Nissan Seminar: Susan Napier (Tufts), 'Crumbling Towers and Bleeding Boys: Gothic Excess and Late Style in Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron'

Convener(s): Dr Alice Baldock and Professor Sho Konishi

Speaker(s): Professor Susan Napier (Tufts University)

The latest and possibly the last film by the great Japanese animation director, Miyazaki Hayao, is both a highly original achievement and one that encompasses some of the director’s major preoccupations over his forty plus years at the helm of Studio Ghibli. There are no soaring flight scenes, no comforting supernatural creatures, and fewer of the scenes of transcendent sublimity that characterize most of the director’s creations. Instead, the movie plunges us into a liminal, death-haunted space, beginning with the fiery demise of the protagonist’s mother and continuing with his quest for her in a fantastic underworld beneath a greying tower. Towers and their attendant subterranean spaces, as well as death, fire, and female entrapment, are hallmarks of the gothic genre. In The Boy and the Heron Miyazaki essentially out-gothics the gothic, offering a vision of excess that builds on previous films such as Spirited Away or Ponyo to go in darker, even transgressive directions. This paper argues that Miyazaki’s willingness to use visual and thematic excess to such a degree is related to the concept of late style, a highly personal aesthetic in which an older artist moves away from previous, more harmonious compositions to embrace artistic forms that create intense antinomial spaces that provoke and promise complexity rather than resolution.