Film Analysis Of Hayao Miyazaki's Animated Films

Known predominantly for their eloquence hand-drawn techniques and austere beauty storytelling, Hayao Miyazaki’s animated films continue to prevail highly acclaimed and admired throughout Japan and all parts of the world. With a career that supervises Japan’s most prominent animation film studio, Studio Ghibli, Miyazaki has occupied on the role of producer, screenwriter, animator, film director, and manga artist. Though, beyond the innovative and artistic value of Miyazaki’s greatest films are the consistent, and often concealed, feminist motifs that render female characters as protagonists; which other animated films may contempt to unfold due to social circumstances, lack of budget, and other conditions. Of Miyazaki’s thirteen archetype animated

We’ve reached a time when this male-oriented way of thinking is reaching a limit. The girl or woman has more flexibility. This is why a female point of view fits the current times.” (Miyazaki, Schilling, 2008)

Miyazaki’s film Spirited Away (2001) poses as an outstanding example of his strength to question traditional fixed gender and establish women characters which exploit her self-growth, difficulties, and decisively overcome obstacles through ingenuity rather than abiding to violence. With many feminist themes and sociology theories that are incorporated in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, its success is bound to perpetuate as it continues to show children and adults-like throughout parts of the world how breathtaking this animated film is.

Chihiro endorses her difficult encounters not through supremacy or conquering her foes, but through empathy and kindness. In western media and films, a hegemonic masculine ideal is often the “only solution to plot problems”, leaving violence as a pathway to success (Pyke,1996). Kimmel stated “in a society that ‘traditionally accords control to man’, to have feelings such as empathy and compassion can be interpreted as weakness to a male figure.” (Kimmel,Rothenberg, 1998). Thus, men are not often described with these qualities, giving Chihiro superior qualities on the male protagonist, and offering alternative outlooks on the way conflicts should be handled.

In the article “Class-Based Masculinities” Karen Pyke converses how lower and higher status men hypothesise the notions of masculinity either through “physical strength or structural violence” (1996). Miyazaki offers an analysis of both practices of masculinity through diverse characters and the engagements they took, as well as his critique of ecological deprivation and the loss of traditional Japanese