a query to the 'verse

[truepenny]

So heres_luck and I rounded out our cinematic experience by watching Spirited Away this morning, and I was wondering if anyone has any website recommendations for a stupid American who would like to get the context and symbolism she feels quite sure she is missing.

All suggestions gratefully accepted!

Comments

[sue-donym.livejournal.com]

I have no useful recommendations whatsoever. I just like having an opportunity to use my No-Face icon. :)

I love that movie.

[peacockharpy.livejournal.com]

http://bobmink.com/translation/chihiro.html

_lore sent me to that site after I watched Spirited Away, because I had the same questions. ;) It doesn't explain everything, but it helps.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[undeadjournal.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure there's a huge amount of cultural context that you need to understand Spirited Away -- what were the questions? You might just be understimating the complete weirdness of Miyazake's imagination.

On the Special Edition DVD, there's a text explanation that pretty much says that the theology is based on the belief that everything has a spirit, rivers have a spirit, for instance, and that to steal someone's name gives you power over them.

Miyazake's work nearly always addresses environmental themes as well, or at least, a nostalgia for a much less urbanised Japan. Haku is the spirit of a river that has been diverted or built over by a housing development and so he has lost his true nature along with Yubaba stealing his name.

Can I just say though, don't sweat the symbolism of Spirited Away, just go out and rent, if you possily can, any and all of his other movies. Princess Mononoke, Nausicaa and the Valley Of The Winds, and the unbelievably cute Kiki's Delivery Service. Wonderful, magical adventures, all with kick-ass heroines. Miyazake is just amazing. When people call him the Walt Disney of Japan, that's a damn insult. He's much more than that.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

This is the sort of thing where if I could explain what it is I felt I was missing, I wouldn't need to ask about it. I could go do the research on, frex, the symbolism of white dragons, or ecological metaphors, or what have you. But I can't really identify any particular thing that was baffling; it's just that the collective unconscious pool that Miyazake is fishing in has got different water than mine. It's still water, and I can drink it, but I want to know why it tastes odd.

Which is possibly THE lamest and most involved metaphor I have perpetrated to date, but it's more or less what I mean. I think.

[peacockharpy.livejournal.com]

*nods*

I felt the same way, which is why I, too, posted a "this is an awesome movie but I feel like I've missed 3/4 of the meaning" entry after watching it. Maybe it's the lit major in both of us. ;)

I second the recommendation on Princess Mononoke. And I suggest you watch it in Japanese with the English subtitles, which seems to preserve a little more of the Japanese feeling (this not meant as a slam on Mr. Gaiman's translation, although I understand that the work he did was afterward dumbed down somewhat by the American voice directors). It's a lovely and wonderful tale with an ecological theme that doesn't take the easy division of "industry bad / ecologists good."

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm glad that made sense to SOMEBODY else. And you're probably right; it probably is a lit-major thing.

I have turned into the most tremendous snob about foreign movies. I won't watch them dubbed unless there's absolutely no other choice. A partial exception will be made when I get around to Princess Mononoke, in that if I like it enough to watch it twice, I'll watch it the second time with the English script. But that's mostly because I'm a Neil Gaiman fan. Go figure.

[peacockharpy.livejournal.com]

Dubbing is evil and horrible, and if I have the choice, I'll take the foreign language with subtitles every time. I hate seeing mouths move out of sync with the sound!

The copy of Spirited Away we watched only had the English, but admittedly they had done a spectacular job of translating and recording the voices -- I didn't feel the voice/mouth movement disconnect.

[undeadjournal.livejournal.com]

I feel obliged to state for the record that I'm a lit major too. But I'm guessing I've spent more time in Japan and/or with Japanese people, so maybe it's not quite the same for me.

There's quite a good book on Miyazake which I borrowed from a friend recently, "Hayao Miyazaki : Master of Japanese Animation" by Helen McCarthy but it finishes with the exciting news that Miyazake has started on a new movie called Spirited Away, so it won't answer questions specific to that movie.

But again, why assume that all of the weirdness is about the difference between Japanese culture and "western"? Miyazaki, even if you're Japanese, seems to be something of a man out of time, a quite unique imagination.

And I can't believe I left "My Neighbour Totoro" off that list of movies to see. It's just the most amazing, charming movie.

Here's a discussion board about some of the themes at BeliefNet (http://www.beliefnet.com/boards/message_list.asp?boardID=449&discussionID=259482).

Here's a rather strange article (http://laughingplace.com/News-ID220120.asp) from someone who asked his Japanese students to explain the movie to him -- try not to laugh when he says he needed to know why the movie should "illicit" such strong responses.

Here's an interesting article (http://www.wirelessreview.com/ar/marketing_featurejapan_director_miyazaki/) which touches on the spiritual themes.

Here's a useful, thoughtful review (http://www.mit.edu/people/rei/manga-spiritedaway.html) with some useful links, including to Nausicaa.net and specifically this (http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/sen/proposal.html) translation of Miyazaki's own explanation of the themes.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

If you have spent any time in Japan, you've spent more time in Japan than I have.

And, yes, I totally agree that Miyazaki's weirdness is obviously largely sui generis ... okay, let me put it like this. Yubaba and Zeniba, especially, look to me very much like figures out of Western fairytales. (I think I'm getting a dim echo of the illustrations in one of Andrew Lang's fairy tale collections, but it's been so long since I've seen any of those that I can't tell.) Now, it would be very easy for me to go ahead and read them as such, but, because I am not familiar with Japanese folklore, I don't know whether my reading is accurate--Miyazaki is riffing off European fairy tale motifs--or completely off-the-wall: Miyazaki is (a.) riffing off Japanese folklore or (b.) riffing off Japanese perceptions of Europeans or (c.) none of the above. Now some of this obviously could be remedied by studying Miyazaki in-depth (which at the moment I don't have time to do), but some of it could also be remedied by a quick crash-course in the cultural context of Spirited Away. Or, as another example, the site peacockharpy pointed to (and I'm dubious about some of the things they claim) says that Lin (as her name appears in the subtitles)/Rin (as they spell it) is a fox-woman. Do they know this because Miyazaki says so, because there are clues in the movie that I completely missed, or because they're making shit up without any evidence to support it?

Perhaps I over-compensated for my feelings of being a stupid American by framing the question as I did. Probably the better way to put it would be: I feel that there is a lot of stuff in Spirited Away that I missed, and I suspect that some of it is due to cultural differences. Any good sites out there that talk about this stuff?

And thank you very much for the links.

[undeadjournal.livejournal.com]

I don't know whether my reading is accurate--Miyazaki is riffing off European fairy tale motifs--or completely off-the-wall:

I think it's a fair assumption. Miyazaki's movies are full of European influences, from Porco Rosso, the story of an italian fighter pilot transformed into a pig, to Kiki's Delivery Service, which takes place, he himself said, in an imaginary 50s Europe in which WWII never took place, to the Ruritanian fantasy of Cagliostro. He even, apparently, visited Welsh mining villages to research Castles in the Sky.

He says something about Yubaba's word being "Pseudo-Western" in that last link, the translated interview at Nausicaa.net, but I can't figure out exactly what he means -- maybe the translation's at fault, maybe it's missing context again.