Spirited Away

21/09/2024

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Drawing from Fantasy

Spirited Away is a simple story with a complex plot, but its success must surely reside in the simplicity of the emotions elicited through the narrative and the innovations involved in the various events within a world that can seem to occupy a brief period of time, one that is expansive for the youthful central character and all but non-existent for her parents. The story rests on a young girl moving to a new place with her parents and taking a detour which leads the three of them into an empty amusement park that nevertheless has copious amounts of food. The parents eat gluttonously with the father saying they have nothing to worry about — he has cash and a credit card — while Chihiro becomes lost in this netherworld as she discovers, in the middle of their gorging, that her parents have been turned into a couple of pigs. At the end of the film it is as if nothing has happened at all; that the parents didn’t eat greedily, never entered this strange environment and that all of it appears to have been a figment of Chihiro’s imagination. No time has passed at all from the parents’ perspective; a whole world of time has passed for Chihiro.  

      That is the simple story and rests perhaps on a single child moving to a new place: difficult enough for a young girl with siblings, but harder if you are doing it alone. The film then becomes a literalisation of the resilience required as she finds herself trapped in a community where she must navigate through numerous tasks, with the aid of various helpers (especially a boy a little older, Haku). The story can be viewed symbolically on the personal, the national and the universal level. It wasn’t only the most successful Japanese film of all time but also a huge hit internationally - making $358m worldwide. As its director Hayao Miyazaki says, "my way is to not use logic. I try to dig deep into the well of my subconscious. At a certain moment in that process, the lid is opened and very different ideas and visions are liberated. With those I can start making a film.” (Midnight Eye) He also notes that “I don't have the story finished and ready when we start work on a film. I usually don't have the time. So the story develops when I start drawing storyboards. The production starts very soon thereafter, while the storyboards are still developing. We never know where the story will go but we just keeping working on the film as it develops.” (Midnight Eye) 

   We’ll have a little more to say later about the work as animation, and Miyazaki as a key animator who retained an interest in the hand-drawn even as digital became more common. But if Miyazaki draws, so to speak, upon his subconscious then what he seems to dredge up appeals to enough viewers that the film can make many millions. If consciousness is individual, deeper levels of consciousness appear to belong much more to the collective, to a variation perhaps of Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious, the idea that our minds are made up of notions that one needn’t be consciously aware of, and which taps into fundamental archetypes. In contrast to personal complexes, social complexes have an archetypal character. “…personal complexes never produce more than a personal bias, archetypes create myths, religions, and philosophies that influence and characterise whole nations and epochs of history.” (Man and His Symbols)

         Archetypes in this sense are both unavailable to consciousness and invisible to the mind’s eye, and this important point is made in a slightly different way by Miyazaki when he says, certain “…images are really interesting, even today. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is still interesting today, don't you think?" Later, when submarines were built, Miyazaki notes, the sea bottom was portrayed numerous times but he reckons these images aren’t of great interest. “What makes 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea so interesting even today is that the sea depicted there isn't just any sea — it’s a sea of the mind. At one time, flight, too, was something that just took place only in the world of imagination. Now it's strictly a matter of physics.” (Animerica) Archetypes are like imagined objects: they don’t quite exist in the real world and this gives them both an unreliability and an imaginative profundity. A person is merely a biological mass living a social existence at a given moment, just as a documented image of the sea is no more than a photograph whose accuracy denies it the spectacular. Those who see art as about archetypes rather than people, the visually imaginative rather than the documented reality, may be inclined to see Miyazaki as a master. But this mastery is perhaps evident for many because he combines the imaginative with the archetypal: few modern filmmakers are more inclined than Miyazaki to shape-shift these archetypes into metamorphosing possibilities. Whether it is a witch turning a young girl into 90-year old woman in Howl’s Moving Castle, Haku turned into a dragon here, or the hero in Princess Mononoke aware that a wounded arm could lead to the complete transformation of his personality into a vengeful, evil figure, Miyazaki likes to turn types inside out. If fairy tales, fables and parables allow for defying the laws of physics through transmogrifications and miracles, it makes sense that in modern filmic form such possibilities would be better suited to animated works over live-action. 

