The portrayal of childhood and adolescence in Miyazaki’s films

Abstract

The authors explore how childhood and adolescence are portrayed in the films of master director Hayao Miyazaki, drawing on four of his works and examining them through the lens of psychoanalytic theory. The authors argue that the director’s films depict fundamental aspects of these stages of human life: sensory, imaginative, and preverbal experiences for childhood, and identity formation, loss, and separation for adolescence. Through an analysis of My Neighbor Totoro and Ponyo, the authors highlight how the infans expresses itself within a potential space where reality and imagination intertwine and where anxiety can be effectively managed to facilitate an encounter with reality. In the films Spirited Away and The Boy and the Heron, the focus is instead on highlighting the arduous process of subjectivation that adoles-cence entails, involving the confrontation with parental heritage and the construction of one’s own identity. The authors conclude by arguing that Miyazaki’s cinema is a space of symbolization that allows for the representation of the infans and the ado-lescent, understood not only as life stages but also as psychic spaces that continue to exist into adulthood.