film and architecture section: Studio Ghibli imaginary architecture: Spirited Away by Hayao Miyazaki, architecture and film appreciation

category: Architecture and Film, Imaginary architectures of studio Ghibli

film index: 63
relationship with architecture:
imaginary as well as reproduction of existing architectures to accomodate the dreamlike reality of the animated realm. spirituality of the spaces

film: Spirited away
director: Hayao Miyazaki
writers: Hayao Miyazaki
production: Japan, Studioin Ghibli
release: July 27, 2001
playtime: 125 min
visual: colour
Language: Japanese, English
Subtitles:
Genre: animation

reference: raiden-rs.blogspot.com, www.foriegnmoviesddl.com, Taringa.com,

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Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi/ Sen and Chihiro's Spiriting Away) is a 2001 Japanese animated film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki and produced by Studio Ghibli. The film views a sullen ten-year-old girl in the middle of her family's move to a new town (presumably the countryside) and her adventures in a world of spirits and monsters.

The major themes of Spirited Away center on the protagonist Chihiro and her liminal journey through the realm of the bathhouse of the gods. A spoiled child forced into the fantastic world, Chihiro becomes completely separated from everything she has known and must find her way back to reality. Chihiro’s experience in the alternate world, frequently compared to Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, represents her passage from childhood to adulthood. The archetypal entrance into another world clearly demarcates Chihiro’s status as one in-between. In her transition between child and adult, Chihiro stands outside these societal boundaries, a situation mirrored by the supernatural setting outside reality. The use of the word kamikakushi (literally "hidden by gods") within the Japanese title, and its associated folklore, reinforce this liminal passage: "Kamikakushi is a verdict of ‘social death’ in this world, and coming back to this world from Kamikakushi meant ‘social resurrection.’"Upon gaining employment at the bathhouse, Yubaba’s seizure of Chihiro’s true name, a common theme in folklore, symbolically kills the child Chihiro. Having lost her childhood identity, Chihiro cannot return to reality by the way she came; she can only move forward into adulthood. The following trials and obstacles Chihiro must overcome become the challenges and lessons common in rites-of-passage and the monomyth format. In her attempt to regain her self, her "continuity with her past," Chihiro must forge a new identity.

Beneath the surface coming-of-age trope, Spirited Away contains critical commentary on modern Japanese society concerning generational conflicts, the struggle with dissolving traditional culture and customs within a global society, and environmental pollution. Chihiro, as a representation of the liminal shōjo, "may be seen as a metaphor for the Japanese society which, over the last decade, seems to be increasingly in limbo, drifting uneasily away from the values and ideological framework of the immediate postwar era." Just as Chihiro seeks her past identity, Japan, in its anxiety over the economic downturn occurring during the release of Spirited Away in 2001, sought to reconnect to past values.In interview, Miyazaki has commented on this nostalgic element for an old Japan.Initially, Chihiro travels past the abandoned fairground, a symbol for Japan’s burst "bubble economy," and her parents' credit-card-fuelled gluttony and transformation into pigs, to reach the fantasy world replete with Japanese culture and fable in the amalgam of the bathhouse.

However, the "bathhouse of the spirits has its own ambivalence, and its own darkness…. Miyazaki is not so simple-minded as to locate a perfect vision in the past or the spiritual." Many of the employees are rude and discriminating to Chihiro, and the corruption of avarice has incorporated itself into the "bricolage" of the bathhouse as a place of "excess and greed" as well, as depicted in the initial appearance of the No-Face. In stark contrast to the "archetypal approaches to cultural recovery such as recognition, proper identification, spiritual cleansing, and sacrifice," embodied in Chihiro’s journey and transformation, the constant background presence of the ambiguity of the bathhouse reminds the audience that reality is not so simple: "the bathhouse’s simultaneous incorporation of the carnivalesque and the chaotic suggests that the threats to the collectivity are not simply outside ones." The environmental asides concerning the trash deforming the River God and Haku’s plight over the loss of his river to apartment complexes further indicate that the sources of pollution within the bathhouse, a place of ritual purity, come from within the Japanese society.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0245429/
Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirited_away

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Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Studio Ghibli imaginary architecture: Spirited Away by Hayao Miyazaki, architecture and film appreciation

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