Module 4: Superheroes in Japan's Atomic Age

 


My Sub Over Dub Preferences Prepared Me For This Day

Let the record show that I went to go see Godzilla Minus One the month that it hit theaters and it was my favorite movie I saw last year.

This week, we discussed Japan: specifically, what happened socially, environmentally, and culturally after the US bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki during WWII. We went over how the devastation of those events influenced the way that Japan created media involving the future; what such a large-scale tragedy inflicted by foreign intervention does to the psyche of a nation. This era of anime, manga, and film covered themes of rebirth, of hope after loss, of putting faith in children to deliver the future into one of technological revolution and— perhaps most pervasively— the limits to which the imagination can cook up creations and ramifications of powerful radiation. 


The creator of Astro Boy, Osamu Tezuka, conceptualized a hero to all in the form of a young robot in a concrete example of those themes, and influenced generations and generations of manga and anime writers— including Hayao Miyazaki, a founder of Studio Ghibli, which has a whole host of films dealing with children or childlike characters dealing with the aftermath of an earth ravaged by some sort of destruction, or an earth with such potential. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (screencap pictured above) was mentioned in the Frank Fuller article we read and relates to these themes, as well. I maintain that Spirited Away— with its initially abandoned setting, intensely nervous protagonist, and lack of normal grownups— also fits the bill with environmental and cultural commentary on greed and predatory practices.




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