Hello Sha-kitty-peare?: Shakespeares Cutified in Japanese Anime Imagination

The first decades of the twenty-first century witnessed a great proliferation of partial adaptations of and references to Shakespeare and his works, in Japanese manga comics and animation films. Such heterogeneous and fragmentary pieces of Shakespeare range from literal or visual quotations from his plays to sacrilegious cute recreations of the playwright himself. This essay will not only illuminate diverse ways of animating Shakespeare’s texts by primarily discussing three recent animated films, Romeo x Juliet (2007), and Zetsuen no Tempest [“The Blast of Tempest”] (2012), but also consider transmutations of Shakespeare himself in animated films such as Romeo x Juliet and Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere (2011), where the playwright is both demystified and cutified in the current fashion of manga-animation characters. This essay will also explore the ways in which the fans of such manga comics and animated films (are often expected to) collaborate and interact with each other to recognize and interpret Shakespearean texts in those works via blogs and fan sites on the Internet. How Shakespeare haunts the contemporary Japanese imagination will be expounded through the analyses of manganized-animated texts that bear “the signature of the Thing ‘Shakespeare’” (Derrida 25).