‘Wolves or People?’: Lupine loss and the liquidation of the nuclear family in Mamoru Hosoda’s Wolf Children (2012)

Submitter: Heejoung Shin

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/108990 Copy

Description

Title

‘Wolves or People?’: Lupine loss and the liquidation of the nuclear family in Mamoru Hosoda’s Wolf Children (2012)

Contributor(s)

Boyd, David John

Issue Date

2020

Keyword(s)

• 3/11 manga
• becoming-wolf
• Mamoru Hosoda
• Wolf Children
• making kin
• anime

Abstract

This essay examines an alternative eco-familial reading of Mamoru Hosoda’s manga film, Wolf Children (2012) through an analysis of Japanese extinction anxieties further exacerbated by 3/11. By reading the film through a minor history of the extinction of the Honshu wolf as a metaphor for 3/11, I argue that an examination of the degradation of Japanese preindustrial “stem family” and the fabulative expression of species cooperation and hybridity can more effectively be framed by the popular Japanese imaginary as a lupine apocalypse. In a reading of Deleuze and Guattari on becoming-animal, the omnipresence of lupine loss in the institutions of the home, work, and schools of contemporary Japan, interrogated in many manga, anime, and video game series like Wolf Children, further reveals the ambivalence of post-3/11 artists as they approach family and the State in seeking out more nonhuman depictions of Japan. In this reading of becoming-wolf, Hosoda’s resituates the family/fairy-tale film as a complex critique of the millennial revival of a nuclear Japan in the age of economic and environmental precarity and collapse. I hope to explore the nuances and contradictions of Hosoda’s recapitulation of family through a celebration of Deleuzo-Guattarian pack affects and an introduction of the possibilities of “making kin,” as Donna Haraway explains, at the ends of the Anthropocene.

Series/Report Name or Number

Journal of Anime and Manga Studies, vol. 1

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/108990

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21900/j.jams.v1.236

Copyright and License Information

• Copyright 2020 David John Boyd
• This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

Owning Collections