Thursday 27 January
13:00-14:00 GMT
Zoom Webinar
Studio Ghibli and its most famous director, Hayao Miyazaki, are often praised for their strong heroines. Often described as a filmmaker with feminist leanings, Miyazaki’s worlds of women have obscured what it has been like for women to work at his studio. In this talk, I examine the creation of Porco Rosso (Kurenai no buta, 1992) in order to investigate the roles women have played behind the scenes of Studio Ghibli. Providing a history of women at Studio Ghibli, this talk reconsiders the extent to which Ghibli deserves its reputation for feminism, and how far that feminism extends into its production culture.
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About the speaker
Dr Rayna Denison, Professor in Film and Digital Arts at the University of Bristol, is currently working on a project about Studio Ghibli’s industrial history. This is a part of her ongoing interests in Japan’s interconnected media industries, and follows on from her AHRC-funded research project Manga to Movies. Rayna’s research interests follow how the UK’s media industries intersect with Japanese media, including the distribution of Japanese films, television shows and anime, and the way fans find and make use of Japanese media texts. She also explores how the films, television shows and anime that we see here in the UK relate to the domestic market back in Japan, where those media texts are often just a small part of a vast multi-media empire.
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