Introducing Studio Ghibli James Rendell and Rayna Denison Many

Introducing Studio Ghibli James Rendell and Rayna Denison Many readers of this special issue of the Journal of East Asian Popular Culture will already feel that they know Studio Ghibli. Famously founded in 1985 by animation film directors Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, along with then-magazine editor, Toshio Suzuki, Studio Ghibli has dominated Japan’s box office since the mid-1990s. Furthermore, thanks to an international distribution deal with Buena Vista International, a subsidiary of Disney, Hayao Miyazaki’s films have become well-known transnational phenomena, garnering international film festival awards and even an Oscar. This international recognition sits alongside the work undertaken by a legion of active fans who have likewise promoted Miyazaki and Ghibli’s works outside Japan. However, reflecting on the studio’s closure in 2014 – after nearly 30 years of film, television and other kinds of production – there are still many aspects of Studio Ghibli that remain obscure. Despite recent rumours that Miyazaki may be coming out of retirement one last time (a pattern he has been repeating since the late 1990s), the (perhaps temporary) moth-balling of Studio Ghibli’s feature production efforts in 2014 presents the scholars in this collection with an opportunity to reconsider Studio Ghibli’s local and global significance. This special edition of the Journal of East Asian Popular Culture is therefore intended to strategically address some of the gaps in anime scholarship, and in the scholarship around Studio Ghibli. In this introduction we also seek to provide a more holistic understanding of what Studio Ghibli is, whose work it represents and how it has become a success both at home and abroad. Our contributors focus on two facets of Studio Ghibli’s meanings, but use a wide variety of academic approaches to do so. Their work ranges across historical, cultural industries, branding, transnation and fan studies methodologies and theories, each of which approaches shifting the debates around what Studio Ghibli means to global culture. The first major lens used to examine Studio Ghibli in this collection is a historical-industrial one. Through analyses of domestic Japanese and transnational industrial practices, our scholars seek to reconsider Studio Ghibli’s meanings, and to show how much variety there is in what ‘Studio Ghibli’ means in different times and places. Second, our authors address the roles played by filmmakers, distributors and fans in promoting and spreading the work of Studio Ghibli. From the strategies of producer Toshio Suzuki through to the creative work of fan crafters, our contributors show how alive Studio Ghibli remains, even after its ostensible 1 closure. In this way, our special edition takes a new view of the circuits of production and reception through which Ghibli’s films flow (Du Gay et al. 2013). Moving away from textual analysis, therefore, the articles contained herein attempt to re-focus critical attention onto Ghibli’s contexts; from the contexts of production, through to those of consumption and recycling. In doing so, this collection shows how Studio Ghibli’s films are being kept alive, even in the years following the studio’s closure. This special issue celebrating Studio Ghibli’s 30 year production history thereby demonstrates the continuing power of the company’s brand and its legacy in relation to global film culture. Hayao Miyazaki, and to a lesser extent Isao Takahata, provide one contextual route into the study of Studio Ghibli’s meanings. Miyazaki and Takahata have tended to overshadow those around them, but these filmmakers are nonetheless well-known in Japan for their collaborative working practices. Their animation styles, developed through decades of training at some of Japan’s top animation studios, including Tōei Dōga (Toei Animation) and Nippon Animation, helped both directors forge strong contacts with everyone from producers through to key animators, who they would later gather around them when creating Studio Ghibli. The consistency in staff has led to a consistency in character design, backgrounds and movement aesthetics at the studio. Their style has remained consistent even as anime aesthetics have warped and changed dramatically in response to the emergence of CG animation technologies. One of Studio Ghibl’s major aesthetic legacies, therefore, has to be the retention of earlier decades of Japanese animation styles within its house style; essentially, its preservation of the styles seen in earlier Tōei Dōga film animation and in the World Masterpiece Theatre animated TV series. That legacy has long been written into scholarly understandings of Studio Ghibli, and few studios have been as highly praised as Ghibli. It is evident in the earliest of work on Miyazaki, as when Helen McCarthy tells us that, instead of comparing Miyazaki and Ghibli to Disney (something that Patrick Drazen also contests, 2003): I would prefer to call Miyazaki “the Kurosawa of animation.” Not only does his work