Time marches on. Things change. I’ve been out of sync with my blog and writing, partially as a result of radical changes to the structure of Rhenium Tales and Raydan’s story (see tags opposite) but also because of Christmas, New Year, my depression about Brexit and This and That. But my planning is up to date (again, for now….) and I can see the wood as well as the trees.
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| Chihiro (Sen) and Haku.... |
The subheading above translates roughly as Sen and Chihiro's Spiriting Away…. Sen is the name forcibly given to the heroine, Chihiro, in the Studio Ghibli film that English-speaking audiences know as Spirited Away. In the story Chihiro needs to remember and reclaim her own name before she forgets it and is trapped forever. We all need to remember and reclaim who we are. I recently re-watched Spirited Away with family and friends (in the "Harry Potter Film Club") and was reminded why it was a deserved winner of the 2003 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. The director Hayao Miyazak has created a fantastically imaginative world with inventive landscapes and extraordinary attention to background details.
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| Characters and scenes from Spirited Away |
The central emotional journey is that of Chihiro’s growing understanding that she has to rely on her own resources to survive in the world, rather than expecting her parents to show her the way. She begins the films angrily and sulkily, grieving because she has been forced to leave all her friends behind as her uber-professional parents relocate the family to a new house in the provinces. Chihiro’s father drives recklessly down a short-cut, boasting about his four-wheel drive and the family are drawn, dream-like, into an abandoned amusement park where Chihiro’s parents cannot stop themselves gorging on food which turns them (literally) into pigs.
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| Thank you, Amy and Maggie, for our Saki set.... |
Chihiro meets Haku, a young man who persuades her that the only way to save her parents is to get a job in the bathhouse (populated by weird gods and spirits) ruled over by the powerful Yubaba. Chihiro has to navigate adventures in the Alice in Wonderland and Wizard of Oz-like environment and she meets further strange characters like the spider-like boilerman, Kamaji, the down-to-earth Lin, the hard-working soot creatures, the Stinky slime-god (who turns out to be suffering from catastrophic environmental pollution), the Yu-bird and the giant baby boy, Boh. Not to mention Yubaba’s sister, Zeniba, who delivers my favourite line from the film: Once you do something, you never forget. Even if you can’t remember.
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| Delicious food to accompany the film: Gyoza dumplings and Katsu Chicken |
What's it all about? Love? Family? Childhood fears? The need to belong? Loneliness and alienation? Endurance? The rat-race? The dangers of material wealth? Self-determination and courage? Asserting your own identity? Working hard? Accepting what cannot be changed? The horrors of enslavement and exploitation? Environmental pollution? It’s about all of these things, and no doubt many more. At one point, tears flow upwards…. hello, February.
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