      Later we will explore the problem with such a view; for the moment it is easy to see the appeal: that art based on the categorical evidence of our senses, allied to the demands of the physical world, limits our imaginative capacities, and these can best be released through animated features that both struggle to capture the world and at the same transcend it. The struggle is evident when digital animators discuss the difficulty in making their work look plausible, and theorist Lev Manovich sees this as twofold: it needs “…to simulate codes of traditional cinematography and to simulate the perceptual properties of real-life objects and environments. The first goal…was in principle solved early on as these codes are well-defined and few in number. Every current professional computer animation system incorporates variable length lens, depth of field effect, motion blur and controllable lights.” He notes that “the second goal, the simulation of "real scenes," turned out to be more complex. Digital recreation of any object involves solving three separate problems: the representation of an object's shape, the effects of light, and the pattern of movement. To have a general solution for each problem requires the exact simulation of underlying physical properties and processes.” ('Assembling Reality: Myths of Computer Graphics’) But this takes animation into the realm of the physical world over that of imagination, and so it make sense Miyazaki would say: “whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever. I am utterly disgusted. I believe that the tool of an animator is the pencil.” (IndieWire) If Manovich insists that “the achievement of realism is the main goal of research in the 3-D computer graphics field. The field defines realism as the ability to simulate any object in such a way that its computer image is indistinguishable from its photograph”  (‘The Paradoxes of Digital Photography), then this would be anathema to Miyazaki’s project. Miyazaki in his comment about 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea makes clear that while perhaps from one perspective technology reveals to us more and more about the world, it then leaves less and less of it to the imagination. The hand-drawn can still see the importance of working with what is in one’s head rather than trying as accurately as possible to emulate what has already been captured by photography. There may be important exceptions to this, with scenes of the obsolete or the extreme using digital work to show us what couldn't otherwise be shown epistemologically or ethically. Dinosaurs no longer roam the earth but Jurassic Park made it appear as if they could again. The DNA the film hinges on may be untenable but the film convinces viewers by the quality of its digital work. The epistemologically impossible is made digitally possible. Ethically, films can also show violence more graphically, and while in most instances this might be gratuitous, a filmmaker who wants to offer the realistic presentation of a bullet penetrating a body, would be better to do so using digital means than a documentary subject, someone whose death has been captured by a news crew for example. 

       Digital images have their place, but for Miyazaki they should not be replacing the hand-craft of animation, if for no better reason than that pencil passes through the mind; the digital image can all but bypass it. However, the problem with the digital isn’t only that it can make animation easier, it also potentially has a different problem with the real. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are made to resemble the paleontological claims about them, and even though many scientists question that accuracy, Spielberg could be accused more of exaggeration than an over-active imagination. As palaeontologist Steve Brusatte says, “…I just remember being flabbergasted by those dinosaurs, being enthralled by them. These dinosaurs were movie monsters, but they were real animals.” (NPR)  Spielberg wanted the sense of accuracy as anybody making a film about dragons wouldn’t: there is no suggestion dragons once roamed the earth. Dinosaurs are, if you like, real dragons — palaeontologically rubber-stamped. Anybody who wished to make a scientific career out of dragon bones would be gently set right. It would be as useful an activity as examining the distribution of labour amongst tooth fairies. The developments in digital technology allowed Spielberg to make what could be seen as a relatively realistic dinosaur film, and central to its appeal wasn’t that it was a product of his imagination (any more than Jaws was), but what appeared to be an accurate collective assumption of what dinosaurs would look like. All those images kids would see in books about dinosaurs were for the first time brought to life, no matter the earlier, puppet-made yet live-action feature The Land That Time Forgot. 

