Fantasising the nation: constructions and materialisations of national identity in American and Japanese animated fairy tale worlds

This thesis examines the use of animated film adaptations of fairy tales as a vehicle for constructing and distributing national identity, focussing on the construction of space and the role of the girl. Due to their metamorphic and liminal properties, fairy tales and their girl characters have commonly been moulded to serve nationalistic functions, but this has been complicated by rapid globalisation around the turn of the millennium. Borrowing Koichi Iwabuchi’s concept of cultural odour and Andrew Dorman’s cultural performance-concealment model, I discuss how this construction process strategically utilises “notes” of cultural odour to build a cultural fragrance that selectively highlights and conceals elements of their associated nations.   

I focus on films by Japanese animation studio Ghibli whose works, many of which are adaptations of magical tales and long-established myths, have been met with critical and commercial success in and outside of Japan. However, the influence that the Walt Disney Company has had in popularising the association between animated film and fairy tales and their princess archetype cannot be overlooked, and so I use Disney as a base of comparison. First, I examine both studios’ adaptations of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, comparing how the Danish fairy tale is reappropriated to carry American and Japanese ideological values in The Little Mermaid (1989) and Ponyo (2006) respectively. Then, I analyse how Ghibli’s The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013) revives a twelfth-century local tale by imbuing it with a fragmentedly nostalgic cultural fragrance. Lastly, by looking at distribution and the materialisation and marketing of the studios’ fantasy spaces, I explore how these cultural notes are diffused globally. Ultimately, I argue that both studios use fantasy space and girls to communicate traditional ideological values of their respective nations, but that they demonstrate contrasting strategies of performing nationality and transnationality to navigate the instabilities of globalisation.