Anime Landscapes as a Tool for Analyzing the Human–Environment Relationship: Hayao Miyazaki Films

Abstract

Common dualistic thinking in environmental design education adopts humans and the environment as separate entities, with the environment as raw material stock. This approach affects the intellectual development of landscape architects and limits their ability to create meaningful landscapes. Therefore, it is necessary to explore and highlight new ideas about the more integrated human–environment relationship. Through the films of Hayao Miyazaki, many audiences around the world have encountered a different worldview. By contrast with Western thinking, which adopts human superiority to nature, the worldview that Miyazaki reflects in his films depicts human as an inseparable part of nature. Being inspired by different communities and their relationship to nature in Miyazaki’s films, we propose using anime as a means of analyzing the human–environment relationship. We classified landscapes based on power relations between humans and nature. We explored how communities shape their physical environment based on how they socially construct nature and the resulting landscapes. Thus, through apocalyptic landscapes, the bitter results of exploiting nature were depicted. Wilderness landscapes reflect the bias humanity has about nature as wild and hostile. Responsible landscapes were introduced asway of understanding the unbreakable bond between humans and the environment. Through these animated landscape types, the ways landscape architecture should approach nature in professional practices was discussed, and the importance of creating responsible landscapes was emphasized.