Amerah’s Garden: An Ecocentric Approach to Animated Storytelling Using Six Elements of Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro as a Model

Abstract

Science and environmental journalist Andrew Revkin frames the climate crisis as a grand challenge. International and federal reports on climate change released in 2018 from the US Global Change Research Program, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and The Lancet warn that time is running out for our Earth’s ecosystem if we fail to cap the rise of global temperatures to within 1.5°C of pre-industrial levels. If we fail to meet this grand challenge, our children and grandchildren will experience the impact of the climate and ecological crisis in ways that we can’t possibly imagine. Children’s stories are one of the building blocks of our adult belief system. A well-crafted animated ecocentric fairy tale can reframe a child’s relationship with nature from anthropocentric to ecocentric. The Japanese master animator Hayao Miyazaki’s 1988 feature-length animation My Neighbor Totoro is internationally recognized for its powerful ecological message. I use My Neighbor Totoro as a model for an ecocentric fairy tale and identify six elements that I believe make it such an effective ecocentric fairy tale. I identify these elements and use them to create my own ecological fairy tale, Amerah’s Garden