Project MUSE - Animated Nature: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Empathy in Miyazaki Hayao’s Ecophilosophy
This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. Writers, artists, and game-designers often use world building to engage the dilemmas of real life on this planet and offer unique aesthetic perspectives on questions of ecological responsibility, sustainability, nonviolence, and social justice.1 Master animator and manga artist Miyazaki Hayao is a master world builder. In Miyazakiworld, his aesthetic of nature combines and recombines with his ethic of nature and human nature to offer us intriguing possibilities for the human imagination of the environment, our relationship to it, and empathetic action within it.2 Throughout his long career, Miyazaki has drawn—both literally and figuratively—intricate imagined worlds, at once beautiful and fragile in their complexity. The natural settings of his animation and manga are so effectively realized that a significant portion of his audience, ironically, has had