     The logic of digital animation is life-likeness — to create ever more accurate versions of the real world while remaining in an animated or fantastic one. This means more facial gestures, smoother running movements etc. “As a basis, it’s fantastic because we can now train the system to look at say Sigourney Weaver’s face and try to solve for what the ‘muscles’ are doing,” Ron Letteri says. “It is important to point out however that the muscle curves are not one-for-one designed to match actual muscles under the skin. The muscle curves are designed to solve the face but in a way that animators can control and yet that matches facial movements that are performance captured at an incredibly high level of fidelity.” (fx.guide.com) Such a quest would be of little interest to Miyazaki, saying of AI animation “I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” (Indiewire) Yet he also insists “You see, whether you can draw like this or not, being able to think up this kind of design, it depends on whether or not you can say to yourself, ‘Oh, yeah, girls like this exist in real life. If you don’t spend time watching real people, you can’t do this, because you’ve never seen it.” (GQ) This suggests firstly that Miyazaki is interested in real life; secondly that the problem with digital animation is that it foreshortens the process that drawing demands: observation gives way to algorithmic solution models. What matters it seems is the amount of subjectivity a work can produce. This doesn’t mean all traditional animators will have it (as the quote testifies), but digital animation is likely to exacerbate the problem. 

  Yet in films like Howl’s Last Castle, Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, the fantastic is prominent, indicating perhaps that Miyazaki isn’t much of a realist but is strongly interested in subjectivity, though closer to one that contains the collective aspect Jung’s work proposes. Such a perspective isn’t based on closely observing the immediacy of the real world but tapping into the depth and breadth of the fantastic one. “I believe that fantasy in the meaning of imagination is very important”, Miyazaki says. “We shouldn't stick too close to everyday reality but give room to the reality of the heart, of the mind, and of the imagination.” (Midnight Eye) This is closer to a type of introspection over observation, a mind’s eye that taps into myth and with the shift from the latter to the former in the scene when Chihiro witnesses her parents eating at the fairground. As they begin eating like pigs so they are turned into them and Chihiro is now on her own, entering into a parallel world as the simile that turns her parents into the porcine also becomes the metamorphic world where figures can become transformed. Miyazaki claims that he finds "the models for my characters in the people who are around me. I think many of the people don’t even know they’re models for my characters, but what I’m doing is taking a little bit of what the people around me have in them innately and working with that and turning it into a character.” (Brian Camp’s Film and Anime Blog)

     Yet it seems to us, that his purpose and success rest less on observing the familiar than generating the unfamiliar and the unfeasible. Certainly, in his work, there are realistic moments given no more than an exaggerated dimension (like the wizened grandmother, the younger daughter whose pants  are almost as big as her skirt, and the intimidatingly rotund teacher, all from My Neighbour Totoro. But often the emphasis isn’t on exaggeration but on the fantastic. In the former, the filmmakers play up characteristics while retaining the coordinates of a realist world, realist at least in the sense that Darko Suvin examines when thinking about science fiction versus fantasy. Suvin admits that “one of the troubles with distinctions in genre theory is, of course, that literary history is full of ‘limit-cases’” (‘Science fiction and the Novum’), as he muses over Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. We might say the same of exaggerated animation and fantastic animation: that there are too many limit-cases. But if a creature can transform into another being (as the parents become pigs, as the boy who helps Chihiro can be turned into a dragon) then we are in the fantastic. If the anthropomorphic or the metamorphic are invoked then no matter how serious the theme, the film remains in the fantasy realm. This would include Animal Farm and Watership Down, no matter if both have serious things to say about community and power: they rely on showing animals acting like humans or at least as more than animals, even if Richard Adams created his own language (Lapine) for the rabbits in the latter film. 

