Fafnir (Jun 2019)
Japanese Apocalyptic Dystopia
Abstract
Japanese film director, screenwriter, and animator Hayao Miyazaki created an intricate adaptation of Diana Wynne Jones’s fantasy novel Howl’s Moving Castle (1986). Both the 2004 eponymous Japanese anime film and the novel seem to be set in the Edwardian era. The novel operates more as a fable, carrying traditional tropes of European folklore, while the film is closer to a dystopian alternate history. My paper examines how the adaptation, even though Japanese, manages to rework the story as a steampunk fantasy. The examination of the visual aspect of the anime illustrates how a Japanese adaptation of a British novel represents a steampunk story whilst bearing traces of the Japanese sense of apocalypse. The comparison of the source material and the film reveals a cross-cultural phenomenon: an engagement of typically Japanese animation components and an essentially British setting. This paper examines the film as an adaptation that operates with vastly differing plot elements: war and the exploitation of magical powers obtain much more important, sinister roles as subsidiary themes, especially in light of the fact that the Iraq war had started a year before the film’s release. This study, focusing on the thematic and visual components, identifies how a Japanese adaptation of a British novel gives a translation of a steampunk story whilst conveying a critique of modern wars.
