As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been rewatching Miyazaki movies, most recently My Neighbor Totoro (1988) and Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989). I’m also currently reading two books that tie in to the themes of those two movies to a surprising extent: Postwar by Tony Judt (2005), and The Story of the Lost Child (2014), the fourth and last book in Elena’s Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. All of these books deal with the crucial period of economic growth and cultural change following World War II, drawing inspiration from the creators’ own baby-boomer childhoods. Kiki and Ferrante specifically use the changing place of women in the workforce as a key aspect of the time period.
Postwar is historian Tony Judt’s survey of European history from 1945 to 2005, when the book was published. So far I’ve gotten about halfway through, to the mid-sixties, which is right before the cultural rupture of the late sixties and the economic slowdown of the seventies, both of which ended the postwar boom years (the ‘trente glorieuses’). Judt clearly admires what he calls the ‘social democratic moment’ of the fifties and sixties, where Western European governments invested in the economy and built large-scale social support systems. I hadn’t realized how much state economic intervention was involved; depending on the country, industries were nationalized, economic planning boards were setup, or public companies were built up out of whole cloth. Judt so clearly admires these public policies that he only somewhat addresses the concurrent decolonization conflicts, and when he needs to find flaws goes all in on how much he hates Brutalist architecture. As the book gets into the late sixties, it’ll be interesting how he deals with the new critics of the system that pop up. He’s unforgiving towards post-war leftists who were apologists for Stalin and the USSR, but later radicals were more interested in anti-colonialism and third-world politics. Judt has suggested that these activists took what they had for granted which is somewhat annoying so hopefully the actual discussion will be more nuanced.
In any case, what Judt’s book makes clear is that the decades immediately following WW2 were ones of exceptional growth and development in Western Europe. Economic growth led to exceptional wage growth; the increased social safety net and social insurance programs protected people from penury. This was accompanied with increased material possessions: cars, fridges, and televisions went from rare to ubiquitous. Poor and rural areas in Italy, France, and Germany got electricity and water for the first time. Meanwhile, economic transitions from agriculture and industry to the service sector led to rapid urbanization. All this was accompanied by political stability not seen since before WW1. The Cold War did start, but as Judt notes, once the Berlin issue was settled the USSR’s and the US’s attentions were turned to other continents. Ok this is somewhat an exaggeration, but there were no wars in Europe, which was a big change. Meanwhile, high birth rates produced the Baby Boomer generation, which experienced this period and now has dominated recent cultural production. Both Hayao Miyazaki and Elena Greco, Ferrante’s main character in the Neapolitan Novels, are born in the early 40s, during the war, so their formative experiences are of this early period, rather than the more fraught 70s as for the later boomers.
Ferrante’s novels work the most hand-in-hand with Judt’s history. The story starts in the 50s and goes all the way to the present, through the friendship of two girls from a poor neighborhood in Naples. Where Judt’s book treats Europe as a whole, Ferrante focuses on the experiences of Southern Italy, a region which is much poorer than the rest of Italy but before the 50s hadn’t changed much since the 19th century. This is the region that Judt notes was basically unelectrified before post-war development. In Ferrante, we see this development through the eyes of a young girl growing up, as people in her neighborhood get cars and telephones, as the successful grocery store owner makes enough that he can open another store due to economic growth, and as a new neighborhood opens next door with fancy new apartments. We also see the fascists and mafia members retain the place atop the local hierarchy that they had during the Mussolini era. As Judt explains, the success and stability of post-war Europe was paid for by large-scale forgiveness of those involved in fascism and war crimes; those at the top were tried, but the masses of bureaucrats complicit were mostly left in place since there was no one to replace them with and the new leaders didn’t want to tear apart political wounds. Ferrante’s close examination of this period lets her examine the fissures more than Judt can or wants to: as Elena grows up, she experiences radical politics, the street fights between Communists and Fascists, and the differences between the way the bourgeois and the working-class experienced this time period. But despite the somewhat different ideological viewpoint (both Judt and Ferrante write from the left but they have very different view on the Italian Communist Party), it’s remarkable how the narratives of societal change in Judt and Ferrante reflect and enforce each other.
Miyazaki’s film Kiki’s Delivery Service also deals with the same period and themes in its own way, surprisingly enough. Despite being a Japanese film, Kiki is clearly set in a European county: the text on buildings is in latin script, and the architectural style is distinctively western. The town Kiki settles in is next to the sea, and is relatively warm, suggesting the Mediterranean. So the setting could very well be Italy, or maybe Austria if it had access to the coast. In terms of time period, Kiki clearly is in an alternate timeline with witches and massive airships (a Miyazaki trademark), but there are some details that make it feel like the post-war period. Kiki moves from her small rural village to a bustling big city, something that many people did during that time period. The technology level is roughly correct, with cars being semi-common and the radio and television spreading. The city is clearly prosperous and bustling. The key is the fashion level. Most of the women are wearing skirts or dresses, while the older men have suits and the younger ones shirts and jeans. But Kiki meets an artist who lives in the woods, and she wears jeans, something which is commented on. This signals that story is set in a period where cultural change is coming, where the younger post-war generation is starting to throw out the social mores of their parents. Kiki’s friend Tombo and his group of friends, who pile up in one car and drive out to the beach, could be Elena and her neighborhood friends. All in all, there is an energy and optimism to the world of Kiki that just feels like postwar Europe.
