Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art by Susan Napier
2019; Volume: 46; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/sfs.2019.0064
ISSN2327-6207
Autores Tópico(s)Science Education and Perceptions
Resumo427 BOOKS IN REVIEW and mass-market narratives to locate the kinds of obscure intersections May uncovers. Interdisciplinary researchers in particular may benefit from the text’s attention to scientific detail, even when descriptions tumble a bit too far down the black hole. The chapter on the super-bomb begins with a lengthy overview and history of atomic science, including an account of Ernest Rutherford’s first theory of the atom’s substructure. The nature and function of isotopes is covered as well: “In the case of uranium, for example, the most stable isotope has an atomic weight of 238, while the commonest of its unstable isotopes, U235 , has three fewer neutrons” (4-5). In the chapter on machine intelligence, we are given technical details on electromagnetic radiation, which “can be thought of as waves travelling at a constant speed c—approximately 300 million meters per second—and differing only in their wavelength and frequency of oscillation” (97). The author does an admirable job tethering such minutiae to sf texts and commentary from sf authors, especially vis-à-vis the pulps, which were concerned with scientific detail, but there is little doubt that one’s mileage will vary, even though an emphasis on science is signaled in the book’s subtitle (as is, perhaps, a lack of critical-theoretical reflection, suggested by the use of the populist “sci-fi”). This is a book of connections, not explorations or analyses, and as such it provides interested readers with a helpful resource for their own research and pedagogy. Considering this, an appendix would have facilitated its use as a guide to American sf and technoscience during the Cold War, so it is unfortunate that one is not provided. Neither this, however, nor the author’s proclivity to draw connections without probing the literary and cultural mechanisms that made them possible, render the book unusable as a springboard for other projects.—Chad Andrews, Independent Scholar Know Your Anime. Susan Napier. Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2018. xviii+305 pp. $30 hc. Beyond the films themselves, available materials on the Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli are rich but often compromised by personal connections. Miyazaki and his colleagues at Studio Ghibli were not merely agents of immense change in the animation business, but also active participants in the surge of information that greeted the rise of the anime press in the late 1970s. Their relationship, in particular with the publisher Tokuma, the magazine Animage, and its editor, future Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki, not only made them the center of a substantial archive of writings on Japanese animation, but also allowed them to curate and steer much of what was written about their work. In the case of the director Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli’s own tireless self-commemoration and the company’s ardent following overseas have combined to create a vast archive, even in English. As Susan Napier concedes in her introduction to Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art, Helen McCarthy’s Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation (1999) covered much of the background twenty years ago, a fact which ought to have prompted today’s 428 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) researchers into more diligent use of untranslated Japanese sources. This has not always been the case, leading to a sump of Miyazaki cash-ins and Ghibli giblets that simply rehash materials already well known in academic or fan circles. Fortunately, Napier does not disappoint, dropping in quotations from many Japanese books unavailable in translation, ensuring that she has snippets of information to educate all but the most jaded of Miyazaki-watchers. Her Miyazaki is a child of privilege, wracked with guilt at his family’s war profiteering, and “keenly aware of the traumatic effect of World War II” (3), a talented artist even at school, and a committed socialist despite (or perhaps because of) an education at the elite Gakushûin school, “hardly a place likely to engender strong left-wing sympathies” (29). Her third chapter rushes a little over the first fifteen years of Miyazaki’s career, cramming in his apprenticeship at Tôei Animation, his decade in television, and his return to cinema. I would contend that...
Referência(s)