Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art

Napier (Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle), a professor of rhetoric and Japanese studies at Tufts University, takes a laudably well-informed look at the life and works of Japanese animation luminary Hayao Miyazaki, director of such films as Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro and cofounder of Studio Ghibli. She is economical but thorough with biographical details, delving into her subject’s childhood during WWII, during which his family owned a factory making fan belts for Zero fighter planes, and after the war, when his mother had a long battle with tuberculosis. Napier recounts Miyazaki’s long apprenticeship at Toei Animation and on smaller television projects before his breakthrough with his first feature, The Castle of Cagliostro. Once Miyazaki’s feature directorial career begins, Napier alternates enlightening film analyses with further biographical information, exploring the director’s political beliefs via his writing for an in-house Studio Ghibli journal on topics like environmental waste and nuclear contamination. However, his wife and children, whom Miyazaki is famously circumspect in speaking about publicly, receive only scant mention. In his work, she finds of particular note a penchant for strong, independent, young female characters and a consistent attention to ecological themes. Napier’s biography-cum-study is self-evidently the labor of both a consummate scholar and an avid fan. (Aug.)