superhero stories, the individual exceeds circumstances. In Takahata’s work, circumstances enter the individual.

War, poverty, migration, family duty, pride, and social judgment become part of the person’s behavior. Character is not a private essence standing above the world. It is formed in relation to conditions that no individual can simply overcome.

The boy who divides his candy performs an act more morally serious than many displays of spectacular power. He cannot defeat poverty. He cannot transform society. He cannot rescue his family through heroic will. He can only divide what he has, and the gesture matters because it remains within limitation. It does not abolish human dependence. It expresses generosity from inside scarcity.

Miyazaki’s heroes often show what human beings could become. American superheroes imagine what human beings could accomplish if limitation were transcended. Anno reconstructs what power, machinery, and adult authority looked like to the fascinated child. Takahata remains with people who cannot escape being human.

The Characters Who Remain

The contrast among these creators does not require a final ranking. Anno, Miyazaki, Takahata, Pixar, and superhero cinema preserve different human desires.

Anno preserves fascination. He remembers the mystery of machinery, the authority of formal language, the grandeur of systems, and the excitement of worlds governed by hidden knowledge. His work allows adults to recover the seriousness with which children once regarded artificial worlds.

Miyazaki preserves heroic possibility. He gives physical life to worlds in which courage, loyalty, skilled work, and compassion still possess transformative force. His characters may be idealized, but ideals can remind us that resignation is not the only mature response to reality.

Pixar preserves emotional guidance. Its films translate contemporary psychological understanding into stories that children and adults can share. They offer a language for discussing feelings that families might otherwise struggle to express.

Superhero cinema preserves the desire for agency. It answers helplessness with extraordinary capacity. At its best, it asks how power can be restrained by responsibility. At its weakest, it encourages the belief that the world needs exceptional individuals more than patient communities.

Takahata preserves something quieter. He preserves people.

His characters do not remain in memory because they always perform noble actions. They remain because their actions seem to belong to them. They possess private motives, material conditions, habits, pride, fear, generosity, and weakness. They do not exist only to prove the director’s argument.

The director’s presence becomes difficult to see. His art is expressed through the apparent freedom of the people he created. This may help explain why Takahata is sometimes less immediately celebrated than Miyazaki or Anno.

Miyazaki leaves iconic images: a castle in the sky, a girl flying on the wind, a forest spirit, an aircraft crossing a painted horizon. Anno leaves unmistakable formal signatures: bold typography, control rooms, rapid technical dialogue, machinery, emergency systems, and carefully reconstructed references.

Takahata often leaves a gesture. A person looks away. Someone hesitates before speaking. A family continues performing despite uncertainty. A boy makes a proud decision that will later become disastrous. A girl raises a piece of candy toward the light.

Such moments do not announce the director’s genius. They may not even appear important when first seen. They wait for the viewer’s experience to catch up with them.

As children, we may be drawn to machines, heroes, princesses, adventure, and power. These things answer genuine needs of the imagination. They make the world larger and restore confidence that action is possible. As adults, however, we may begin to notice other things.

We notice the mother who left home because the family needed money. We notice the father who remained because his patients depended on him. We notice the traveling performers whose kindness is inseparable from their own hardship. We notice the aunt whose cruelty cannot be separated from fear and scarcity. We notice the child who does not immediately eat the candy she has been given.

The work did not change. We did.

Some art allows us to return to what we loved before experience complicated our vision. Other art remains beside us until experience teaches us how to see it. The first kind preserves childhood. The second allows childhood to grow older.

Perhaps Takahata’s greatness lies in the patience required for the second kind of art. He did not need every child to understand every gesture immediately. He allowed human meaning to remain partially hidden in ordinary behavior, trusting that life might reveal it later.

Many years after the story has ended, I can still see the girl holding the candy toward the sky. For a moment, she looks at something small as though it were precious beyond measure. Then she places it carefully in her pocket, while her brother divides his own piece and gives part of it to her.

No one explains what we are supposed to feel. The characters simply live.

Image generated by the author