have the same rare combination of epic sweep and human sensitivity that the great live-action director possessed, but it also fails to fit into any of the neat, child-sized boxes into which the West still tends to stuff animation as an art form. (1999: 10) This tendency to align Miyazaki and his studio with the very best of Japanese cinema is only outdone by the commentary in Japan, where Miyazaki is compared not just to Disney, but to 2 US filmmakers like Stephen Spielberg (see Denison, this edition). However, that high praise for Miyazaki leaves the work of other Ghibli directors out of the scholarly picture. Studio Ghibli has been home to many key figures in Japanese animation history, not least Miyazaki’s renowned colleague, Isao Takahata, whose films often surpass Miyazaki’s own in terms of experimentation with form and style. Other famous anime directors, perhaps most notably Hideaki Anno, also have connections with the Studio, and Ghibli has trained other directors like Hiromasa Yonebayashi and Gorō Miyazaki. As Helen McCarthy and others have noted, what makes Ghibli different to other Japanese animation studios is its stable, permanent staff roster. Permanent staff have occupied positions at Ghibli since the mid-1990s, instead of doing piece work and undertaking short-term contracts (1999). This stability has helped to maintain the consistent production of a Studio Ghibli style of animation, helped by collaborative working practices the include key personnel like colour designer Michiyo Yasuda through to key animators like Megumi Kagawa and Hitomi Tateno, all of whom are women whose careers have been spent at Studio Ghibli. Therefore, taking a wider contextual of view of Studio Ghibli has the potential to reveal the extensive links forged between Miyazaki, Takahata and a plethora of other Japanese animation creators, whose continuing work may be the strongest examples of Ghibli’s aesthetic legacy for Japanese animation. A significant part of Studio Ghibli’s legacy lies its highly praised animation style. The Ghibli aesthetic is so well-developed that anime critic Jonathan Clements enjoins us to ‘spare a though for poor Hiromasa Yonebayashi, who was nominated for an Oscar for Marnie [Omoide no Mānī/When Marnie Was There (2014)], but who is little-known or recognised in the anime world, having worked for a decade to keep someone else’s reputation alive.’ (2016) As Clements’ comments suggest, Yonebayashi and other Ghibli animators’ films bear strong hallmarks of a consistent studio style, linked to the work of its two most famous directors, Miyazaki and Takahata. Indeed, Yonebayashi’s forthcoming film Mary and the Witch’s Flower (Meari to majo no hana, 2017), made for the newly formed Studio Ponoc, has already begun to be likened in style and content to previous Studio Ghibli films. But the aspect of Studio Ghibli’s history that has most inspired academic criticism has been Miyazaki’s (and to a lesser extent, Takahata’s) marriage of consistent, albeit ambiguous, themes to these aesthetics. For example, Miyazaki’s ecological interests are often read through the details of his filmmaking. They are seen in Miyazaki’s films in the realistic, if 3 impressionistic, way that wind moves through fields of grass, and in the way the first few drops of rain in a shower darken patches on a pathway (McCarthy 1999; Cavallaro 2006). Miyazaki and Takahata’s anthropomorphism and zoomorphism also go hand-in-hand with the creation of memorable characters and the studio’s interests in ecological conservation (Odell and Le Blanc 2015; Moist and Bartholow 2007; Foster 2012). Miyazaki’s detailed depictions of flying machines are, in a similar way, entwined with themes of freedom and subjectivity (Napier 1998; Napier 2005). Ghibli’s aesthetics and themes have thereby dominated discussions of the studio and are suggestive of attempts to define Miyazaki and his colleagues as auteur-style directors, bringing them out of the realm of commercial film production in order to celebrate them as artists with universal concerns. The focus on Studio Ghibli’s themes in academic scholarship may help to explain, somewhat, the relative lack of work that places Ghibli’s productions within commercial contexts. Miyazaki and Takahata are instead discussed as exemplary transnational auteur directors adhering to ‘the transnational commerce and practices of auteurism…embedded in the material conditions and commercial strategies of international institutions and networks of circulation’ (Lee 2008: 204, emphasis in original). In this special edition, our contributors show how the commercial side of Studio Ghibli includes not just the branding of Miyazaki and Takahata as commercial auteurs (see Carter, this collection), but can also be read in the wide variety of side-projects and advertising work undertaken by the studio. While sometimes analysed (McCarthy 1999; Odell and Le Blanc 2015), these side-projects have only rarely the province of academic scholarship to date, suggesting rich ground for future scholarly work.

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