In not relying on technology, he still covers the recognizable themes of human interaction with their environment, the roles of nature and technology in that interplay between the two-distinctly through some vivid and bleak images of a war made sinister in that we never quite learn the cause or history behind it in the story.

Miyazaki treads familiar themes in this film nonetheless, and the more traditional futurism of the steampunk genre is replaced by a fantastical magical element that imbues characters and objects with power. Any sort of moving machine in the film is almost exclusively run on some sort of burned substance, producing smoke or steam. Nationalism was a strong cultural trend in these years before the early 20 th century world conflicts, and inevitably helped cause them. Generic flags are waving proudly troops are marching off to their honored doom. An unexplained war is taking place during the story, and there are scenes imbued with nationalistic representations.

The humanoid characters are represented as white, and their fashion speaks to this time period as well. The world created in the film draws many visual cues from late Industrial Age Europe, the half century or so that lead to the First World War. Hayao Miyazaki’s 2004 film Howl’s Moving Castle* serves as an excellent example of imagery that could quintessentially be called steampunk expressing itself in an effectively visual medium (the anime film) while drawing some interesting correlations with the historical record. While we will revisit the idea of looking at consumer goods refashioned in a steampunk image, for now we move on to a meatier subject: how steampunk can be used in our visual media (in this instance film) to produce complex and interesting results. On Octopoe, we have explored some consumerist sides of the steampunk genre so far, via wedding cakes and then laptops.

Howls moving castle gifs