Week Four

Susan Napier, "Confronting Master Narratives: History as Vision in Miyazaki Hayao's Cinema of Deassurance":

Napier's article mostly elaborates on themes she only touched on regarding Miyazaki in her book. To start, she puts forth the idea that a society's historical narratives and ways of perceiving itself are, these days, largely controlled by mediums like film and television. The products of the entertainment industry hold great sway in cultivating a mass national identity based on a shared sense of history and values. Napier sees this trend as being especially present in the works of the Disney studio, a "cinema of assurance" as she calls it. The vision promoted is one where all the world's problems can be solved by sticking to American ideals and values. Even films which borrow mythology and characters from other cultures (e.g. Mulan) assign their protagonists and plot lines with values that are representative of current American trends, not the values of the culture/time period from which the story comes. Animation, however, Napier sees as far more subversive, often serving as a "cinema of deassurance" which criticizes both history and culture. As for Miyazaki, Napier points out that he often puruses the same humanistic messages as Disney, albeit in a different way: Miyazaki doesn't rework traditional myths of other cultures so much as incorporate elements of them into his own original vision, his characters tend to combine distinctly Japanese and distinctly Western characteristics (reflecting a harmonization between the concepts of Nihonjinron and Kokusaika in Japanese attitudes towards the West), he explores differences rather than attempting to reconcile them (Napier looks at attempts to reconcile such differences in the West through films like "Tarzan" and "The Lion King"), and he is often critical of popular notions of Japanese identity and history. Napier pays particularly close attention to Miyazaki's treatment of women, looking in depth at his departure from traditional heroines and dark undertones in plot in "Princess Mononoke" and it's three female protagonists: San, Lady Eboshi, and Moro.