    As a rule, this is the direction animation has always moved in, with the animator’s pragmatic ability to draw with more or less the same ease or difficulty a dog that can turn into a human, a cat that can talk and dance, or a boy turning into a dragon. To film rather than draw a dragon, a mermaid or a flying elephant requires at least superficially far more work than to film a person walking along the street — the latter doesn’t need a special effects department. But both are equally difficult to draw because both are created beings, no matter if one can be based on the sort of observation Miyazake invokes but doesn’t always practice. Miyazake may say: “to be as full as possible in drawing the world that the characters inhabit, not just drawing the characters but the world that they inhabit is just as important. To be as sensitive to the seasons, the light, the rain, the history of the world that they inhabit and portray that fully. I think a lot about the world that the character inhabits (Brian Camp’s Film and Anime Blog). But other animated films seem closer to this aspiration. These include Anamolisia, Waltz with Bashir, The Illusionist, A Scanner Darkly, Waking Life and The Triplets of Belleville, all sharing this greater interest in the world as it is, even if Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly are oneiric and hallucinogenic, while the animation techniques adopted vary: Anomalisia uses puppets, A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life rotoscoping, Waltz with Bashir a process called animatics, while The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist are hand-drawn. All of them would be closer to Suvin’s take on what constitutes the non-fantastic: that they follow the laws of physics rather than resist them. As Suvin says of scientific principles, “naturalist fiction does not require scientific explanation. Fantasy does not allow it and S/F both requires and allows it.” (‘Science Fiction and the Novum’) In this sense, Miyazake mainly offers fantasy while the others we mention are S/F or naturalistic. It might seem odd to call a film like The Illusionist realistic when its characters are caricatures, where director Sylvain Chomet and his animating team show short bodies and long legs, rounded bodies and tiny limbs, but this is no more than the principle of exaggeration. It doesn’t defy reality, it only embellishes aspects of it. In A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life, the point is to show the workings of the mind and this can give a filmmaker freedom to escape the constraints of reality without assuming the flights of fantasy. The technique adopted suits this well: rotoscoping consists of filming traditionally and then tracing onto the frames. Waltz with Bashir is a documentary about soldiers during the Lebanese conflict in the early eighties, and Avi Folman wants to capture the elasticity of memory in how these moments are recaptured. This meant filming the interviews etc, then storyboarding around them to produce the animated. 

      We contend that in the examples we have just given, many of Miyazake’s comments make more sense in the context of others’ animation than it does of his own work. If people are responsive to the Japanese animator it rests much more on his capacity to imagine worlds. When Einstein proposed “logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere” (BBC), Miyazake offers this in practice. Logical or realist narratives are consecutively coherent; fantastic ones are more escalating — they may have to abide by rules of their own but that is the point; they can make them up as they go along and aren’t constrained by scientific laws. Haku says that Chihiro must be careful to remember her name. If she forgets it all together then she will no longer be able to return to the normal world and will remain in the spirit one. The logic is contained within the parameters the film creates; it has no bearing on ours where name forgetting falls under amnesia, Alzheimer’s etc. Also, long after her parents have been turned into pigs, she wishes to save them as she tries to spot them in a pen with a hundred others. She can’t and it would have felt like a cheat if she could have intuitively done so. They are no longer human and the film plays fair with this fact. Yet at the same time and returning to an earlier point, while the purpose of fantastic films is the creation of their own internal rules, they are also clearly part of a tradition, a little like Jung’s collective unconscious but less mystically so. Peter Bradshaw sees in Spirited Away, “many Western influences and resemblances: Homer's Odyssey, Lewis Carroll, L Frank Baum and maybe even The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett” (Guardian), while in Shinto, “there is a belief called kamikakushi, which is the death or disappearance of a person after they have upset kami. Kamikakushi literally translates to ‘Spirited Away.’”  (Connecticut College) Others have noted the Japanese myths and religions the film draws upon, with Zachary Moser seeing too that “the look and feel of Spirited Away are based on the Japanese Shinto religion, an East Asian religion based on animism and polytheism. In this religion, there are many kami spirits that inhabit everything in the world.” (Screen Rant)

       This suggests that while the logical world follows rules that we all have to abide by where no one can fly without the aid of technology, where nobody can turn into a dragon at will or under another’s spell, myth may not have to follow these rules but they have to create their own, one that while indebted to a history of myth, gives them the jurisdiction to play with the laws of physics. It is this other law that Miyazake obeys and that contrasts with the non-fantastic animation we have invoked. Not all Miyazake films are as imaginatively metamorphic as ‘Spirited Away’; My Neighbour Totoro, for example, despite various fantastic elements, including a cat that can become a bus, could have worked as a non-fantastic account of a couple of sisters’ misadventures while living in their new home near the hospital. Tmy hey are waiting for their mother to be released from hospital after a long term illness. The fantastic elements seem much more incidental, no matter the dust-like house spirits and a tree that grows quickly when the spirits engage in a ceremonial dance. But these elements don’t for example make the mother better, which would have made them an integral part of the plot. 

