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Cultural Writings of the Fairy Tale: a Spatial Reading of Three Studio Ghibli Productions

In this chapter I delve into the many postmodern manifestations of Studio Ghibli’s productions in order to uncover the ‘shades of magic’ that engulf the fairy-tale genre and are re-told as parodical discursive manifestations of the anti-fairy tale. In particular, I look at three different productions of the Japanese franchise, all of them directed and written by Hayao Miyazaki: Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, 2001), Howl’s Moving Castle (Hauru no Ugoku Shiro, 2004), and Ponyo (Gake no Ue no Ponyo, 2008). These three films expose a refractive correlation with space, as they provide a contradictory resignification of magical places that have a rhetorical impact on their protagonists’ mindsets. As divergent forms of heterotopias, both the natural and the artificial worlds portrayed in these films appear as magical environments in which the objects acquire a sense of place and are conceptualized as autonomous and performative entities. Magic is therefore interconnected with nature, allowing an ecocritical reading of the films based on their productions of space. The discourses of such spatiality will be the analytical focus of this essay, in which I interrogate the cultural projection of the fairy tale in terms of transnational folklore.