FIGURE 1: A piece of promotional material for Ringing Bell. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQt8CqVPNC4&t=262s FIGURE 2: The film’s opening song, and the address that follows. “Wolf! Alright, I’ve decided to be your apprentice…
read moreMiyazaki’s 2001 Spirited Away, blurs the binary of human, animal, mythology, and spirit. Each character has its own version of this intersectionality, creating different presentations of ontology that in turn…
read more“Good thing he’s on our side” … “For now” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFxN2oDKk0E Figure 1 – Godzilla: King of the Monsters trailer. How do we define the term ‘Monster’? Or perhaps, how should…
read moreIn their 2020 film A Whisker Away, Junichi Sato and Tomotaka Shibayama explore the story of 14-year-old Miyo Sasaki, who transforms into a cat with the help of a Noh…
read moreIn A Whisker Away, the 14-year-old Miyo Sasaki takes extreme measures in order to be close to her school crush Kento Hinode, even accepting a cat mask from a dubious…
read moreThere is a surprising lack of non-human animal representation in Studio Ghibli’s 2004 film Howl’s Moving Castle, despite an overarching theme which frequently pits an idyllic pastoral version of Japan…
read moreMary and the Witch’s Flower is a 2017 animated film, directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi and produced by Studio Ponoc (founded by the former lead film producer at Studio Ghibli). The…
read moreWolf Children describes the maturation of two werewolf children, Yuki and Ame, and their human-being mother, Hana, with great sensitivity. The werewolf children struggle between their two identities – human…
read morePom Poko[1] is a film that follows the tanuki of Tama Hills trying to halt development of their woodland through their folkloric transformation powers. In terms of how it shows…
read morePom Poko. Dir. Isao Takahata. Studio Ghibli. 1994 Pom Poko (Heisei Tanuki Gassen Ponpoko) is written and directed by Isao Takahata, a co-founder of Studio Ghibli which animated and published…
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