The Moral Narratives of Hayao Miyazaki PDF Download

Author: Eric Reinders
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476664528
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Widely regarded as Japan's greatest animated director, Hayao Miyazaki creates films lauded for vibrant characters and meaningful narrative themes. Examining the messages of his 10 full-length films--from Nausicaa (1984) to The Wind Rises (2013)--this study analyzes each for its religious, philosophical and ethical implications. Miyazaki's work addresses a coherent set of human concerns, including adolescence, good and evil, our relationship to the past, our place in the natural order, and the problems of living in a complex and ambiguous world. Exhibiting religious influences without religious endorsement, his films urge nonjudgment and perseverance in everyday life.

Author: Colin Odell
Publisher: Oldacastle Books
ISBN: 184243358X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
The animations of Japan's Studio Ghibli are amongst the highest regarded in the movie industry. Their delightful films rank alongside the most popular non-English language films ever made, with each new eagerly-anticipated release a guaranteed box-office smash. Yet this highly profitable studio has remained fiercely independent, producing a stream of imaginative and individual animations. The studio's founders, long-time animators Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki, have created timeless masterpieces. Although their films are distinctly Japanese their themes are universal—humanity, community, and a love for the environment. No other film studio, animation or otherwise, comes close to matching Ghibli for pure cinematic experience. All their major works are examined here, as well the early output of Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, exploring the cultural and thematic threads that bind these films together.

Author: Annette M. Magid
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476640823
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Late 19th century science fiction stories and utopian treatises related to morals and attitudes often focused on economic, sociological and, at times Marxist ideas. More than a century later, science fiction commonly depicts the inherent dangers of capitalism and imperialism. Examining a variety of conflicts from the Civil War through the post-9/11 era, this collection of new essays explores philosophical introspection and futuristic forecasting in science fiction, fantasy, utopian literature and film, with a focus on the warlike nature of humanity.

Author: Peter Yoonsuk Paik
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452915121
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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"I read Peter Y. Paik’s lucid, graceful, ruthless book in one single astonished sitting. I scarred it all over with arrows and exclamation points, so I can read it again as soon as possible." —Bruce Sterling Revolutionary narratives in recent science fiction graphic novels and films compel audiences to reflect on the politics and societal ills of the day. Through character and story, science fiction brings theory to life, giving shape to the motivations behind the action as well as to the consequences they produce. InFrom Utopia to Apocalypse, Peter Y. Paik shows how science fiction generates intriguing and profound insights into politics. He reveals that the fantasy of putting annihilating omnipotence to beneficial effect underlies the revolutionary projects that have defined the collective upheavals of the modern age. Paik traces how this political theology is expressed, and indeed literalized, in popular superhero fiction, examining works including Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s graphic novelWatchmen, the science fiction cinema of Jang Joon-Hwan, the manga of Hayao Miyazaki, Alan Moore’sV for Vendetta, and the Matrix trilogy. Superhero fantasies are usually seen as compensations for individual feelings of weakness, victimization, and vulnerability. But Paik presents these fantasies as social constructions concerned with questions of political will and the disintegration of democracy rather than with the psychology of the personal. What is urgently at stake, Paik argues, is a critique of the limitations and deadlocks of the political imagination. The utopias dreamed of by totalitarianism, which must be imposed through torture, oppression, and mass imprisonment, nevertheless persist in liberal political systems. With this reality looming throughout, Paik demonstrates the uneasy juxtaposition of saintliness and cynically manipulative realpolitik, of torture and the assertion of human dignity, of cruelty and benevolence.

Author: Gael Berton
Publisher: Third Editions
ISBN: 2377842887
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Through this study of Hayao Miyazaki's universe, discover the major influence of the Japanese animation master, whose works have marked Japanese animation and the world of cinema. Through his creativity, technical wizardry and talent for storytelling, Hayao Miyazaki has left an indelible mark on Japanese animation and world cinema. The animation master has been able to create magical worlds for a children’s story or a darker tale. But he has also known how to cast a cynical and innocent look on a world and its societies undergoing great changes and facing grim futures. And yet, his work is often reduced, firstly, to his handful of feature-length movies created under the auspices of Studio Ghibli, but also to a superficial view due to cultural elements that are extremely difficult to grasp for anyone outside of Japan. This work, which explains biographical elements and presents Studio Ghibli and the master’s entourage, will give you a detailed analysis of Hayao Miyazaki’s works, decrypting their themes and offering transversal keys to their understanding. This book will offer you a detailed analysis of Hayao Miyazaki's works, enriched with explanations on biographical aspects. The book will also provide you with reading keys that will allow you to better understand the specifically Japanese cultural elements present in the works.

