Week Five

Anime: From Akira to Howl's Moving Castle

Chapter 9:

Napier's chapter on the idea of "the disappearing shojo" focuses on a trend she observes in the treatment of the shojo in anime over the past few decades: the creation of darker, more complex characters who, in their exploration of liminal worlds, seem to themselves critique various aspects of shojo/Japanese culture, often through their "disappearance" in the narrative. This theme of disappearance is one Napier sees as occurring again and again in Japanese folklore and fairytale. The idea behind it being the cultural paradigm that a woman must disappear to complete a tale's sense of sorrow and beauty. To show the common and divergent threads of this emerging theme, Napier examines four different works: "Utena", "Lain", "Spirited Away", and "Haibane Renmei." Each, in different ways, exposes the deepest values and fears of Japanese society. Utena tackles the question of reconciling two sides of one self: Utena's masculine, brave side and Anthy's soft, nurturing side. Utena's retreat from the fantasy world of dueling and princes also signals her recognition that real world concerns top goals only fulfilled in fantasy. Lain, on the other hand, Napier views as, "a sly critique of the ubiquity of the shojo", in the way Lain seems omnipresent in the web, on TV, and over cell phones. Lain's shojo mode of dress can also be interpreted as a protective layer from the real world. Her disappearance however, unlike Utena's, is for the greater good of society - to break down the wall between real world and web world - rather than of her volition. Napier next looks at Miyazaki's film, featuring the (at first) self-absorbed, whiny Chihiro. The work, according to Napier, is a critique on Japanese modern society, as seen in Chihiro herself and also her parents, who are greedy, irresponsible, materialistic, and see everything as being able to be solved by a credit card. Chihiro disappears from this world of superficial materialism to become part of a fantasy world, to a world containing more traditional figures (such as Gods), where she must learn to mature while holding on to her own identity in order to return to her parents and the real world. The strong themes of pollution in the bathhouse hint at the fragility of the traditional Japanese way of thinking in the modern world. Through various trials and tribulations, she learns various values of the "old way" before having her vision cleared and being able to return to the real world. I found the examination of "Haibane Renmei" less relevant and interesting, so I'm going to skip straight to Napier's conclusion...Which is that the idea of the shojo as a site of play and innocence is itself disappearing, to be replaced by the darker shojo, one who represents loss and absence, themes more relevant in the world of Japan, which itself may be seen as currently being between ideas (i.e. in a liminal world, as the shojo are presented) and caught between forgetting and remembering.