For this assignment, we were placed in groups and tasked with choosing an article from an online Animation Journal to analyse and explain in the form of a presentation. This module, I was grouped with Lewis, Rae, Rachel and Jack – however, Jack was absent for this assignment for personal reasons.

To begin, we discussed topics that intrigued us about animation and one we landed on was how villains – particularly in Disney – have been watered down through the years. However, initially we were confused and thought we could choose an article from any source, not just the Animation Journal. Once this small mishap was cleared up, however, we quickly got to work looking into the articles in the journal and noting down the ones that interested us. We narrowed it down to three – ‘Hayao Miyazaki’s Mythic Poetics’, ‘Animation, Branding and Authorship in the Construction of the ‘Anti-Disney’ Ethos’, and ‘The Politics of Powerpuff: Putting the ‘Girl’ into ‘Girl Power’ – but we ultimately decided to go with the Hayao Miyazaki article as it was the one that related to all of our interests the most.

As we sat down to read through the article, the first thing our group noticed was the complex language used throughout the entirety of the article. It was expected that the article would use professional terms, but the wording in this one particularly could be confusing and unnecessary at points. For example, the quote ‘the heroic journey may be perceived during the reading activity as an inward projection’. Most of the session reading was spent by Lewis attempting to translate the article into basic terms for the rest of us to understand. We found that reading through the article as a group was going to take too much time, so we chose to divide and conquer, splitting off and taking the article in sections. Lewis took the Introduction and the Conclusion, Rae took the section on Spirited Away, Rachel took Howl’s Moving Castle, and I took Ponyo. Rae also helped us define what we should take note of and discuss in each of our slides.

The section I chose was titled ‘Ponyo: Narrative dialectics of mundanity and transcendence’ and my approach to it was to simply read it through and take note of the author’s main points and the evidence used to support it. However, this proved to be difficult when I found out that the main body of the section was simply straight summary of the movie being analysed followed by a very loose point with very little backup. As seen below, the text highlighted in red is just summary of the movie, while the text in green is the authors point.

When discussing this issue with the rest of my group, we found out that the rest of the sections were like this.

However, combing through the mountains of summary, I found that the author’s point was actually quite interesting. They proposed that Miyazaki used dichotomy throughout the film to immerse the audience into the story, and highlighted three major contrasts depicted – land and sea, human and mermaid, male and female – which I explained and presented on in my slide of the presentation, seen below.

Finally, when we had taken all our respective notes, it was time to put the presentation together. Rachel and Rae both created designs and layouts in Canva, but ultimately we decided to go with Rachel’s design as it incorporated stills from each move discussed. When compiling our notes into slides, we decided that it was best to keep it compact – one slide per movie so that we could keep within the allocated ten minutes to present.

Ultimately, I really enjoyed working with this group. Everyone was entirely on the same page and communication flowed easily. And although we chose to look at our article through a much more critical lens, I do believe it deconstructs Miyazaki’s techniques to engage an audience effectively, however my main wish would be a bit more explanation on the points made and presented.