Review of Eriko Ogihara-Schuck, "Miyazaki's Animism Abroad: The Reception of Japanese Religious Themes by American and German Audiences

Abstract

Eriko Ogihara-Schuck, Miyazaki's Animism Abroad: The Reception of Japanese Religious Themes by American and German Audiences Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2014. 240 pages. Paperback $29.95, Kindle $17.99. isbn 978-0-7864-7262-8 (paperback); e-book 978-1-4766-1395-6.In last few decades, Japanese animation (anime) has become an established research topic in fields such as Media Studies, Cultural Studies, and Japanese Studies. Thanks to critical and commercial success of animated works like Akira (Otomo 1988), Ghost in Shell (Oshii 1995), or films by Studio Ghibli, as well as digital distribution of fan-subbed anime TV series, international audiences have become familiar with aesthetics, narratives, and themes of Japanese animation. In response to this increasing global expansion of anime, scholars from different countries and disciplines have started to reflect on Japanese animation. Interestingly, connections and influences between religion, Japanese culture, and anime have become productive area of research. Jolyon Thomas has argued that aspects of manga and anime culture are visible in ways in which visualize religious worlds, entertain religious ideas, and appropriate religious sites and concepts for novel purposes (2012, 155). According to Buljan and Cusack, the mosaic of anime world is built up largely from elements of specifically Japanese spiritual and religious traditions (2015, 209) in such way that viewing anime be an educational experience for Western audiences who are unfamiliar with Japanese religiosity. Okuyama's work is also relevant in this area, although her scope is wider as she discusses presence of Japanese mythology, understood as a collection of sacred texts with spiritual (or religious) significance to Japanese people (2015, 211), in popular films and anime. These works offer historical and cultural approaches to audiovisual products with religious themes, drawing examples from different media and analyzing creations by variety of authors. They provide concepts and explanations for Western audiences to interpret and better understand Japanese religiosity, but academic studies on specific reception processes of Japanese works with religious motifs are still scarce.1Miyazaki's Animism Abroad, by Eriko Ogihara-Schuck, also deals with representation of Japanese religion in anime and its possibilities to convey autochthonous Japanese beliefs such as animism to foreign audiences. Unlike previously mentioned works, it focuses on films by one single creator, Hayao Miyazaki, and it attempts to establish in which ways animist motifs present in Miyazaki's films have been translated and interpreted in countries such as U. S. and Germany. Essentially, Ogihara-Schuck argues that anime can generate international dialogue in arena of religion. And, significantly, religion that promotes such dialogue is not just present in films' content, but manifests itself within form (10). In order to demonstrate this, she uses two strategies: on one hand, American and German textual translations of Miyazaki's films as well as certain paratextual elements (trailers, posters, and credit songs) are analyzed with purpose of detecting modifications from Japanese original version; on other, author discusses film reviews from both countries as an attempt to establish if reviewers' cinematic experiences depend on different adaptation strategies (domestication or foreignization) employed by distributors of Miyazaki's works. Thus, Ogihara-Schuck addresses transnational reception of Japanese animation through methodology that combines discourse and translation analyses with basic visual analyses of certain elements such as posters or film sequences.This book emerged out of Ogihara-Schuck's PhD dissertation, and some parts previously appeared as chapters in two books (Hoff Kraemer and Lewis eds. …