Cultural and Historical Aspects of Spirited Away
In this essay I will be because analysing Spirited Away (Japan, 2001), an animated fantasy film. It was directed and written by Hayao Miyazaki, a co-maker of Studio Ghibli. Spirited away, after it was released, collected over 270 million dollars worldwide and turned out to be the most successful film in the history of Japan. The premiere of the film happened to be in a Pixar Studio, not without the influence of John Lasseter – a director from the Pixar Studio and a big fan of Miyazaki. He also convinced the creator of the film to sell the rights on it to Disney. This essay will be analysing Mise-en-scene of this film. The reason to choose Spirited away is that it comes from a different, East Asian culture and the unusual animation style, which Miyazaki is known for. This essay will contain an analysis of this film from cultural and historical point of it.
Spirited away tells a story of a ten-year-old girl called Chihiro who drives together with her parents in a car, searching for their new house, that they should move into. The family takes the wrong path and find themselves in front of an abandoned amusement park. At that time, they still don’t know that it’s filled with spirits. In the frame, which shows the beginning of an abandoned road, you can see the torii - a wooden gate of a special shape - indicating the entrance to the Shinto shrine. In the original Japanese version, you can hear that the character-spirits are called not Yurei - ghosts, but kami. Kami are Shinto deities who, according to the Japanese worldview, inhabit the entire surrounding world: there are Kami mountains, Kami rivers, Kami trash.
The family walks through a long dark corridor, which Chihiro did not want to go into, and find an abandoned town, that has no people in it, but a whole bunch of restaurants, filled with food. Chihiro’s parents do not see anything wrong with lack of people there and begin to eat the food without paying or getting the permission. The girl refuses to join them and goes for a walk. The nest time she sees them again – they are not people anymore, but pigs and the town is filled with ghosts and spirits.
A helpless girl, found herself all alone fortunately, she meets the boy Haku, who becomes her guide tin the spirit world. He explains to Chihiro that she and her parents fell into the possession of the evil sorceress Yubaba. To survive, the girl has only one thing she can do - to ask the witch for work.
The girl signs a contract, but the old woman changes her name Chihiro to Sen which makes her forget her original name. Later on, Haku comes to help - he reminds Sen of her name, and explains that if she forgets it completely, she will lose her memories and will not be able to find her way back. This episode has a fundamental meaning: it testifies to the importance of memory - personal and historical, without which people lose the purpose of life (this happened with Haku, who does not remember his original name).
Unaccustomed to physical labour, Sen is taken for the task entrusted to her - to work in the baths, that gods and spirits go to. Yubaba instructs her to wash an enormous stinking monster, who is wrongly mistaken for the trash spirit. However, it turned out that under the thick layers of mud and waste the River Owner was hiding. That god, in gratitude for Chihiro’s work, handed her a magic pie. Miyazaki, in one of his interviews, shared that this scene was inspired by his memories of when he was cleaning a river from all the garbage that it had, even the bicycle.
Yet not aware of all the aspects of this world, Sen makes a mistake by letting the Faceless into the baths. He causes a stir among the servants, paying with gold for all these services, and so the workers are ready to do anything for it. Chihiro is the only one that rejects the offerings. Faceless, in fact, is a mirror of the people around him: next to greedy servants he becomes angry and aggressive, while next to a girl he is a sweet and calm creature. The meaning of this might tell not only of the destructive role of money, but also of the responsibility of people with wealth.
Parallel to that plot, the important part of Spirited Away unfolds. A wounded dragon flies into Sen’s balcony, which turns out to be her friend Haku, fulfilling Yubaba’s instructions. Chihiro also saw that Haku was chased by a flock of small paper figures. It is easy to assume that the prototype of these birds is the chipolata, which means “doll” in Japanese, small sheets of paper in the form of human figures, which are used in the Shinto rite of the Great Cleansing. According to Japanese culture, a participant can buy a blank in the sanctuary, write his name on it, blow it and put other people in a pile of figures. During the ritual, the priest will throw all the pieces of chitogat into the river, and they will take away bad luck and illness. Miyazaki used this image of flying paper figures in his film to show them hunt down a dragon that made a bad deed.
In an attempt to save her friend, Chihiro goes to Yababa, but unexpectedly meets her nice twin sister, Zeniba. Unfortunately, she refuses to help the dragon, as he stole some important seal from her. It seems that Haku cannot be saved, but at the last moment Chihiro recalls the magic pie that the Master of the River gave her. The magic tool helps to remove the curse, but the item stolen by him still must be returned to Zeniba.
Sen decides to take the train, taking Faceless with her. On the way back, the girl meets the recovered Haku, whom she helps to remember his real name. He was the spirit of the Kohakugawa River and once saved the very small Chihiro that fell in his water.
When Sen returned to Yababa, she was put to a test - she had to find out her parents among the pigs. She gave the correct answer, the contract disappears, and Chihiro, accompanied by Haku, goes to the same building that she entered the spirit world before. There she sees her parents, back in their human bodies. They do not remember anything about what happened, but they are surprised that the car that they left a few hours ago is covered with leaves. Most likely, Chihiro also forgot about her journey and only vaguely the girl held in mind the image of Haku, who promised to return to the real world and be sure to find her there.
A distinctive feature of Miyazaki’s film is the lack of a clear separation between “bad” and “good” characters, as is often the case in western films. Each character combines both good and bad personality features, and characters can change significantly when they interact with each other. Even Haku isn’t perfect, since he has to steal and perform other vile tasks of his mistress Yubaba. Chihiro's character at first might seems nasty and spoiled, but as the story goes, more fully revealed her kindness, responsiveness, honesty and courage.
Spirited Away draws the viewer's attention to many problems of modern society, such as environmental pollution, the negative impact of Western culture on Japan and human vices, such as greed and avarice. The influence of the West can be seen in many details, such as the clothes and the car that Chihiro's parents own, but the main focus is precisely on Yubaba. Audience might notice that the only character that looks the most European in this film is the witch Yubaba. She has a Caucasian appearance, although very caricatured, she wears a European dress, and her apartments are furnished in a similar way. This contrasts sharply with the minimalist rooms in the traditional Japanese style, in which her subordinates huddle. Yubaba can be claimed an exploiter, because of the huge number of girls and toads work for her, whose lives is very simple in comparison with the wealth of her chambers.
