Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan

3. Entertaining Religious Ideas

103 b C H A P T E R 3 Entertaining Religious Ideas In this chapter I perform a detailed case study of several anime by an influential director, showing ways in which audience interpretations—including academic interpretations—of certain films as products deriving from directors ’ religious motivations or as media for imparting religious messages can be fruitfully juxtaposed with directors’ reflexive statements about their own work. I focus on the oeuvre of director Miyazaki Hayao because of its domestic and international box office success and critical acclaim. Miyazaki’s work has also attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, allowing me to conduct a critical appraisal of some prevailing tendencies in foregoing academic studies of his films (and, by extension, of anime more generally). Furthermore, since most of Miyazaki’s anime are produced primarily for the theater, they provide an opportunity to examine anime that are not derived from manga. Jaqueline Berndt has offered a cogent critique of the scholarly fascination with Miyazaki, referring to the overabundance of academic literature on his oeuvre and the corresponding dearth of academic studies regarding the works of other equally fascinating directors. While this chapter is one more contribution to the burgeoning literature on Miyazaki’s work, its specific aim is to provide a corrective for essentialist tendencies in foregoing scholarship , including the common assertion that Miyazaki’s films somehow reveal a mystical understanding of religion (particularly Shintō). I proceed on the presupposition that examining what a director and his audiences say about his oeuvre is more revealing than scouring the work for particular religious themes. Through commentary on fan sites, interviews with informants, academic literature, and citations of interviews with the director, I examine how various interest groups interpret Miyazaki’s films as religious while also showing how Miyazaki himself resists such descriptions. Entertaining Religious Ideas 104 Miyazaki’s Moving Pictures Because of its blockbuster success, its critical acclaim, its lauded technical wizardry, and its contribution to broader international interest in anime, Miyazaki’s work in many ways epitomizes the forefront of Japanese popular anime production. Over his long career, Miyazaki has honed his ability to use painstakingly detailed illustration to create broadly palatable stories conveyed in a mode that packs affective punch while keeping narratives both intellectually stimulating and accessible. Despite his professed antipathy to religion, many of Miyazaki’s movies are moralistic, and he has made some of them with the explicit intention of inculcating certain values that can be reasonably described as religious. Miyazaki draws on existing religious themes like kami, but he also modifies them for his own idiosyncratic purposes . From his public statements it is clear that he seeks to simultaneously entertain and exhort, and his films thus serve as propaedeutic or persuasive texts that attempt to inspire alterations in behavior. Some audience responses to Miyazaki’s films attest to their emotive ef- ficacy and intellectual allure. The films are sometimes used ritually (repetitively , as liturgical texts, as scripture) for edification as well as entertainment . Furthermore, the cosmology and mythology of the films comes to be interpreted and applied to reality after the films end. Such responses can include ritualized actions that indicate a sincere, if sometimes temporary, acknowledgment of belief in the actual existence of the saviors and spirits featured therein. Responses also include the performance of rituals enacted vicariously through the films, and the conduct of rituals performed in reality but created through the influence of the films. Audience members may also identify certain physical places as sacred because they were the alleged inspiration for sacred places found within the narrative realms of the films themselves. All of these aspects of audience reception demonstrate the power of moving images, the ways in which audiences are animated by characters they perceive as animate, and the ways in which they imaginatively superimpose fictive geographies on actual topography. Yet audience reception has generally gone unexamined in academic work on Miyazaki’s oeuvre and religion , which has hitherto been dominated by a method that focuses on tracing connections between filmic content and traditional religious doctrines. This method usually reveals little about the religious or ritual activity that accompanies Miyazaki fandom, and does not account for the discrepancies Entertaining Religious Ideas 105 between Miyazaki’s professed motives and the available evidence on how audiences interpret the content of his films. Framing Miyazaki as Religious A number of authors have...