ANIME SERIES: AFTER NATURE

ANIME SERIES: AFTER NATURE
1984–2024

“After Nature” explores how contemporary anime reimagines the pastoral tradition through a look at seven Japanese anime from 1984 to 2024.

Once associated with rural retreat and harmony with nature, the pastoral becomes a way of thinking about life within ecological, technological, psychological, and meteorological systems.

In an era of catastrophic WUI fires and escalating, irreversible climate change, however, the enduring impulse for refuge underpinning the pastoral tradition — and the expectation of nature as a site of safety and nostalgia— now seems hazardous, individualistic, and conceptually destabilizing.

There is new urgency to examine the specific romance of the “pastoral landscape.”

From forests and spirits to infrastructure, dreams, and changing weather, these films ask what forms of care, memory, and belonging remain when nature can no longer be understood as something outside ourselves.

My Neighbor Totoro 1988
Pokémon 4Ever 2001
Nausicaä: Valley of the Wind 1984
Patlabor: The Movie 1989
Paprika 2006
Look Back 2024
Weathering with You 2019

07–08.2026 Stoner Park
Dates to be announced.

Free and open to the public.