Final Essay

Hayao Miyazaki Characters Impact

Japanese animation (also referred to as anime) has become a powerful cultural medium in Japan and throughout the rest of the world. Individuals, whether they are avid otaku1 or have only experienced one film, have probably heard the name of one of the industry's most famous and prolific contributors, Hayao Miyazaki. Beginning his career as an animator in 1963, Miyazaki has spent almost fifty years animating, writing, and directing over twenty Japanese animated works; subsequently, he and his colleague Isao Takahata established their own animation studio in 1985 known as Studio Ghibli (Broderick, 2003). In 1997, Miyazaki's film, Princess Mononoke became the highest-grossing domestic film in Japan's history, earning the equivalent of about 150 million USD at the time of its release. In 2003, his film Spirited Away (2001) won the Academy Award, not for best foreign film, but for best overall Animated Feature. Miyazaki has developed a signature style of creation that is readily witnessed within his films, but he is most well known for creating fantastical, innovative and magical worlds, and in particular distinctive female characters. However, whether male or female, Miyazaki's characters can be set apart from other Japanese animated individuals in their actions and behaviors, as they differ from conventional gender roles and expectations in animation (Choo, 2008).

Many scholars and critics have recognized that Miyazaki is known for creating female characters that are strong-willed, capable, and neglect to uphold some of the negative stereotypes of femininity associated with other Japanese animated works in film, television, and manga (Japanese comics). Being one of the first English speaking scholars to write on anime, Helen McCarthy's book, Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation, became a groundbreaking work in analyzing Miyazaki's character constructions as unique to other anime characters at the time. McCarthy's examination began scholarly awareness of Miyazaki as a culturally minded figure, with the predilection of animating independent and honorable female characters. Subsequently, in the book, Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation, author Susan Napier insists that there is a legitimate interest in understanding the prevalence of gender representation in Japanese animation, as it correlates to the cultural image of Japanese society (Denison, 2008). Echoing this interest in his own work, Miyazaki's representations of gender and identity, particularly female identity, maintain great significance due to the redefinition and blurring of traditional, hetero-normative gender stereotypes.

However, compared to this overwhelming attention directed toward his distinctive female characters, the male protagonists and an interpretation of their masculine identity within the films have gone relatively un-noticed and without scrutiny. Representations of masculinity in Japanese animation in general are often varied and multifaceted topics that have been examined throughout cultural studies and animation discourses (Emerson, 2009).

Through an exploration of the ways in which masculine identity functions and is constructed in Miyazaki's films, a more complete understanding of the characters' vulnerability, metamorphosis and maturation can be obtained. The identities of the heroic male characters in the films: Porco Rosso, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, ...