Academic research on anime, just like animation for Miyazaki, is a cursed business. It is similar to other “area studies” in that there is an umbrella term for any research on anime, which can take myriad forms. Therefore, it is difficult to produce or look for book-length academic work with comprehensive discussion of anime itself rather than the areas around it, such as fan culture. You can write and publish books on anime, especially if it is on a specific theme or a creator's works, as Dani Cavallaro does. However, academic books in English on anime that have a historical perspective seem to be rare. That is possibly because they require detailed knowledge of anime in general and a lot of groundwork that potentially involves the collection and analysis of numerous Japanese-language materials (Jonathan Clements's Anime: A History is the best example).Footnote 1 In addition, even if you do make the effort and try to publish, chances are, you will be met with a skeptical or negative response from publishers and/or reviewers doubting the academic value of your work. This could explain the absence of a real successor to Helen McCarthy's classic work on Miyazaki, which was published in 1999, until this book by Susan Napier.Footnote 2
Actually, between 1999 and 2018, a handful of books on Miyazaki (and Studio Ghibli) were published, such as Jeremy Mark Robinson's The Cinema of Hayao Miyazaki and Collin Odell and Michelle Le Blanc's Studio Ghibli: the Films of Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, which was in its third edition at the time of this writing after its original publication in 2009.Footnote 3 However, these books lacked the comprehensiveness and depth of McCarthy's work.
On the surface, with sixteen chapters covering the animator's life and career in chronological order, Napier's book seems similar to these. The first three chapters cover Miyazaki's life up to the period before his first feature film, Castle of Cagliostro (1979), which is discussed in chapter 4. After that, each chapter, except chapter 10—which is on the manga version of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), whose significance is often overlooked outside those familiar with anime, manga, or Miyazaki—focuses on one of his films up to The Wind Rises (2013). However, as you might expect from this pioneer of studies on anime in the West, under the bonnet is a detailed and comprehensive discussion of Miyazaki's life and career, with the sound scholarship that is missing from the two earlier books on Miyazaki. The first three chapters give us an overview of Miyazaki's private and professional life, detailing his family background and war experience, as well as his early days as an animator at Tōei Animation, using Japanese materials that are not available in English. Once the focus shifts to the films, we are treated to a well-rounded discussion of the films covering their social and political context, production process, and analysis of the film texts.
What is particularly noteworthy about this book is the centrality of Miyazaki himself. Although the book offers in-depth analysis of Miyazaki's films, it focuses equally on presenting Miyazaki's personal and professional life, placing his works within changes (and consistencies) in it. In the introduction, Napier asserts that “missing from the flood of commentary on [Miyazaki] . . . is much discussion of Miyazaki's own history” (p. xiv). She emphasizes the significance of paying more attention to his personal life and its relationship with the broader social and historical context, noting that “[Miyazaki] remains an idiosyncratic genius, but he and his art are also an amalgam of the time and space he was born and raised, the extraordinary and sometimes excruciating cultural experience of twentieth-century and twenty-first century Japan” (p. xvii). Through extensive use of published interviews with Miyazaki as well as writing by him, Napier shows how his works are linked with his personal and artistic values and how those values, in turn, are associated with postwar Japanese social and political history. This certainly is an approach and viewpoint missing from earlier works on the director. It enables readers, especially those who are not familiar with Japan or anime, to appreciate the significance of Miyazaki's works and career beyond what they can find in the films or in general materials found in media.
This book is clearly aimed at a nonacademic audience, as is evident in the overall writing style and structure—making it approachable to general readers. The work avoids jargon and theories that may scare them away, although this by no means indicates that the book lacks academic depth. The strategy seems to have been successful, judging from the fact that tens of copies of this book were piled up in the bookshop of the British Museum when an exhibition of manga was held there in 2019, and people were buying them. This book will also be ideal reading for undergraduates and postgraduates who are interested in Miyazaki but do not have access to Japanese materials and/or detailed knowledge of anime or Japan.
Miyazakiworld is a significant starting point for further discussion of the director's works as well as Japanese popular culture. Future research could look more critically at Miyazaki's remarks and the very idea that he is an “an idiosyncratic genius”: the image itself could be constructed out of his own speeches and writing by fans, media, and Studio Ghibli, as well as Miyazaki himself, possibly in a bid to separate “Miyazaki/Ghibli films” from other anime. Miyazaki's words in and outside his films reflect the reality of Japan and the world at a given period, but at the same time, they are not immune from other factors, such as the need for commercial success.
Miyazakiworld seems to have a lot of uncharted territory beyond that explored by Napier, but we should hail the author for finally providing us with a good map of it.
