I watched Spirited Away three times, the first time I watched the on-demand station in elementary school, and the second time I re-watched Miyazaki's complete works many years later. The first time I watched Spirited Away, I thought the picture was great, the plot was not fully understood but it was also very interesting, the second time I watched it, I roughly understood the meaning of the movie and admired the depth of its content, while the third time I watched it, I only felt that I had become a person in the plot.
If I had to use one word to describe Miyazaki's animation, I would use Agility. The pictures in Miyazaki's works always have a strong sense of jumping, as if each character has the ability to fly, and the plot unfolds like a flowing cloud, pulling the audience's eyes and emotions from beginning to end.
But Miyazaki's films often come to an abrupt end, and what he wants to express always seems to be unfinished under the usual fast-paced narrative style.
The exception is Spirited Away, one of the most accomplished works in Miyazaki's films. It covers a wide range of topics, including growth, the workplace, environmental protection, society, education, love and so on. If the average director wants to put so many things into a two-hour movie, blood collapse is inevitable, but Miyazaki did.
He organically integrates these contents without appearing cluttered or influencing the narrative of the main line, while making each theme appear to have a certain depth. What is even more amazing is that he packaged these profound contents in a form suitable for all ages, so that audiences of different ages, different cultural levels, and different experiences can find content suitable for themselves.
Spirited Away's biggest theme is growth. Chihiro travels to another world, working at a hot spring inn to rescue her parents, which actually shows the situation of young people leaving their parents' arms and entering society to survive and work hard.
At first, Chihiro did not know the world, and did not even dare to use too high a voice to greet people, she lost the protection of her parents in an instant, and at the same time lost her name and identity, and came to a completely unfamiliar environment. When she was reprimanded by the white dragon with a stern attitude, she was even naïve enough to think that there were two white dragons in the hotel, and she had no idea that there would be another side to people, which was actually what young people looked like when they had not yet accepted social experience.
Chihiro and her parents
Chihiro has a very interesting plot when she is looking for a job, she helps the fallen briquette to carry things, and the other briquettes pretend to fall so that she can help. Like everyone who has not yet found a formal job, Chihiro here lacks a sense of security and belonging, hoping to help as much as possible to gain recognition, while Briquettes, as a senior, has thrown her job, and when it is time for dinner, they run fast again, which can be said to be a very vivid scene.
The owner of the hotel, Tang Po Po, is a typical capitalist image, she has a powerful magic, upholds the belief of the supremacy of money, for money can be picked up by any guest, everyone in her eyes is walking money. Initially reluctant to accept Chihiro, she wanted to turn her into a pig like her parents so that she could be slaughtered by herself to entertain guests. After having to hire Chihiro, she also tries to make it difficult for Chihiro so that she can give up her job and honestly become a pig.
She regards all her subordinates as tools to make money, and her right-hand man Bai Long is ruthlessly abandoned by bai long after he helped her steal things and is ruthlessly abandoned by her, and Grandma Tang can almost be said to eat people and not spit bones.
Mother-in-law Soup
The hotel run by Grandma Tang is the embodiment of desire in the film, and can also be seen as the big dye tank of society. She took away the names of all the employees and made them forget who they were. The people who came to work here were gradually influenced by this place and became greedy people like Grandma Tang. Xiao Ling secretly takes Chihiro for a roasted salamander, and frog digs the floor in the middle of the night to get the placer gold of the river god.
What will happen to the end of this road of desire? Chihiro's parents told everyone about their own experiences at the beginning - to lose themselves and become domestic animals.
And the various people in the hotel are also referred to separately. Hakuryu is a kind person like Chihiro, but he learns magic from Grandma Tang in order to make himself stronger, and as a result, his eyes become more and more vicious, and he forgets his name and identity, and is immediately abandoned by Grandma Tang after losing his use value. He represents here those who have excellent talents and are eager to change their destiny, but are eventually eaten dry and wiped out by the upper class and lose themselves.
Chihiro and the White Dragon
The faceless man is like a blank piece of paper, and what he becomes depends on the influence of the people around him. He fell in love with Chihiro at first sight, waiting on the bridge from night to the next day in order to see her. He is also clumsy because he wants to make Chihiro happy and uses exaggerated ways to help her. He doesn't know what Chihiro wants, so he absorbs the people around him to learn their appearance and hobbies, and eventually becomes infected with the vices of the hotel, and also enters the hotel without knowing the world, but he takes a completely different path from Chihiro. When he had everything that everyone in the hotel envied and was given the opportunity to talk to Chihiro, he realized that Chihiro didn't need it.
Chihiro and the Faceless Man
The river god is the first test that Chihiro encounters in the inn, representing the eternal topic of Miyazaki's work— man and nature. The part where the river god bathes is estimated to be the heaviest part of the film, and he appears in a way that is completely unrecognizable, and he can't see the original appearance at all, even if he soaks in the hot spring, it is also dirty and smelly. It was not until the end of the body that the industrial garbage of modern society, such as scrapped bicycles, was finally restored to its original appearance.
Here Miyazaki expresses the destruction of nature by human beings in a very violent way, and contains his own environmental protection concept. The white dragon's true identity is the homeless river god in the real world, and his encounter is also deepening this theme.
Mother Tang's baby shows Miyazaki's view of education. If the cold-blooded Tang mother-in-law has real feelings for anyone, it must be her baby. Grandma Tang is very doting on the baby, which can be described as a thousand and one, afraid that he will be hurt, and even refuses to let him go out, telling him that there are germs everywhere outside. So the baby grew into an image with a huge body but the shape of a baby, he has no ability to take care of himself, lacks common sense, has a willful personality, solves all problems with crying, and even cannot stand on his own. Miyazaki used this image to satirize the educational behavior of many families, saying that all they had bred were giant babies.
When the baby lost his original body, the three wood carvings that had been used by Grandma Tang to take care of him chased him for revenge as soon as they came up. When Bai Long pointed out that the most important thing of Grandma Tang had been dropped, Grandma Tang's first reaction was to check whether there was a problem with the placer gold, which reflected the extreme dereliction of duty of some parents as guardians. After accompanying Chihiro through various hardships, the baby first learned to walk on his own, and then obtained food through labor from Qian's mother-in-law, becoming a reasonable child. Miyazaki wants to use this plot to tell the audience that doting is never the way to teach children, and as a parent, you should teach the correct social rules and let your children learn to be self-reliant.
Returning to the protagonist Chihiro, Chihiro does not lose herself like her parents in the seductive hot spring inn, but always remembers her name and insists on relying on labor for remuneration. She treats everyone kindly, and even gives the medicine used to save her parents to Bai Long and the Faceless Man so that they can find themselves.
Chihiro's growth is also enormous, she is still powerless at the beginning of the plot, she does not dare to stand when going down the steps, and she is clumsy when she wipes the floor. However, after various experiences, Chihiro in the later period actually dared to step on the pipe to save the white dragon, and no longer relied on others for everything, which was in stark contrast to the previous period. She infects the people around her in her own way, and Xiaoling, baby and faceless man are all affected by it and develop in a good direction. Chihiro also completed her own growth in the experience again and again, never forgot her name, and finally successfully returned to the real world.
Chihiro
Miyazaki wants to use Chihiro's experience to tell the audience that only by facing life with bravery, kindness and perseverance can we not forget our hearts in this complex society.
As a person who has been working for nearly three years, looking at this work again, I can't help but feel a thousand emotions, and now I am more like who is in the work? Is it a baby? Is it a faceless man? Or someone else working in a hotel?
Everyone hopes that they will never lose their first memories, just like Chihiro, although this is a luxury.