Napier's Anime Summary

In Napier's book, Anime: from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle, she addressed several motifs: Identity, feminine characters, and narrative making. The articles in the book stated analysis with various films as instances. The first part of the book explored the relationship between global and local (Japanese) society and animation. In this book, Japanese animation is both the media and the culture container. It is the media that communicate contemporary values with the audience. It also is the container that accumulates national and worldwide cultures and tries to create something new. In the second part, Napier analyzed some animation masterpieces related to identity reorganization. For instance, she discussed three animations in chapter five, Ghost and Machines: the technological body. What she stated is the contradiction between the hard machine bodies and the vulnerable human bodies inside the machine. The machine bodies are so much stronger than human bodies. But eventually, what would last forever is not the body but the soul and spirit. In the last part, Napier talked about the influence of historical background on the creation of animation. What impressed me is chapter 11. Napier analyzed the impact of the World War II. The war took away lives and prosperity. What were left are
awful memories and "victim's history" (2005, p.217).
In the whole book, I am most interested in the discussion of shojo (young girl) characters in part three. Shojo as the protagonist is popular in Japanese animation films. Many famous directors use shojo to develop stories, like Isao Takahata, Satoshi Kon, and Hayao Miyazaki. Many TV animation series adopt this setting as well. For example, many animators like the pattern that magical girls fight with evils and save the world. The most famous one in the U.S. might be the Sailor Moon. It tells a story that a pretty middle-school girl destined to save Earth from the forces of evil.
Nevertheless, the classic shojo in Japanese animation differentiates with Miyazaki's.
First, many shojo identities are characterized by an "ultrafemininity" that is often passive or dreamy. (Napier, 2005, p. 154) The girl protagonist in Sailor Moon, Usagi Tsukino, is a good example. She is a hero. But at the same time, she likes crying when she meets problems. Different with the classic shojo, the girls in Miyazaki's animations are "notably independent and active". They sometimes have "unfeminine elements" (Napier, 2005, p. 155). Those elements make the characters so remarkable. In Laputa: Castle in the Sky, Sheeta hid from the pirate and escaped from the plane alone. In Kiki's Delivery Service, she also lived a life of supplying delivery by herself. Princess Mononoke even attacked and attempted to destroy as many members of the human race as possible. Moreover, unlike Miyazaki's girls, the classic shojo likes to be in a group. Usagi in Sailor Moon has four female friends who are also magical girls and fight for the world with her.
Additionally, in Miyazaki's films, shojo are usually ordinary girls in the fantasy world-space.
They have unique experiences. But they are often in the same identity with other characters in the animation. In Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Nausicaä is the princess of the Valley of the Wind. She is one of the members in the kingdom. In Laputa, Sheeta is an ordinary girl as well. The classic shojo, however, usually are action heroes or extremely but secretly different with others. Many of them, like in Sailor Moon, are girls with magic. Same instances include Cardcaptor Sakura and Mysterious Thief Saint Tail. Their behavior consists of various forms of violent retribution toward
evils.
All in all, it is the differences of Miyazaki's girls that make them so adorable and respectable. Miyazaki also uses the shojo characters to spread his idea of "what (the world) could be" potentially. (Napier, 2005, p. 153)