Author: Mark W. MacWilliams
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317467000
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
Born of Japan's cultural encounter with Western entertainment media, manga (comic books or graphic novels) and anime (animated films) are two of the most universally recognized forms of contemporary mass culture. Because they tell stories through visual imagery, they vault over language barriers. Well suited to electronic transmission and distributed by Japan's globalized culture industry, they have become a powerful force in both the mediascape and the marketplace.This volume brings together an international group of scholars from many specialties to probe the richness and subtleties of these deceptively simple cultural forms. The contributors explore the historical, cultural, sociological, and religious dimensions of manga and anime, and examine specific sub-genres, artists, and stylistics. The book also addresses such topics as spirituality, the use of visual culture by Japanese new religious movements, Japanese Goth, nostalgia and Japanese pop, "cute" (kawali) subculture and comics for girls, and more. With illustrations throughout, it is a rich source for all scholars and fans of manga and anime as well as students of contemporary mass culture or Japanese culture and civilization.

Author: Yoshiko Okuyama
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739190938
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
A cyborg detective hunts for a malfunctioning sex doll that turns itself into a killing machine. A Heian-era Taoist slays evil spirits with magic spells from yin-yang philosophy. A young mortician carefully prepares bodies for their journey to the afterlife. A teenage girl drinks a cup of life-giving sake, not knowing its irreversible transformative power. These are scenes from the visually enticing, spiritually eclectic media of Japanese movies and anime. The narratives of courageous heroes and heroines and the myths and legends of deities and their abodes are not just recurring motifs of the cinematic fantasy world. They are pop culture’s representations of sacred subtexts in Japan. Japanese Mythology in Film takes a semiotic approach to uncovering such religious and folkloric tropes and subtexts embedded in popular Japanese movies and anime. Part I introduces film semiotics with plain definitions of terminology. Through familiar cinematic examples, it emphasizes the myth-making nature of modern-day film and argues that semiotics can be used as a theoretical tool for reading film. Part II presents case studies of eight popular Japanese films as models of semiotic analysis. While discussing each film’s use of common mythological motifs such as death and rebirth, its case study also unveils more covert cultural signifiers and folktale motifs, including jizo (a savior of sentient beings) and kori (bewitching foxes and raccoon dogs), hidden in the Japanese filmic text.

Author: Hayao Miyazaki
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Animation (Cinematography)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"In the mid-1990s, filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki moved from success to success as his work found an audience outside of Japan. His animated films of the era, including Princess Mononoke, Howl's Moving Castle, and Ponyo, were internationally lauded, and Miyazaki won an Academy Award in 2003 for his popular and critical hit Spirited Away. Follow Miyazaki as his vision matures, as cinema-lovers worldwide embrace his creations, and as critics such as Roger Ebert take up the cause of animation and Miyazaki's films. In a legendary career, these crucial years represent the turning point"--

Author: Susan Napier
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300240961
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
The story of filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki's life and work, including his significant impact on Japan and the world A thirtieth-century toxic jungle, a bathhouse for tired gods, a red-haired fish girl, and a furry woodland spirit—what do these have in common? They all spring from the mind of Hayao Miyazaki, one of the greatest living animators, known worldwide for films such as My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and The Wind Rises. Japanese culture and animation scholar Susan Napier explores the life and art of this extraordinary Japanese filmmaker to provide a definitive account of his oeuvre. Napier insightfully illuminates the multiple themes crisscrossing his work, from empowered women to environmental nightmares to utopian dreams, creating an unforgettable portrait of a man whose art challenged Hollywood dominance and ushered in a new chapter of global popular culture.

Author: Dani Cavallaro
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476600708
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Formed by a small group of university students in the early 1980s, Studio Gainax is now one of the most adventurous and widely esteemed anime companies on the scene. And it is fascinating for its unique approach to animation. Formal experimentation, genre-straddling, self-reflexivity, unpredictable plot twists, a gourmet palate for stylishness, proverbially controversial endings, and a singularly iconoclastic worldview are some of the hallmarks. This documentation of the studio's achievements provides a critical overview of both the company and its films: in-depth examinations of particular titles that best represent the company's overall work, including television series such as Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water and Neon Genesis Evangelion, and feature films such as Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise and Gunbuster vs. Diebuster. Each chapter highlights the contribution made by a specific production to the company's progress.