“The world is cursed. But still, you find reasons to keep living”: Perversity and Faith in Hayao Miyazaki’s World. An Ecocritical Reading of Threshold

Abstract

This article examines Hayao Miyazaki’s work as both a critique of human ambi­tion and a speculative device for imagining future modes of coexistence. Drawing on ecocritical and comparatist perspectives, and informed by Donna Haraway’s concepts of the Chthulucene, sympoiesis, and holobionts, the analysis focuses primarily on Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), Princess Mononoke (1997), Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), and The Boy and the Heron (2023). The author ar­gues that the fantastic in Miyazaki operates as an aesthetic-emotional strategy that destabilises anthropocentric and Cartesian epistemologies, foregrounding hybrid forms of agency and interdependence. The deconstruction of symbolic formulas that generates ambivalence without reinforcing binary oppositions, particularly those involving technological development and natural preservation, is also highlighted. Special attention is given to female characters – San, Sophie, and Nausicaä – whose narrative trajectories reconfigure the heroine’s journey as a site of sociopolitical agency beyond essentialist dualism. Natural entities such as forests, wolves, boars, and the paradoxical figure of Calcifer further illustrate Miyazaki’s sympoietic imagination. Finally, by addressing the treatment of mul­tiple temporalities and spatialities, our article reads Miyazaki’s films through Georges Didi-Huberman’s notion of the dialectical image, underscoring how irony and speculative fabulation shape a cinematic ethics of interdependence. Ultimately, the study demonstrates that Miyazaki’s cinema offers a crucial epis­temological shift, moving from passive alarmism to an active, non-anthropocentric ethics of survival.