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4. The Fairy Tale Reimagined 65 Bettelheim to be pivotal to their psychological and ideological significance: “fairy tales,” the author maintains in his seminal book The Uses of Enchantment, “depict in imaginary and symbolic form the essential steps in growing up and achieving an independent existence” (Bettelheim, p.73). In revisioning The Snow Queen, Dezaki has been especially keen to question the authority of the happy-ending formula so often associated with the fairy tale tradition—especially in the wake of its Disney adaptations. In so doing, the director tersely advocates that stability is not a desirable objective for an individual tale any more than it can be reliably presumed to govern the lives of texts across disparate epochs and cultures. Quizzing the story’s closure, Dezaki thus implicitly alludes also to the inevitable openness of the universe of textuality as a whole—which is indeed the prerequisite of the eclectic art of adaptation. Dezaki’s anime, in this respect, faithfully reflects Jack Zipes’ contention that revisionist renditions of fairy tales at their most dispassionate constitute “not recuperation but differentiation, not the establishment of a new norm but the questioning of all norms” (Zipes, pp. 157–158). Concomitantly, Dezaki’s stance brings to mind Angela Carter’s playfully irreverent evaluation of the fairy tale as a form: “The chances are, the story was put together in the form we have it, more or less out of all sorts of bits of other stories long ago and far away, and has been tinkered with, had bits added to it, lost other bits, got mixed up with other stories, until our informant herself has tailored the story personally to suit an audience ... or, simply, to suit herself” (Carter, p. x). Carter is here elliptically hinting at the very etymology of the verb “to adapt,” the Latin adaptare: i.e., “to make fit” or “to make appropriate.” Although The Snow Queen constitutes an unprecedented accomplishment in the universe of adaptations of fairy tales to anime, it must nonetheless be noted that Andersen’s tales were previously utilized as source materials by the series Andersen Stories (dir. Masami Hata, 1971). A highly imaginative interpretation of Andersen’s world in the recent history of anime consists of Hayao Miyazaki’s movie Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea (2008), a loose adaptation of The Little Mermaid treated with vertiginously exuberant visual verve from beginning to end. As Ponyo lures us into its colorful filmic ride by recourse to electrifying graphics keen on foregrounding their emphatically hand-drawn status, its overall atmosphere emanates an aura of infantile candor which might at first induce the viewer to categorize it univocally as a children’s movie. Although it is true that Ponyo is one of Miyazaki’s most pointedly child-oriented productions to date, it must also be noted, however, that the work strikes grave and thought-provoking chords in its reconceptualization of the venerable tale in terms of a disquieting environmentalist message of tremendous political significance and corresponding animational pathos. Miyazaki’s fascination with Western fantasy literature well predates Ponyo,
66 Anime and the Art of Adaptation as attested to by his adaptations of Three Thousand Miles in Search of Mother (TV series, 1975) and Howl’s Moving Castle (movie, 2004), as well as his devotion to the study of children’s stories from an early age and involvement in the Children’s Literature Research Society while studying politics and economics at Gakushuin University. Miyazaki’s adaptations tend to take considerable liberties with their sources, leading to free-standing narratives of globally acclaimed stature. Miyazaki has also experimented with the adaptation of Japanese children’s fiction with Kiki’s Delivery Service (movie, 1989), in this case incurring the ire of the creator of the original story (1985), Eiko Kadono, due to his adventurous departure from the parent text. Miyazaki is not alone in treasuring fantasy literature of Western provenance intended primarily for kids as a copious wellhead of inspiration. Other notable adaptations in the gen res of the fairy tale and the folk tale include Puss in Boots (movie, dir. Kimio Yabuki, 1969), Aesop’s Fables (TV series, dir. Eiji Okabe, 1983) and Cin derella (TV series, dir. Hiroshi Sasagawa, 1996). In the areas of child-oriented action adventure and the bildungsroman, some of the most remarkable accomplishments encompass Heidi, Girl of the Alps (TV series; dir. Isao Takahata, 1974), A Dog of Flanders (TV series; dir. Yoshio Kuroda, 1975), Rascal the Raccoon (TV series; dirs. Hiroshi Saitou, Seiji Endou, Shigeo Koshi, 1977), Anne of Green Gables (TV series; dirs. Isao Takahata and Shigeo Koshi, 1979), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (TV series; dir. Hiroyoshi Saitou, 1980), Swiss Family Robinson (TV series; dir. Yoshio Kuroda, 1981), The Story of Pollyanna (TV series; dir. Kouzou Kuzuha, 1986) and Tales from Earthsea (movie; dir. Goro Miyazaki, 2006). Most of the titles in the second category—alongside the aforementioned Andersen Stories and Three Thousand Miles in Search of Mother, as well as several other less wellknown productions—belong to the long-running Japanese series World Master piece Theater: a veritable galaxy of adaptations of famous stories of principally Western origin. Gulliver’s Space Travels: Beyond the Moon (movie; dir. Yoshio Kuroda, 1965) and Animal Treasure Island (movie; dir. Hiroshi Ikeda; 1971), for their part, offer generic repositionings of classic narratives by Jona - than Swift and Robert Louis Stevenson, respectively. Returning to Andersen, there are arguably several reasons for which his oeuvre might appeal specifically to a Japanese sensibility. One of these is that his stories never demur from exposing the dark side of fairy tale, the real-life sorrow and fear metaphorically encapsulated in their classic tropes—and most typically, as Naomi Lewis phrases it, in their “terrible trials, forests of thorns, unscalable glass mountains.” Hence, Andersen’s world view would be quickly grasped by a Japanese spirit eager to acknowledge the coexistence of calm and turmoil throughout the universe. No less vitally, the Danish author’s unflinching belief in the sentience of all things is quite congruous with the lessons of
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Anime and the Art of Adaptation
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Anime and the Art of Adaptation Eig
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To Paddy, with love and gratitude .
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Contents Preface . . . . . . . . .
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Preface Keep on the lookout for nov
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Preface 3 medium (and hence a diffe
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Chapter 1 The Frame of Reference No
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Chapter 6 A Magical Murder Enigma U
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Chapter 7 A Tapestry of Courtly Lif
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198 Filmography Hisayuki Toriyumi.
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200 Filmography The Count of Monte
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202 Bibliography Bloom, H. 2004.
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204 Bibliography “Kimono History:
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206 Bibliography Wullschlager, J. 2
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208 Index Chesterton, G.K. 128 Chir
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210 Index Martini, S. 94 Marvel Com
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212 Index Tarot 20 Tateishi, K. 146
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