Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle by Susan J. Napier

Author:Susan J. Napier
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250117724
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

CHAPTER TEN

CARNIVAL AND CONSERVATISM IN ROMANTIC COMEDY

Enacting ideologies of naturalization, women in [Japanese] TV families defer to their husbands, serve them tea, and clean up after them … women’s subordination to men … is promoted in politics, in theory, and on television as eternal features of the national landscape.

—Andrew A. Painter, “The Telepresentation of Gender”

FANTASTIC ROMANCE IS ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR GENRES in recent Japanese animation. It is usually presented in episodic situation comedy format, distinctive for its high-spirited tone and broad, often slapstick, humor and revolves around what are usually known as “magical girlfriends.”1 These magical girlfriends have genuinely magic powers and are somewhat older than the shōjo characters in Miyazaki’s works. Furthermore, in contrast to the rather androgynous Miyazaki heroines, they are sexualized figures who engage in a wide continuum of erotic play with their decidedly unmagical human boyfriends. However, in contrast to the totally sexualized female characters in pornography, these “girls” still project a strongly innocent quality, closer to the still immature shōjo than to an adult woman.

In this regard they, like Miyazaki’s characters, seem to occupy a pleasantly fantastic space, far removed from any strictures of history or reality in general. Each series adheres to the standard boy-meets-girl paradigm of romantic comedy, but in these anime, the “girl” is usually a literally otherworldly female, ranging all the way from Scandinavian goddess to video-generated fantasy. Interwoven with bizarre imagery and events, the material seems to offer perfect escapist fantasy. Frequently festivalesque in the amount of anarchic craziness that their narratives engender, each series may be analyzed for the inventiveness of its story lines and its imaginative and sometimes poignant imagery.

Furthermore, romantic comedy anime, not unlike its American television counterpart, is fruitful material for examining a variety of social dynamics, including neighborhood, family, and male-female interactions, at the end of the twentieth century. While Miyazaki’s works were carefully structured calls to activism in an attempt to change the world, these works, with their copious fantasy elements, wild plot twists, and absurd exaggerations of character, act as transforming mirrors of certain prevalent currents in modern Japanese society. Sometimes, as in the case of Video Girl Ai and Oh My Goddess, the works also play a compensatory role as well, allowing the male characters to enact wish-fulfilling fantasies, but in all cases, the exaggerations help to highlight issues of concern that might be contained or swept away in a more realistic drama. As scholar Lynn Spigel says of the suburban sitcom during the 1960s in America, “the fantastic sit-com provided a cultural space in which anxieties about everyday life could be addressed, albeit through a series of displacements and distortions.”2

In anime these “displacements and distortions” include such crucial issues as the growing independence of women, the changing role of the family, and the increasing importance of technology. The changing status of women in particular has had repercussions throughout society as women became more critical of the conventional Japanese lifestyle that, in the words of one Japanese woman, “emphasizes efficiency,

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