According to Kyoko Koizumi professor at Otsuma Women’s University; Japanese composer for many of Studio Ghibli’s films, Joe Hisaishi

employs four identifiable musical approaches in Miyazaki’s films, which are: his use of Dorian mode to create an historical European feel; western classical-styled music to suggest occidental themes; pentatonic scales, natural minor scales, and other ‘Asian’ musical elements to enhance Japanese and oriental images; and an eclectic style of Japanese popular songs in which Japanese and western musical approaches are mixed (Koizumi, 2010, cited in Coyle, 2010, p.61). 

This notion of instrumental and melodic signification can be attributed to a longstanding partnership between melody & tonality; and mythology, culture & tradition Ie. the evolutionary development of music over time has come to resonate forms of cultural identity. For example, in the animated film, Spirited Away, Hisaishi wanted to portray an “otherness” to the spirit world. By doing so he employed the Okinawan scales of Indonesia as they “are considered to sound exotic, as they resemble Indonesian music more than that of Japan’s adjacent regions” (Koizumi, 2010, p.69). Therefore, melody and instrumentation play an essential role in the signification of meaning.

In the scene where Susie is running through the forest. I chose to practice this theory by employing a whole tone scale of which plays upwards from the fundamental key note in full tones until the next octave.

The scale is often used to signify ominousness of which an example can be heard in the opera Ruslan and Lyudmila in a leitmotif used to represent the evil dwarf, Chernomor. The scale is referred to by author of Tchaikovsky’s Operas, Henry Zajaczkowski as “Chernomor’s whole-tone-scale sphere of evil” (2005, p.22). The symmetry of the scale’s intervals are mathematically beautiful and can arguably be described as lacking or removed from any obvious emotion; as the nature of its perfection–its pure symmetry; does not exist anywhere in nature. However, it could be that very notion that makes the music work in it’s evocation of evil; it’s melodies resonate an air of coldness and emotional distance, therefore providing an unhinged and brutal element to the visuals. You can hear the implementation of the scale in Debussy’s Voiles here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVV0jkZC4jI

Here is the final scene utilising the whole tone scale in the key of C: