Miyazaki desperately seeks an answer to this question as he makes it again to the author of the original book, in which the film is titled in Japanese (“Kimitachi wa dou ikiru ka?”; “How do you live?”). The octogenarian and multi-award winning director demonstrates his non-response with an exposure of his self on screen for over 120 minutes; that is, a conscious work on his personas as an artist, as a father, as a human being and, above all, as an idealist. There is no clear answer: the film is an amalgamation of a life filled with uninterrupted attempts to seek beauty in the corruption of reality, the real world.
At times, the film features countless self references: it's as if Miyazaki knew he was making a... Miyazaki film. The director presents the public with an intertwining of ideas and audiovisual archetypes that marked his work in an apparently disconnected way, such as several clippings of his expressions as an artist. The tropes are all here: the fantasy environment full of fantastic beings; surrealist, dreamlike envinronments; the contemplation of ideals of beauty and purity; a deep relationship with nature and the female figure; however, there is no focus on any of these aspects. It is not the ode to nature of Princess Mononoke or the tragic (and romantic) contemplation of an artist's relationship with his craft of The Wind Rises. All the aforementioned aspects come together, congested as in a synthesis, so to speak. Miyazaki exclaims the various virtues that would give some meaning to the human condition, which he himself believed in for some time.
The self-insertion of his personality into certain characters in the film also denotes the self-reflective nature of “Kimitachi wa dou ikiru ka?”; It's a dialogue by the author with yourself, with his various "selves". Miyazaki is Mahito, the boy who loses his mother at a young age and needs to learn to live without a mother figure, he is also this same boy who grows up in a Japan devastated by war and destruction. Mahito also takes on the role of representing Miyazaki's relationship with his son, Goro: an ideal successor to his father's legacy who never lived up to his selfish expectations. Miyazaki, in this sense, projected himself in the figure of “Ooji”, an old man who sought throughout his long life to establish a perfect, ideal world within his studio. The old man, aware of his finitude, has his desire for a world along his lines rejected by Mahito, which is enough to represent a destruction of the heredity of that ideal. But isn't it ironic that parental relationships of a blood and biological nature (above all, material, real) are sought for the continuity of this perfection of the artist's abstract (and unique) ideal world? Perhaps this is the conformity achieved by Miyazaki: Mahito leaves his old world, in ruins, collapsing. The artist, Ooji, dies with his art.
Ultimately, Miyazaki's non-response demonstrates a man aware of his legacy, but also aware of an entire world outside his idealistic mind. People will move on, forget, and follow their own paths: his romanticized idea of perfection will thrive and perish within his work. And although I believe this conclusion brings dissatisfaction to Miyazaki himself, it is conveyed in a sober, if not conforming, way. The conclusion of the plot is short, to the point. As if all the brilliance of a life was like the passing of a second. Tomorrow, immutably, everyone will move on. If there is still any illusion regarding eternity and perfection, let it be for a small moment, while we visit the worlds within his work; there, in fact, we will be inside his ideal world, where in fact all aspects follow Miyazaki's whims to the millimeter. It is within his work that, reluctantly, Miyazaki finds his immortality, while the weight of reality becomes as fleeting as it is necessary.
