Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art by Susan Napier (review)

Miyazaki Hayao, arguably the most celebrated living anime master, has publicly announced his retirement from making feature films on several occasions over the years, only to return to work every single time. His latest such withdrawal (as of now) inspired a Japanese television documentary, the aptly titled Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki (directed by Arakawa Kaku, 2016). The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness (2013), a behind-the-scenes documentary on his company, Studio Ghibli, also featured Miyazaki very prominently. These productions reflect two core aspects of Miyazaki's oeuvre and its global reception: his work has been extensively documented, usually with the active participation and indeed content curation of Ghibli itself, yet it continues to generate widespread interest and further scrutiny.

Susan Napier's Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art is not the first English-language book-length survey of the director's career. In the prologue, Napier acknowledges the impact of Helen McCarthy's Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation (Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 1999), which laid the groundwork for this type of study twenty years ago. Napier's is not even the only Anglophone volume dedicated to Miyazaki to come out in 2018: as its title suggests, Raz Greenberg's Hayao Miyazaki: Exploring the Early Work of Japan's Greatest Animator offers an in-depth analysis of the director's earliest projects in both film and television, alongside the works of global art and literature that inspired him and shaped his style. Rayna Denison's edited volume Princess Mononoke: Understanding Studio Ghibli's Monster Princess, also published in 2018 as part of the same Animation: Key Films/Filmmakers series from Bloomsbury Academic, features an impressively broad range of essays on Miyazaki's epic fantasy film.

Finding itself in the company of these two excellent studies, Miyazakiworld nevertheless makes a distinct contribution to the literature. As signaled by the phrase "a life in art," the challenging goal of this volume is to not only examine the director's personal biography and artistic oeuvre alongside each other, but also actively place the two in dialogue. Reading Miyazaki's art through his life and, conversely, finding traces of his art scattered across his personal interactions and views, Napier has crafted a hybrid study that weaves biography, film analysis, historical context, and industry discourse into a rich, sometimes contradictory, but always fascinating tapestry.

While compiling a survey of such a multifaceted, long, and indeed apparently neverending creative career is a rather ambitious undertaking, Napier is a well-known anime scholar who has published on Miyazaki before, including in her book Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001)¹ and a chapter on Studio Ghibli in Christopher Holliday and Alexander Sergeant's edited collection Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres (Routledge, 2018). She is also, by her own proud admission, a Miyazaki fan, and her admiration for his work shines through strongly and infectiously. The product of eight years' worth of labor, the book under review is a chronologically organized volume that guides the reader through Miyazaki's entire creative path, starting with his family background and concluding with a poignant 2014 interview with the director. With palpable archival zeal and scholarly attention to detail, Napier takes a deep dive into Miyazaki's past, unearthing the key events (both in his personal life and the broader history of Japan in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries) that have molded his aesthetic vision, inspired many of his memorable characters, and determined the thematic trajectories of his oeuvre, including his commitment to environmentalism, his apocalyptic narratives, and what she calls his "utopian impulses" (p. 14).

As early as the second page of the prologue, Napier declares her intent for the volume: to demonstrate that an animation director "can really be an auteur" through a close reading of what she terms Miyazakiworld, "the immersive animated realm that varies delightfully from film to film but is always marked by the director's unique imagination...