Week Eight

Anime: From Akira to Howl's Moving Castle

Chapter Ten:

Napier here looks at a form of shojo character more traditional than the young, androgynous figures found in Miyazaki: the "magical girlfriend" type. This genre of anime revolves around the boy-meets-girl scenario found everywhere in popular culture, but not only gives the girl in question magic, otherworldly qualities, but - in Napier's view - uses these themes to both explore changing notions of feminity and reaffirm traditional views of it. They are not calls to activism as Miyazaki's works tend to be, but reflections of current social undercurrents, not unlike the American sitcom. Because this genre privileges nontraditional lifestyles - where Japanese society as a whole tends to have little tolerance for it, Napier argues - it can examine the new role of women, family, and technology with ease. Napier examines three series - "Urusei Yatsura", "Oh! My Goddess", and "Video Girl Ai" - to prove this point. To her, Lum ("Urusei Yatsura") is the least conservative depiction of an otherwordly girlfriend. She is powerful, brash, aggressive, a failed homemaker, and hardly content to quietly suffer her love interest's indiscretions. However, as Napier points out, she also embodies an unwavering devotion to her less-than-worthy object of affection that provides a reassuring premise to the show: no matter what Ataru does, Lum will forgive him. In effect, Lum embodies contradictory images: that of the chaos believed to be brought by the newfound sexual and monetary independence of Japanese women - embodied in the chaos Lum's actions brings - and her traditionally-oriented emotional subordination to her man. Napier also sees the figure of Ataru's mother - who openly flirts with other "men", ignores her husband, and criticizes Ataru to no end - as being a reflection of the anxiety over what a mother's role in Japanese society is with the breakdown of the valorized mother-son bond.
While Napier characterizes Lum as both progressive and reactionary, to her, figures like Belldandy ("Oh! My Goddess") and Ai to be solely the latter; an expression of the fear of unleashed female sexuality seen in reactions to cultural phenomena like the Hanakozoku and "yellow cab" women. Belldandy is an escapist pleasure, and dream come true in her function of providing perfect domestic bliss. None of the scolding or chaos that comes with Lum comes with Belldandy. Ai is, while equally escapist in her function, at least more complex. She does not meet any of the viewer's expectations - or Yota's, for that matter - and serves to help her love interest grow as a person, arousing his more generous instincts and mature realizations.
To Napier, these narratives are so appealing to the West and East alike because they abandon much of the hypersexuality of our own media cultures, instead imbuing the idea of relationships with something deeper than sexuality: the restoration of woman as nurturer. And, importantly, unlike most other mediums of romantic story-telling, they are from a male point of view.