I finally got around to watching an animated movie after a long time and Spirited Away was a fascinating film to get back into the world of animated films. Spirited Away as the title suggests is about being dragged into a different world, a world inhabited by spirits and all creatures strange.
I started watching this with an open mind and let myself be carried on by the sequence of events without questioning or pondering much. This film is surprisingly one without clear-cut heroes and villains. Yubaba, Zeniba, and even the mysterious No Face walk on the tight rope between good and bad and in the end, they all take the path of peace. The concept of good and bad, (evil being too severe of a word here) has never been both simple and complicated. No Face swallows alive three whole workers of the bathhouse but yet the victims manage to survive unscathed, all of which is both puzzling and amusing fitting well with the fairytale-esque theme.
When it comes to Chihiro’s parents, I just found them completely irresponsible, leading their child into danger while ignoring massive red flags: a deserted amusement park and unmanned food stalls filled to the brim with food.
Their lack of foresight and plain common sense puts their child in danger finally forcing her to fend for herself. Chihiro rises to the challenge and grows as an individual, learning new skills and forging new bonds. Her relationship with Haku takes on a romantic colour, something which was predictable to begin with. Her relationship with Haku seems to be fated, a love that is written in the stars and this is established by her half-forgotten memory of him as the guardian spirit of a river.
If at the beginning Chihiro was the damsel in distress, at the end it is Haku, and both get to play the saviour, giving their relationship an interesting dimension. What started out as a seemingly innocuous move to another town takes on epic proportions for Chihiro and she emerges out of the tunnel enlightened and changed. The roles of the parent and the child are swapped from the very beginning, perhaps the film is about deconstructing the fixed roles of the parent and the child or maybe I am reading too much into this. But hey, I can sit and speculate.
Human Oxymoron 