Warriors of Legend

In 2002, Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away became the first Japanese animated film to win an Academy Award. The honor was well-deservedMiyazaki has always been a master storyteller, and how stories reflect life, and Spirited Away was his greatest distillation of myth and modern Japanese society to date.The basic plot of the film, which concerns a young girl named Chihiro who is thrust into a mysterious and magical world, owes heavily to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. However, the characters and motifs she encounters in it are based off of specifically Japanese ideas. For example, the Japanese folklore of kamikakushi , meaning “hidden by gods,” is an old explanation for anybody’s mysterious disappearance. It literally implies that the person has angered a god and been kidnapped by them. (more…)