Cover of Miyazakiworld

Susan Napier on the Making of “Miyazakiworld”

On October 5, Susan Napier visited WashU to talk about her new book, Miyazakiworld, a critical biography of one of Japan’s most significant contemporary filmmakers. Before her talk, we sat down with Napier to talk about Miyazaki, Japanese popular culture, and the excitement of teaching and studying anime now.

How did you become interested in Miyazaki?

Miyazaki is both an incredible visual artist and possessive of a psychological complexity that is almost like a literary sensibility. His characters are multilayered and complex. They’re very interesting people. They are not at all so-called "cartoon" characters. Early on I got interested in Japan and ended up becoming a professor of Japanese literature originally, which was fun. But I began to realize that fantasy and science fiction were becoming kind of a big deal. They were starting to be taken seriously (a little bit) by the academic establishment -- still not too seriously. And while that shift was happening I was writing a book on Japanese fantasy.

While writing that book I became aware of Japanese animation and manga. These days most people know what manga is. But when I was starting on all this it was still pretty weird and strange. I thought, wow, this is amazing stuff, particularly the animation. I was teaching at the University of London at the time, and I happened to go to the European premiere of this very famous, iconic classic anime film called Akira, which is still regarded as one of the great masterpieces of anime. And I walked out of the Institute of Contemporary Art in London feeling like, "what did I just see?"

The animation was beautiful. It was kinetic. The colors were so saturated. And the story was so interesting and dark and exciting and just like nothing I'd ever seen before. And so I thought somebody better write about this stuff, and of course nobody was going to, partly because you know you're trying to get tenure, you're trying to be taken seriously. In my field, there was this sense of, oh anime it's so vulgar. You should be doing your study 10th-century classics or one of the great 20th-century writers or something. But I was becoming aware that it was becoming kind of a thing in the West, too. And I thought, oh you know, this is not just a Japanese cultural phenomenon for Japanese. I'm seeing more young Americans getting into it.

There is something going on here, and I thought, I'll write the damn book if no one else was going to!

In the course of researching that book, I became aware of this really quite amazing director Hayao Miyazaki. I was quite impressed by his use of very independent, strong, complex female characters in what are traditionally male roles.

The more I researched him the more I thought, he's more than just a family animator. He's not simply the Walt Disney of Japan. He's much more complex, more serious. He's tolerant of ambiguity, and he's tolerant of or acknowledges the darkness in people, in the world, in life. This guy is a serious filmmaker, and indeed we can call him an auteur. He does all the storyboards. He writes the screenplays. He directs the films. He chooses the voice actors. He works with his composer on the music and writes the lyrics, sometimes, for the theme songs. This is a serious auteur.

It really was time to do a study of him.

In your book you talk about his process, how he doesn’t really work from scripts.  

You can't be a direct live action director and say, “well I don't really have a script and I don't really know how it's going to end exactly. But, you know, I'm going to gather a bunch of people together.” In anime, though, you can. Miyazaki does. He thinks from the ground up.

How does working on something like anime compare to working on classical Japanese literature?

Japanese animation is the only real animated form that kind of contests with the animation being produced by the West. One reason for that is that anime has complexity and seriousness and that real narrative verve and artistry and aesthetics, which really do go all the way back a thousand years.

Compare how I’ve described anime with a work like The Tale of Genji. That story is very different from the kind of epic military narration that we have in the West. It's really a story of a young man and his romantic conquests, of his romantic frustrations and decline. It’s emotionally resonant, believable, and also very beautiful. It has beautiful descriptions. In some ways, The Tale of Genji is not so different from what we see in anime. There are all of these really interesting, deep, and in many ways appealing characters who go about their lives with a sense of purpose and a feeling that there is some meaning in their worlds that can be expressed through art, through love, through the love of nature. That narrative sensibility continues through to Miyazaki, along with a feeling of transience, ephemerality.

One of my colleagues calls Japan a picto-centric culture. I think it's both picto-centric and literature-centric, which is why I think it combines so well. But there's no question that from very early on they have been really brilliant artists. You have a vivid, evocative, immersive kind of world building in the scrolls and screens and woodblock prints they created.

How have your students’ reactions to Miyazaki and anime changed over time?

They have gotten much more sophisticated. I mean I've been teaching this now 20 years and, yeah, for sure you're getting a more sophisticated group of students coming in. A lot of people are coming from film and media studies. They are sophisticated readers of film. And you're getting people from English departments who know about narration and character building. And then also you do have a lot of engineers and scientists who love animation. It kind of gives them a different sort of world. There's acceptance increasing of what when I first started was still seen as marginal, still something that was mainly boys did that, techies. Over the years that has changed enormously. Now it's about 50 percent female at least. So that's been a big change too. I have a quote in my lecture from an anime fan saying the characters are more real than Hollywood characters. You really feel like you know these people. They are more believable. They're not as teflon, not as airbrushed. People were very interested in coming because anime was dealing with things back in the 90s that American television still wasn't dealing with, like homoerotic themes, like queer themes. And there's an awareness that Japanese animation gives things that American animation or American Hollywood films don't give, things like more acknowledgement of darkness, of the fact that it's not always happily ever after.

Susan Napier is the Goldwaite Professor of Rhetoric at Tufts University. Her most recent book is Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art.