J340 Prompt for Paper #3: 4-5 pp. Due Nov. 19

On Nausicaa - Valley of the Wind and Princess Mononoke

According to Susan Napier, there is a tendency in Miyazaki films like Nausicaa and Princess Mononoke to offer “a vision of cultural dissonance, spiritual loss, and environmental apocalypse in which humans and nature battle each other.”  She also notes that women are major players in his films. Many of Miyazaki's female characters are remarkable for being assertive taking charge of their lives. Moreover, Napier argues that in Princess Mononoke 

Miyazaki uses the fantastic and the feminine to defamiliarize and even subvert conventional notions of history, progress, and gender coding in Japanese culture. In contrast to his previous films,which mined the history and legends of other countries, Miyazaki this time decontextualizes and defamiliarizes his country's past to create a vision of shifting alterities allowing the audience to range freely across a far wider continuum of both historic events and historical identities than the traditional history film usually presents.

This is why she can argue, in the end, that his films leave the viewer with a sense of "de-assurance" as opposed to the re-assurance often found in Disney films.  What do you think of these ideas? 

What sort of vision do you think Miyazaki has for Japanese History and the Environment? 

Write a paper which looks at some of these issues and specifically at Napier’s arguments how they apply to Nausicaa and Princess Mononoke.  

Due Nov. 19, 4-5 pages