     In Spirited Away this leads to a paradox: that the fantastic is integral to the story but is often close to disintegrating the tale it tells. Fantasy usually offers both self-contained rules, and the ability to absorb sometimes thousands of years of myth. Spirited Away is so prodigal in the use of the latter that we might lose sight of the former. Near the beginning, when Chihiro and her parents find themselves in the abandoned amusement park, the father says that it would have been built like many others in the early 90s but when the economy went bad they all went bankrupt. Nothing indicates the father would have been one of the victims of this failed economy, and makes a point of saying when they start eating in the amusement park restaurant, with food in abundance but nobody around mentions he has plenty money to pay for it. However, though Miyazaki then turns the parents into pigs, he doesn’t seem interested in extending this into a broader critique. They are greedy and become porcine within the film’s reasoning: they are eating the food of the spirits, but this isn’t quite reason enough for them to be transformed into literal guzzlers. If they had been also feeding off a stagnant Japanese economy, making money while others suffer, this may have justified the deed. But they go into the park, don’t see anyone around, eat the food and are happy to pay if and when someone appears. Some might insist this is too literal an account of a film that is a fantasy but we have no problem with people turning into pigs; we just want a rationale for it.   

        Commentators may justify it as allegory, seeing the whole film as a critique of capitalism in metaphoric form. Nicole Zhou reckons “with his materialistic mindset, he [the father] sees the situation as an economic problem rather than a moral or social one” (The Science Survey)— that they can eat as much as they like and pay for it all later. But we would need more evidence to judge the characters as cruel and capacious figures of capitalism. The father may drive a German car but it would be a stretch to insist this is part of the rationale to turn him into a pig, even if part of that economic collapse he mentions was the decline of the country’s automobile industry and there he is driving an Audi. Zhou also notes that, “…at the film’s core, Spirited Away is a critique of the failures of capitalism. Not only does the system promote materialism, but it also traps the low-class laborers at the bottom while lining the pockets of the rich.” No doubt greed is a key feature of the film, and exploited labour too, with the figure of No-Face, a spirit fascinated by Chihiro, becoming increasingly obese in his unhappiness, and the workers slavishly working for the head of the spirit world, Yubaba — who lives in immense luxury. Spirited Away may well be an attack on capitalism, but if critics are inclined to call it allegorically so this may rest on the vagueness of its critique. If we knew the father happened to be driving an Audi because he didn’t care about the Japanese economy, that he had a history of taking things to which he wasn’t entitled, and that in the course of the film realised that he needed to think again about his materialist mindset, then the film could have absorbed the various metaphoric elements into the critique. Instead, the parents disappear from the film except as the occasional mindless piggy presence, and appear again at the end, telling Chihiro off for disappearing. The film has taken place in no time at all from the parents’ perspective; it has been monumental from Chihiro’s. If Spirited Away has a message it would appear to be much more a rite-of-passage film about a single child who clings to her parents but has seen a world her parents will never know. At the beginning, her mum says “don’t cling like that it will make me trip” and the same line is repeated at the conclusion. We then realise that some time has past; the events haven’t been a fantasy inside Chihiro’s head. When they get back to the car it is covered in leaves and dust. The parents don’t understand; clearly Chihiro does. They are practical people but Chihiro has witnessed a magical existence.  

