Aug 27, 2021
(SPOILER WARNING)
Spirited Away (2001) is a japanese fantasy film directed by Hayao Miyazaki and animated by Studio Ghibli. It follows a ten-year-old girl, Chihiro, driving with her parents to visit their new home. Her father loves to take shortcuts and to experience new areas. That’s why they end up taking a shortcut. Here they enter a spirit supernatural world called Yuya, which are owned and managed by the witch, Yubaba. The place is desolated. After entering Yuya, Chihiro’s parents get hungry and decides to eat some food in one of the restaurants, but they realize that they forgot their money in the car. Even so,
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they decide to eat right away. Because of their behavior Yubaba decides to transform them into pigs. This leaves Chihiro on her own. Out of nowhere she meets a lot of different spirits in Yuya. Chihiro ends up getting friends from the supernatural world and also a job in a bathhouse. The story is about getting herself and her parents back to the human world.
Postmodernism does not distinguish between high and low art forms. Spirited Away is in many ways a film that appeals to both the child and the grown up and to both reflection and entertainment. According to Azuma Hiroki, who has studied Miyazaki’s works in a japanese postmodernistic perspective, Miyazaki has bridged the gap between high and low cultures. Studio Ghibli produces films, toys and merchandise. And they own a television channel and an art museum (In Mitaka, Japan). Art and entertainments are mixed. The fact that a lot of music from animated films like Spirited Away or e.g. The Lion King is played in concerts by philharmonic orchestras is confirming the postmodernistic theory of rejecting rigid distinctions between genres.
As opposed to Disney movies the characters in Spirited Away are neither good nor evil, but have both sides. Chihiro is the only purely good character in the film. The absence of absolute evil and absolute good is a postmodernistic trait. Also, the absence of clear boundaries between present time and the historical time in Spirited Away is a significance for many postmodernistic films.
In one of the scenes Yubaba is giving Chihiro a new name, Sen (Yubaba can be seen as a symbol of capitalism, she also identifies the western culture as the only one not in japanese clothing or uniform). Due to the new name (new identity) given to Chihiro, she to some extent looses her memory. But through her work and friendship with the spirits she regains her identity and manages to escape the bewitchment. This can be seen as a postmodernistic trait according to Anthony Giddens:
“A person's identity is not to be found in behaviour, nor—important though this is—in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going. The individual's biography, if she is to maintain regular interaction with others in the day-to-day world, cannot be wholly fictive. It must continually integrate events which occur in the external world, and sort them into the ongoing 'story' about the self.“ - Anthony Giddens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Giddens#Self-identity)
All the way through the story, Chihiro is true to her core values. This allows her to escape the supernatural world.
Important link:
https://serendipitousanachronisms.wordpress.com/2015/07/24/spirited-away-2001-and-postmodern-japan/
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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