Episode 93 - Howl's Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki, 2004) (with Brian Attebery)
Howl's Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki, 2004).
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
Myth, magic, and technology take to the skies in Episode 93 of the podcast, with Howl’s Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki, 2004) providing a welcome return to the steampunk spectacle and metamorphic marvels of Japanese anime. Joining Chris and Alex to examine Studio Ghibli’s 2004 feature film fantasy of flight is Professor Brian Attebery, writer and professor of English at Idaho State University, who took over as editor of the Journal of the Fantastic in Arts in 2006, and is also a prolific author whose seminal work encompasses all things fantasy literary, history, and storytelling. Listen as they discuss the director Hayao Miyazaki’s careful combination of provincial communities with (anti-)war themes and adolescent activity; voicework in anime and how specific casting practices feed into the film’s juvenile feminine perspectives; the exchange between gender and unruliness; the film’s play with verticality and flight, and what it means politically to look down as well as up; and the instability of Howl’s Moving Castle’s fictional world, and what this says about the challenges of trying to belong in places and spaces that continually change.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
Suggested Readings
Attebery, Brian. 1980. The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Attebery, Brian. 1992. Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Attebery, Brian. 2002. Decoding Gender in Science Fiction. New York: Routledge.
Attebery, Brian. 2013. Parabolas of Science Fiction. Ed. with Veronica Hollinger. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2013.
Attebery, Brian. 2014. Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth. New York: Oxford University Press.
Clyde, Deirdre. 2020. “Pilgrimage and prestige: American anime fans and their travels to Japan.” Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 18, no. 1: 58-66.
Drazen, Patrick. 2002. Anime Explosion! The What? Why? & Wow! Of Japanese Animation. California: Stone Bridge Press.
Jones, Diana Wynne. 1996. The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. London: Vista Books.
Mulvey, Laura. 1989. Visual and Other Pleasures. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rowe, Kathleen. 1995. The Unruly Woman: Gender and Genres of Laughter Austin: University of Texas Press.
Telotte, J.P. 2001. Science Fiction Film. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Tompkins, Jane. 1985. Sensational designs: The Cultural Work of American fiction, 1790–1860. New York: Oxford University Press.