Paper short abstract:

A close analysis of the 2012 animated film and box office success "Wolf Children" (dir., Hosoda Mamoru) reveals the film's complex strategy of queering its main protagonists, portraying dynamics of stigmatization and at the same time re-instituting normativity through binary notions of gender.

Paper long abstract:

Animation is a genre of popular culture that is particularly suited to visualize and enact tropes of transgressing, queering and overcoming boundaries such as those between reality and dreams or fantasy, between human and animal worlds, between genders and sexualities. In this paper, we discuss the 2012 animated film and box office success Wolf Children, directed by Hosoda Mamoru, one of the most prominent animators in contemporary Japan. Wolf Children explores the transgressions of human/animal boundaries as it portrays the growth and socialization process of two hybrid wolf-human children, Yuki and Ame, and presents their journeys in finding their own identities.

Our analysis of the film focuses on the question of how the dilemmas of the secret hybridity of the wolf children and their anxieties about being 'outed' in society speak to and correspond with the anxieties that so-called 'invisible minorities' experience in contemporary Japan. Recurring dynamics of stigmatization and social discrimination form the subtext in Hosoda's film in which the mother of the wolf children is constantly engaged in hiding the 'difference' of her children from mainstream, 'normal' society. We employ queer theory (Butler, Kristeva) and the concept of stigma (Goffman) to elucidate how the wolf children's deviation from normativity and their attempts to 'pass' as normal in a series of social spaces can be read as references for passing modes of other non-normative identities, i.e., of social, ethnic, and sexual minority groups in Japan. In the film, however, the children's/minorities' potential for disturbing fixed and normative notions of identity, system and order is at the same time contained through the gendered frame of the 'mother'. Motherhood is presented in the form of the 'good wife, wise mother' as gendered nationalism and as the major mode for reifying normativity.

We explore whether this film's complex strategy of queering, passing and then reifying binary divisions and re-instituting normativity can also be traced in Hosoda's other successful films, such as Summer Wars (2009) or The Boy and the Beast (2015). We thereby discuss and draw attention to the contradictory social and cultural implications of Hosoda's oeuvre.