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.In Spirited Away, the gods or creatures which Chihiro encounters have reason to be angry. The first she meets is a seemingly normal boy named Haku, who is actually a dragon and river spirit who was cast out of his home when the river was drained and filled with apartments. Haku leads her to the bathhouse where the majority of the film takes place. Disguise is a major theme here, with all of the inhabitants Chihiro meets taking some other form than their natural one. For example, Chihiro soon comes into contact with another river spirit who cannot even be recognized due to the pollution covering his body.If you haven’t yet had a chance to experience Spirited Away, we recommend checking it out as soon as possible. It’s a glimpse into a world you’ve likely never seen before, and an experience you won’t soon forget.