The female protagonist of Hayao Miyazaki and environment apocalypse: An ecocritical perspective

Apocalypse is the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal,” opines pioneer ecocritic Lawrence Buell. Keeping in mind the emergent condition of global warming and the destruction of ecology, such as the burning of the Amazon, one might presume that the apocalypse is not just a mere metaphor but a reality to look forward to. The traumatic situation of the deadly COVID pandemic that the world has just recovered from is yet another signal of the symptomatically imbalanced world in terms of nature and man. The paper examines the apocalyptic world and a possible way out or way ahead through the lens of Hayao Miyazaki, the famous Japanese animator. In his animated works, Miyazaki imagines a world torn apart by human greed, mostly for power. Most of the time, the victim of human greed is Mother Nature, and the protagonist trying to balance the equilibrium is female. Thus, the ‘women-nature connection’ of ecofeminism is yet another arena in which Miyazaki’s films converse. By focusing on the healing and nurturing aspects of womanhood, Miyazaki’s work is a look at how nature and femininity go hand in hand. Another element of Miyazaki’s work is the fierceness of women and nature that go parallel to each other. This paper explores this parallelism through the lens of ecocriticism and ecofeminism.