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The Anime Director, the Fantasy Girl and the Very Real Tsunami

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Susan J. Napier
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Abstract

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Of the many gifted directors within Japanese animation, arguably the most imaginative and certainly the most prolific is Miyazaki Hayao. Miyazaki's works over the last three decades have consistently dealt with catastrophe on both a personal and a universal level, often focusing on young people and their reactions to a devastated world. This paper examines the treatment of disaster in the films, concentrating particularly on his most recent film Gake no ue no Ponyo, (Ponyo). Ponyo is discussed in the context both of Miyazaki's general treatment of disaster and in relation to the tsunami of March 11.

Keywords

Miyazaki Hayaoanimationtsunamiapocalypsedisasterpopular culture

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 10 , Issue 11 , March 2012 , e3
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2012

References

Notes

1 Miyazaki Hayao, Starting Point. San Francisco: Viz Media, 2009. p. 340.

2 Robert Lifton, “The Image of the End of the World’: A Psychohistorical View,” in Visions of Apocalypse: End or Rebirth, edited by Friedlander, Holton, Marx, and Skolnikoff(New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985), p. 165.

3 Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” in Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 454.

4 Interestingly, although American cinema contains many examples of films with apocalyptic themes, almost none of them revolve around children as the main protagonists. The sole exception, and this is a slight stretch, is Pixar Studio's recent (2008) family film Wall-e, which features a robot whose childlike innocence and plucky behavior are quite reminiscent of Miyazaki's protagonists.

5 John Treat, “Introduction” in Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture, edited by John Treat (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996).

6 David Parker, “The Miyazaki Agenda: Agency, Innocence and Resistance in Miyazaki Hayao's Construction of Childhood.” Unpublished Research Paper, May, 2011.