WEEK 5-ASHLEIGH

WHAT IS THE SHOJO AND HOW DOES IT FUNCTION IN ANIME?

‘Shoujo’ - meaning ‘little female’ - acts as a sub-genre in anime. Where anime functions as a darker, male-foucsed-topics genre, for example Momotaro’s Divine Sea, shoujo acts as the contrast. The primary target audience is girls aged 12-13 (Cavallaro, 2006) and a shoujo character is a young female character of similar age as the audience. The characters often have similar ‘dream-like’, magic-infused qualities as the storyline. Characters or creatures and storylines are developed to reflect the genres’ target audience and what they are interested in. The focus of the genre is less to do with the plot and more to do with the internal conflict, for example in Miyazaki’s ‘Princess Mononoke’ the character Askitaka struggles between his love for Princess Mononoke versus his loyalty to his village.

Another example in this film is the forest spirits that are designed in a ‘cute’ fashion to reflect shoujo audiences obsession with cute things (Cavallaro, 2006).

In a battle between Shoujo vs. traditional anime I would defiently go for the former. In western society, where female audiences tend to not watch a lot of anime, shoujo would be a good starting point and a good alternative to the Hollywood romcom that we so dearly love. Shoujo tends to deal with the issues that are related to being in the awkward phase between adult and childhood. More specifically, it involves those confusing feelings and conflicting issues of being still innocent but aware of your surroundings. For myself, shoujo tends to attempt to explain to the audience this process and what is going on around them. Davis’ study (as cited in Mazzarella, 2005) describes Shoujo narrative as the internal confliction of “Who am I? What kind of person do I want to be? What would I be willing to do for love?”. For this reason, shoujo functions as a way to explain the world so that we may better our understanding of our surroundings.