They care about each other, but the world is so complicated and so challenging that they can’t live together. But that doesn’t always happen in Japan, and in particular in Miyazaki’s middle-to-late works like Princess Mononoke, for example, where you have two protagonists who do not live together happily ever after. In American animation for children-and even Hollywood cinema in general-we expect the happily-ever-after ending. It kind of developed in Japan initially for children, but starting in the sixties, it went into a much more adult direction, really encompassing dark, tragic themes.Īmerican animation and movies tend to go for simple ideas and happy endings, but Miyazaki certainly doesn’t. In general, though, anime is not necessarily seen as a children’s medium. He does have a message that he’s trying to convey to both children and adults. Susan Napier: Up until his very last film, he wanted to create for families. Tufts Now : Miyazaki’s films are animated, and there’s a presumption that animation is for kids-and there are kids in these movies-but they seem more adult than not. Tufts Now talked recently with Napier about Miyazaki and Miyazakiworld, which is being translated into Japanese, Chinese, and Russian. “He’s a very well-read, cultivated individual, and very interested in current events, and he takes them and his own story and then creates something completely original-these extraordinary, idiosyncratic, unusual works of art.” ![]() “I could start understanding more about why he emphasized certain things in his films, why he was fond of particular kinds of stories,” she said. You wouldn’t think of cartoons as being elegiac, but they are, and I would say Miyazaki has elegiac work.”Īs she learned more about Miyazaki’s life, she began to think about his films in a different way. His works, she said, often invoke “the elegiac, a sense of lament or loss, which is much more pervasive in Japanese than American culture. “He’s a very complicated and passionate man,” she said. She was waiting for someone else to write a book about his life and works in English, and finally decided to take it on herself. Napier, whose previous books include Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle and The Fantastic in Japanese Literature, has taught a seminar on Miyazaki for a number of years. It’s partly a biography, but mostly a film-by-film analysis of Miyazaki’s wondrous creations, a celebration of his animation and storytelling. Now Susan Napier, Goldthwaite Professor of Rhetoric and Japanese Studies in the School of Arts and Sciences, has written a new book on Miyazaki and his films, Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art (Yale University Press). His eleven feature films, including worldwide hits such as My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away, have redefined animation, and brought Japanese anime to mainstream audiences in America. For fans of Japanese animation filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, each movie he creates is both an entry into a new fantastic world-and a return to a familiar universe.
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