The Folkloresque Circle

Toward a Theory of Fuzzy Allusion

MICHAEL DYLAN FOSTER

Undoubtedly something was lost in the translation; watching the parade of wild things flutter, stomp and crawl though the bathhouse will make you wonder what each represents in Japanese mythology. (At one point it's as if every item in the Japanese Sanrio line of toys has come to life.) The cultural weight that the picture bears partly explains why this was the biggest hit ever in Japan, outpacing "Titanic."

— Elvis Mitchell, New York Times

In 2001, Studio Ghibli released a film called Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi, written and directed by master animator Miyazaki Hayao. It was a blockbuster hit, grossing more than any previous film in Japanese history. In 2002 a translated version was released by Disney with the title Spirited Away and it promptly won the Golden Bear at the 2002 Berlin International Film Festival and the Oscar for Best Animated Feature at the seventy-fifth Academy Awards in 2003. The critical and popular success of Spirited Away marks not only a watershed moment in the international recognition of the anime genre but also raises provocative questions about the relationship between folklore and popular culture. As the above quotation from the New York Times review of the film makes explicit, on this side of the Pacific Spirited Away was received as a glorious expression of an enigmatic folkloric tradition ("Japanese mythology") full of "cultural weight." At the same time, the parenthetical aside about Sanrio also suggests that Japanese "mythology" may be all but indistinguishable from (globalized) commercial culture.

It is not my intention here to completely unpack the dynamics of this film; rather, I want to use it as a springboard for contemplating the relationship between folklore and popular culture. In particular, I explore the folkloresque as a form of integration that provides insight into any number of popular cultural (and literary) texts. As suggested in the introduction of this volume, the folkloresque can be thought of as the popular, vernacular, folk conception of folklore. A folkloresque text draws on folklore in an often (but not always) conscious manner, using an association with folklore to sell itself, both literally and figuratively, within a commercial venue. Many popular culture products fit into this broad matrix, deploying folklore in a wide variety of ways. In this essay I examine one of these ways, specifically, how allusion to folkloric motifs, characters, and tale types can give a work the semblance of being based on "real" folklore even when there is no direct link with specific referents in a given tradition. Such works operate through a sort of elusive allusion, as it were, or what I call "fuzzy allusion."

This is the case with Spirited Away, and one reason for its critical and popular success both domestically and internationally. In order to flesh out these dynamics, I also briefly introduce the way folklore is used in a different Studio Ghibli film, Heisei tanuki gassen pompoko (1994), known in English as Pom Poko, which directly references beliefs, images, and narratives readily recognizable to most Japanese audiences. Comparing Pom Poko with Spirited Away provides insight into differences between direct reference to folklore in a creative narrative and the folkloresque operation of fuzzy allusion.

It is hard to pin down in words the quality of seeming to be based on folklore that characterizes the folkloresque within popular culture; in the pages that follow I explore a number of metaphors for thinking through this problem. Finally, however, I argue that the very processes involved in the generation of both folklore and the folkloresque are deeply interrelated. While the two can be seen as distinct, they ultimately work in a Möbius strip — like fashion, so that today's folkloresque may become tomorrow's folklore, which in turn supplies the folkloresque of the day after tomorrow. However commercial a folkloresque product may be, it is created through allusion and integration in a process remarkably similar to that by which folklore itself emerges.

ANIMATING FOLKLORE

Animated film (anime in Japanese) is a particularly rich vehicle for representing folklore, in part because it allows for the portrayal of physical transformation in a more visually dynamic way than does live-action film or, for that matter, oral or written narrative (see Ortabasi 2013, 257 — 60). In 1988, Studio Ghibli, the most internationally successful anime company, released a film called Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro) that tapped into a folkloric nostalgia that would go on to inform many of director Miyazaki Hayao's later films — and which sets the stage for the discussion of the folkloresque that follows.

My Neighbor Totoro concerns a family that moves to the countryside, where the youngest daughter interacts with the natural world, most notably portrayed in the guise of Totoro, a gigantic and charmingly plump creature with perky ears. In many ways, Totoro has the hallmarks of a "traditional" Japanese spirit; it is intimated in the film that the creature is linked to the pristine natural environment and can be seen only by children, who are themselves innocent and pure. There is, as the New Yorker notes, "a gentle hint of Shintoism in all this" (Talbot 2005, 68). Indeed, with his portrayal of Totoro and other spirits, Miyazaki seems to reference Japanese folklore and religion, drawing on traditional animistic beliefs about the natural environment. But just as the nostalgic world created in My Neighbor Totoro only distantly references its setting in mid- twentieth-century Japan, so too the...