Making Miyazakiworld: How I Spent 8 Years and Three Months Coming to Grips with Japan’s Greatest Living Filmmaker

This talk discusses the challenges, stresses, and joys of writing the “Life and Art” of Hayao Miyazaki, contemporary Japan’s most famous film director and arguably the world’s greatest animator. The discussion touches on the complexities of writing about Miyazaki, an enormously beloved but sometimes controversial figure in contemporary Japan, whose work has inspired and excited audiences around the world. These complexities include obvious challenges such as dealing with the intimidating amount of Japanese-language material on Miyazaki but also subtler hurdles such as creating a nuanced portrait of a complicated and brilliant artist who is still working intensely at the age of seventy-seven.

Professor Susan Napier received all her degrees from Harvard University and is currently the Goldthwaite Professor of Rhetoric, at Tufts University. Initially a specialist in modern Japanese literature, she began to develop an interest in manga and anime in the late 1990's and published the first major English language scholarly book on anime in 2001. She has continued to work on anime and manga since that time and her other interests include fantasy and science fiction and gender and the body. Her recent book Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art  (Yale University Press, 2018) explores the life and art of the famous Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki.  Other books include From Impressionism to Anime: Japan as Fantasy and Fan Cult in the Western Imagination (Palgrave, 2007) and Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation (St. Martin's Press, 2005).