Hayao Miyazaki & His Manga Classic Shuna’s Journey: Alex Dudok de Wit, Helen McCarthy & Deb Aoki

Alex Dudok de Wit is the associate editor at Cartoon Brew and an animation correspondent for Sight & Sound. His writing has also appeared in Vulture, Little White Lies, The Telegraph, The i, The Independent, Time Out, Index on Censorship, and elsewhere, including specialist animation publications like Skwigly and ASIFA Magazine. He also translates from Japanese as part of the Art Translators Collective. He is the translator of Shuna’s Journey (First Second), a new manga classic created by Hayao Miyazaki, the internationally award-winning animator creator of 11 features. Shuna’s Journey follows a prince of a poor land on a quest for a golden grain that will save his people. Shuna watches the harvesting of what little grain grows in his kingdom in despair. When a traveler shows him seeds from a mysterious western land, he sets out to find the source of the life-saving golden grain. He meets a girl named Thea while on his journey and frees her from her captors and she escapes to the north. Shuna continues toward the west and reaches the Land of the God-Folk. But will he ever see Thea again? And will he make it back home with the grain?

Deb Aoki is the creator of Mangasplaining and the comic strip Bento Box, which appears in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. She works as a freelance writer, artist, illustrator, and consultant, providing content to Sony, eBay, Google for Education, PayPal, and many others. As a writer, Aoki crafts articles and reviews about manga and independent comics for Publishers Weekly, Anime News Network, Graphic Novels Reporter, Honolulu Advertiser, and Honolulu Weekly. She will be at Miami Book Fair 2022 to moderate a conversation between Helen McCarthy, Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation (Stone Bridge Press), and Alex Dudok de Wit, translator of Miyazaki’s manga classic, Shuna’s Journey (First Second).

Helen McCarthy has been researching and writing about anime, manga and Japanese popular culture since 1981. In 2010 she won a Harvey Award – the Oscars of the comics world – for her 10th book, The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga. She is also the author of Anime! A Beginner’s Guide to Japanese Animation, The Anime Movie Guide, and The Erotic Anime Movie Guide, written Jonathan Clements. In Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation (Stone Bridge Press), McCarthy mixes firsthand interviews and personal insights with critical evaluations of art, plot, production qualities, and literary themes in examining Miyazaki’s work. Illustrations throughout, in color and black and white, show the detail and vigor of his art. Miyazaki is not just an animation master – he is a meticulous craftsman who sees his work as a medium for shaping the humanistic and environmental concerns of our times.