(Re-)Enter Sandman

Inspired by Japanese myth, Neil Gaiman returns to the comic book character that made him famous.

by Sam Adams

A funny thing happened on the way to Princess Mononoke. After being hired to write an English script for Hayao Miyazaki’s animated epic, Neil Gaiman began to immerse himself in the folklore and history of 14th-century Japan, as would any diligent scribe. But when Mononoke’s script was finished, the former Sandman writer who 10 months ago told City Paper he had "no intention" of returning to comics found he couldn’t get the mischievous wit and elegant formalism of Japanese storytelling out of his mind. The result was The Dream Hunters (Vertigo/DC, 128 p., $29.95), Gaiman’s first Sandman book in three and a half years.

"I loved these Japanese stories, the flavor of the time," he says now. "I had so much sloshing around in my head I had to do something to get it out."

Particularly drawn to one story, "The Fox, the Monk, and the Mikado of All Night’s Dreaming," Gaiman made minor adjustments to fit the story into the Sandman’s universe and contacted Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano (who’d already done a promotional illustration of the Sandman for DC) to illustrate. The only hitch, Gaiman says, was that while Amano loves comics, he doesn’t draw them. So instead of a comic book, The Dream Hunters is a prose short story copiously illustrated with Amano’s lavish paintings, gorgeous explosions of color that often threaten to supplant Gaiman’s text.

The common thread between Mononoke and Dream Hunters, Gaiman says, is "the element of myth," something that applies equally to his non-Sandman comics and novels as well.

"I think it’s very useful to view the world from a mythic perspective," he goes on. "Myth is like fertile soil; it’s the stuff that we grow on. When you start digging down inside somebody, you get to the myth layer very quickly. That’s why I sometimes think I’m happiest writing, digging in the cellar. You get to create things on a level that feels right, things that feel like they’re true. [In] Mononoke, you’re looking at a film [specifically] about the battle between an iron works and the giant creatures of the forest in 14th-century Japan, [but] you’re still fundamentally telling a very true story. There are responsibilities in which happiness is hard-won, in which events all have consequences."

Something else Mononoke has in common with Gaiman’s comic work is the difficulty of surmounting a mainstream audience’s automatic assumptions about the format. Just as comics have perpetually come up against the bias that "funnybooks" are only for kids (or at least arrested adolescents), so Mononoke faces the task of convincing American moviegoers that an animated film can have the sweep and drama of a live-action epic. Gaiman recalls, "I was arguing with this journalist the other day who wanted me to be very specific about who I thought the audience was for this film. I said, ‘Bipeds.’ If you like Star Wars, you’ll like this film. If you like Kurosawa, or David Lean, or really cool, big, weird movies, you’ll like this film."

While Gaiman’s evangelism might seem a bit immodest, he’s humble enough to cite a moment he had nothing to do with as his favorite part of the film: "You’re looking at a rock, and it gets hit with a raindrop and then another raindrop hits it and you pull back and it’s slick with rain. That’s something you could never see in a Disney film; it’s there purely for the beauty of the moment." Likewise Yoshitaka Amano’s illustrations for The Dream Hunters, which often have more to do with establishing a mood than depicting the action.

While Gaiman’s own work tends towards the fantastical, he sees Mononoke’s director Miyazaki as a realist first and foremost. That may seem odd for a man who cooked up a story involving giant spirits hundreds of feet high and forest gods in the form of wolves. Still, Gaiman says, "The impression I get is that if Miyazaki could simply have gone out and filmed Princess Mononoke, he would’ve done it." He pauses a bit, for effect. "There are simply not enough 12-foot high wolves who will cooperate."

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