Todorov

I found Todorov's The Fantastic to greatly connect to the themes discussed in this course. While structuralism is a subject I am not familiar with, after reading The Fantastic, I easily see how it is necessarily applicable to deconstructing and analyzing any film or text. I initially found a connection to Susan Napier's essay on Miyazaki's use of shojo, particularly the section on My Neighbor Totoro, conveniently the next movie being shown. The definition given differentiating between the fantastic, the uncanny and the marvelous can directly be applied to most Miyazaki films, however literary devices explained by Todorov seem to connect to Susan Napiers explanation of Mei's experiences in My Neighbor Totoro. While Mei believes her encounters with the Totoro, the viewers experience is that of hesitation, mirroring that of a readers experience in the literary sense when discerning the truth in a fantastic subject matter.