What ties Ferrante’s novels and Kiki’s Delivery Service together in how they deal with their time setting is how they’re concerned with the changing relationship of women to work. The fifties and sixties were a time when women had expanded opportunities to join the workforce and changing social expectations. Women were allowed to vote for the first time in Italy and France after the war, and divorced was legalized in many European countries in the same period (though not in Italy until the 70s). This led to more women working for themselves or for their family, rather than supporting their husbands. We see this in both novels. Kiki is part of a family of witches, who are all women who provide services for their towns/villages: potion making, divination, charms. Witches are therefore already working women, but in a traditional mode. When Kiki leaves to train herself in the city as a witch rite of passage, she also has to work for a living. But Kiki’s doesn’t have skills in the traditional disciplines, and so, in addition to working in a bakery, she decides on a non-traditional occupation: opening a delivery service. She therefore is pushing boundaries in terms of how she as a (soon-to-be) woman is performing work in a changing society. Interestingly, the world Kiki encounters while doing her deliveries is full of women: the bakery owner, the fashion designer neighbor, the hermit artist who wears pants, the old lady and her elderly servant who loves tv. All these women have money that they use to help and encourage Kiki in her new business. It’s thanks to this network of women that Kiki is successful. The movie doesn’t spell it out, but it clearly presents Kiki’s world as one where women are able to work for themselves, and create new economic spaces for themselves.
In Ferrante’s novels, Elena also works to support herself, though Ferrante’s concern with the societal dominance of men means that she struggles much more against societal restrictions. Elena’s world is one where society is newly open to women’s work, but where women have to fight every day to make it. The novels are too permeated with this to go into comprehensively — one of the fundamental themes of the series is that the societal power and brutality of men is too strong to really escape — but Elena’s friend Lila’s story can be a representative example. Lila doesn’t get an education like Elena does, and spends her whole life working once she leaves school. Early on she works in her family businesses, first in her father’s shoe shop, then in her husband’s grocery store. This kind of work is more traditional, where small businesses require the whole family to chip in. However, once Lila leaves her husband, her lack of opportunities force her to push boundaries in terms of what work she takes. She spends years working in a sausage factory under awful conditions. The fact that she’s working while also raising a child shocks her family and neighbors. Finally, Lila and her partner Enzo take correspondence courses in programming and find jobs as computer operators. In this Lila is truly innovative and taking advantage of societal change: she brings in new technology to her city and takes a dominant role in inaugurating a new employment category. This combines different threads of post-war society: economic development allows her employers to buy a computer; technological investment allowed it to be developed; and increased roles for women let Lila get the job. In typical Ferrante fashion, though, Lila has to compromise with male power in order to achieve this progress: the computer is owned by the Solaras, who lead the local mafia and who Lila despises. So in contrast with Kiki’s world, where networks of women can power an expansion of the economic role of other women, in Ferrante’s Italy any advancement is tainted by and conditioned on the involvement of men who won’t let go of their power.
It’s also interesting to compare Miyazaki’s pseudo-post-war-Europe in Kiki’s Delivery Service to his post-war Japan as seen in his earlier film, My Neighbor Totoro. The setting in Totoro is a realistic one: it’s actually set in Japan, and in a time period where Miyazaki would have been a kid himself. What sticks out to me as a key difference between the two is the direction of movement the characters undertake, and how this relates to the specific post-war stories of the two settings, even as both Europe and Japan developed rapidly post-war. As mentioned earlier, Kiki moves from her village to a big city: this represents the urbanization of Europe in the 50s and 60s. In Totoro, Satsuki, Mei, and their dad make an opposite journey: they move out of Tokyo into an old house in the countryside. The house is in ruins, the village they’re in has a one-room school and is surrounded by forest. This may make it look like this is a story of de-urbanization, where modernity is too much and has to be escaped. And yet, in the context of post-war Japan, this actually represents the Japanese post-war expansion just like Kiki’s journey does Europe’s. The village Satsuki and her family isn’t an isolated village: her dad can move there because he can take a bus into Tokyo where he works as a university professor. After the war, Tokyo and started gobbling up the surrounding area as people moved out of the inner cities. The family in Totoro is just on the edge of that expansion. Japan was already urbanized before the war, so the economic boom allowed it suburbanize earlier than European countries. The rural setting of Totoro is not isolated but connected to urban Japan. Both Kiki and Totoro are cognizant of the changing world they’re depicting, but Toroto’s choice to depict a place that’s starting to disappear makes it more bittersweet.
The couple of decades following World War 2 were very good for Western Europe due to the enormous economic growth it experienced. Today this period is often looked back at as a ‘golden age’ whose betrayal in the 1980-90s set the stage for the rise of the far-right in the last ten years. This conception is of course extremely reductive, but it means the 50s and 60s are a good setting in the popular imagination for stories about faith in human advancement and progress. Tony Judt clearly believes that there was a lot of good done during this time, and depicts it that way even as he understands the complexities in Postwar. Kiki’s Delivery Service captures the spirit of the times and avoids the nuances by placing it in a fantasy setting. It’s Elena Ferrante, in the Neapolitan Novels, that manages to be the most critical while still understanding how growth changed the world of Southern Italy: all the growth doesn’t do much to change the already-existing male power structures. The third novel takes place in the late 60s and early 70s, when the culture changes led to movements that challenged the status quo in new ways. Ferrante depicts the resulting clashes as violent and passionate. These clashes took place all over Europe, challenging the idea of a European golden age. I’m about to start that section of Judt’s book, I’ll have to report back on how he deals with it.
