Amerah’s Garden: An Ecocentric Approach to Animated Storytelling Using Six Elements of Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro as a Model

Abstract

In this dissertation, I maintain that animated stories that reconnect children with nature are an untapped resource for addressing the climate crisis. By reinventing the humble fairy tale, we can tackle one of the biggest problems we face as a society, changing our cultural mindset toward nature. The main goal of this written thesis has been to identify six elements of the feature-length animation My Neighbor Totoro that make it an effective ecocentric children’s fairy tale. I test these six elements by using them to create a new ecological fairy tale, Amerah’s Garden