Spirited Away - Themes

Themes

The major themes of Spirited Away center on the protagonist Chihiro and her liminal journey through the realm of spirits, wherein Chihiro becomes separated from everything she has known. Chihiro's experience in the alternate world, frequently compared to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, represents her passage from childhood to adulthood. The archetypal entrance into another world clearly demarcates Chihiro's status as one in-between. In her transition between child and adult, Chihiro stands outside these societal boundaries, a situation mirrored by the supernatural setting. The use of the word kamikakushi (literally "hidden by gods") within the Japanese title, and its associated folklore, reinforce this liminal passage: "Kamikakushi is a verdict of 'social death' in this world, and coming back to this world from Kamikakushi meant 'social resurrection.'" Yubaba had many similarities to The Coachman from Pinocchio, in the sense that she transformed humans into pigs in a similar way that the boys of Pleasure Island were transformed into donkeys. Upon gaining employment at the bathhouse, Yubaba's seizure of Chihiro's true name, a common theme in folklore, symbolically kills the child Chihiro, who must therefore assume adulthood. The following trials and obstacles Chihiro must overcome thus become rites-of-passage according to the monomyth format; to recover "continuity with her past", Chihiro must create a new identity.

Besides the coming of age theme, Spirited Away contains critical commentary on modern Japanese society concerning generational conflicts, the struggle with dissolving traditional culture and customs within a global society, and environmental pollution. Chihiro, as a representation of the liminal shōjo, "may be seen as a metaphor for the Japanese society which, over the last decade, seems to be increasingly in limbo, drifting uneasily away from the values and ideological framework of the immediate postwar era." Just as Chihiro seeks her past identity, Japan, in its anxiety over the economic downturn occurring during the release of Spirited Away in 2001, sought to reconnect to past values. In interview, Miyazaki has commented on this nostalgic element for an old Japan. Initially, Chihiro travels past the abandoned fairground, a symbol for Japan's burst "economic bubble", and her parents' gluttony and transformation into pigs, to reach the fantasy world replete with Japanese culture and fable in the amalgam of the bathhouse.

Nonetheless, the "bathhouse of the spirits has its own ambivalence, and its own darkness.... Miyazaki is not so simple-minded as to locate a perfect vision in the past or the spiritual." Many of the employees are rude to Chihiro because she is human, and the corruption of avarice has incorporated itself into the "bricolage" of the bathhouse and as a place of "excess and greed" as depicted in the initial appearance of the No-Face. In stark contrast to the "archetypal approaches to cultural recovery such as recognition, proper identification, spiritual cleansing and sacrifice," embodied in Chihiro's journey and transformation, the constant background presence of the ambiguity of the bathhouse reminds the audience reality is not so simple: "the bathhouse's simultaneous incorporation of the carnivalesque and the chaotic suggests the threats to the collectivity are not simply outside ones." The environmental comments concerning the trash deforming the River God and Haku's plight over the loss of his river to apartment complexes further indicate the sources of pollution within the bathhouse, a place of ritual purity, come from within the Japanese society.