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Karatsu, Rie. "Female Voice and Occidentalism in Mika Ninagawa’s Helter Skelter (2012): Adapting Kyoko Okazaki to the Screen." Journal of Popular Culture 49. (2016): 967–83. Added by: joachim (1/9/20, 10:50 AM) Last edited by: joachim (1/9/20, 11:08 AM) |
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| Resource type: Journal Article Language: en: English Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1111/jpcu.12451 BibTeX citation key: Karatsu2016 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details  |
Categories: General Keywords: "Helter Skelter", Adaptation, Film adaptation, Gender, Interculturalism, Japan, Manga, Okazaki. Kyoko Creators: Karatsu Collection: Journal of Popular Culture |
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“Women are increasingly making their presence felt in the Japanese filmmaking industry, which has long been dominated by men. Epitomizing this trend is Mika Ninagawa through her work Helter Skelter (2012). Like Ninagawa’s debut 2006 film adaptation of Moyoco Anno’s manga series Sakuran, Helter Skelter is a live-action adaptation of Kyoko Okazaki’s 1996 manga. The manga follows Liliko, a cover girl who rose to stardom after her appearance was perfected through multiple cosmetic surgeries. Her downfall comes when she fails to sustain her beauty because of the surgeries’ side effects. Okazaki’s works have enormously influenced the new generation of women’s manga that has emerged in Japan since the 1980s (Iizawa). Beginning her career in the early 1980s, Okazaki discarded the visual style of shojo manga characterized by the use of icons such as sparkling eyes, flowers, and angels, and instead she satirically depicted death, violence, and sexuality in the lives of Japanese girls and women. Okazaki transgressed the aspects of the Japanese traditional shojo manga models and practices that represent girls and women as passive and subservient. Helter Skelter, the most critically acclaimed of all her works, was the first of her manga to be adapted into film. This paper examines Ninagawa’s film adaptation of Helter Skelter in comparison with Okazaki’s original manga with the same title. Ninagawa updates the source to be relevant to contemporary audiences and she keeps the core meanings of the story and theme of its source by inscribing a feminist authority. Ninagawa’s adaptation of Helter Skelter created an alternative vision to Okazaki’s manga world and that this vision provides a cinematic approach of promoting self-awareness and empowerment through critical reflection. This paper aims to examine the aspects of the relationship between filmmakers/manga artists and their subjects, and the ways in which questions of gender identities are negotiated through different forms. It is organized into two main sections. The first section traces the growth of shojo manga practices featuring the female private inner space and Occidentalism, that is, the exoticization of Western culture. The historical and artistic evolution of Okazaki’s manga that led to Helter Skelter is shown, and the manner of how Okazaki gives her own subversive take on the shojo manga practices is discussed. The second section highlights how Ninagawa updated Okazaki’s Helter Skelter by enhancing female voice as the positive, empowering aspects of shojo manga practices that may have diminished in the original manga through radical subversion.” Added by: joachim |