A journey through the ‘Hosoda sphere’: digital worlds in Mamoru Hosoda’s animation

ABSTRACT

Anime director Mamoru Hosoda’s focus on digital technology, social networks, and the power of online communities is a recurring thematic and visual motif in many of his works, beginning with the forty-minute film Digimon Adventure: Our War Game! (2000), continuing with Summer Wars (2009), and recently resurfacing in Belle (2021). This article traces the aesthetic evolution of Hosoda’s virtual spaces over the past two decades, unpacking the technological, ideological, and stylistic underpinnings and implications of the shift from Digimon’s relative lack of visual sophistication to the sleek speculative architecture of Belle. It puts these digital worlds in conversation with the contemporary digital culture discourses they reflect, examining Hosoda’s sustained engagement with broader societal attitudes towards digital technologies, particularly the internet and social media. At the same time, my analysis focuses on the director’s increasing reliance on digital animation, investigating the relationship between his films’ computer-generated worlds and the animation processes enabling their creation.

KEYWORDS:

• Mamoru Hosoda
• digital animation
• internet
• digital culture

Notes

1 The term ‘Hosoda sphere’ appears in an Anime News Network online discussion forum entry authored by ‘Splitter,’ published on 22 December 2009. The post can be found here: https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/bbs/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=125685.

2 The digital landscape aesthetic referred to as ‘the Hosoda sphere’ throughout this piece can also be seen in the director’s 2006 feature The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (Toki o Kakeru Shōjo). In this film, which explores the concept of time loops, this visual motif manifests as clock parts and gears floating against a vast empty space ringed with red bands. Rather than representing digital space, in this instance the sphere merely signals instances of time travel. As neither the film itself, nor its incorporation of Hosoda’s signature imagery, are tied to questions of digital technology and the evolution of virtual spaces, I have chosen to omit this example from my study.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mihaela Mihailova

Mihaela Mihailova is an Assistant Professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. She is the editor of Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio LAIKA’s Stop-Motion Witchcraft (Bloomsbury, 2021). She has published in The Velvet Light Trap, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, [in]Transition, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Feminist Media Studies, animation: an interdisciplinary journal, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, Flow, and Kino Kultura. She has also contributed chapters to Animating Film Theory (with John MacKay), Animated Landscapes: History, Form, and Function, The Animation Studies Reader, and Drawn from Life: Issues and Themes in Animated Documentary Cinema. Dr. Mihailova is the co-editor of Animation Studies (https://journal.animationstudies.org/) and currently serves as Secretary of the Society for Animation Studies.