     It seems the film wants to say no more (and no less) than that children have imagination and parents for whatever reason either lack it or have lost it. It is a fair claim, no doubt, but its accumulated manifestation of the magical can perhaps seem an odd type of diminution; that it can appear to credit the imagination as a virtue initself, when usually if we look at myths, fables, parables etc. they offer the magical within the context of another value. Maybe Spirited Away is an allegory of capitalism but that is quite different from saying the Midas touch is about greed, the Tortoise and the Hare about taking your time, and Jesus walking on water about belief. (If the latter weren’t, he could have administered them without witnesses and it would be a pretty erroneous take on The Gospel According to St Matthew to say Jesus wants people looking on so he can show off.) If one responds more to the non-fantastic films we have earlier invoked, it isn’t because they are more realistic than Spirited Away and most of Miyazaki’s other films; more, the values explored and the images created are more coherent. The Illusionist for example is a wonderful film on obsolescence as the magician (as well as a clown and a ventriloquist) can no longer ply his trade. Waltz with Bashir muses over memory and forgetting within the context of atrocity: it ends with archival footage from the destroyed refugee camps Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon, as the film has examined the characters’ involvement in the incident. In Anomalisia, the film explores hell as other people when you yourself may be hellish. They might not have the directness of a parable or a fable (which themselves of course can be read many ways within the undeniable moral). However, one does feel that the films are focused and ethically extractable: a clear point and purpose can be taken from the material without claiming allegory for its extraction. When Zhou speaks of Japan’s wealth in the period the father in Spirited Away describes, she says that “…to conceptualize the country’s obscene wealth, picture this: the Tokyo Imperial Palace (1.15 square kilometers) had a higher land value than all of California (423,970 square kilometers), America’s most populated state. Japanese investors also bought out movie studios like Columbia (Sony) Pictures, golf courses, and even landmarks like the Rockefeller Center.” (The Science Survey) But to draw from the film its meaning in the opulence of Japan in the late 80s and early 90s that it then rejects, is to read into the film more than to extract meaning from it.  If this were what the film was about, then it would have been better focusing on the parents, who are completely ignorant of what has happened to them, than a child who goes off on this journey her parents remain oblivious over.    

   Yet we proposed at the beginning that Spirited Away is a simple story, and its simplicity doesn’t reside in the meaning it contains but more the feeling it elicits. Zhou is right to say that the music is memorable. A “single F Maj chord ripples through the air” she says. “For three seconds, the note lingers in a suspended breath until its poignant sharpness fades away. There is no mistaking it; this is Joe Hisaishi’s One Summer's Day, the main theme of Hayao Miyazaki’s 2001 animated feature Spirited Away.” (The Science Survey) Whatever personal reservations one may have Spirited Away undeniably struck a chord which is more than just the success of its musical composition, yet it might still have done so with a less convoluted surface plot and a clearer comprehension of what it is about.  It is finally the triumph of affect over the concentration of narrative coherence but many it seems have had no problem with that, enjoying the simplicity and complexity as one.   

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin Tony McKibbin

Spirited Away

Drawing from Fantasy

Spirited Away is a simple story with a complex plot, but its success must surely reside in the simplicity of the emotions elicited through the narrative and the innovations involved in the various events within a world that can seem to occupy a brief period of time, one that is expansive for the youthful central character and all but non-existent for her parents. The story rests on a young girl moving to a new place with her parents and taking a detour which leads the three of them into an empty amusement park that nevertheless has copious amounts of food. The parents eat gluttonously with the father saying they have nothing to worry about he has cash and a credit card while Chihiro becomes lost in this netherworld as she discovers, in the middle of their gorging, that her parents have been turned into a couple of pigs. At the end of the film it is as if nothing has happened at all; that the parents didn't eat greedily, never entered this strange environment and that all of it appears to have been a figment of Chihiro's imagination. No time has passed at all from the parents' perspective; a whole world of time has passed for Chihiro.

That is the simple story and rests perhaps on a single child moving to a new place: difficult enough for a young girl with siblings, but harder if you are doing it alone. The film then becomes a literalisation of the resilience required as she finds herself trapped in a community where she must navigate through numerous tasks, with the aid of various helpers (especially a boy a little older, Haku). The story can be viewed symbolically on the personal, the national and the universal level. It wasn't only the most successful Japanese film of all time but also a huge hit internationally - making $358m worldwide. As its director Hayao Miyazaki says, my way is to not use logic. I try to dig deep into the well of my subconscious. At a certain moment in that process, the lid is opened and very different ideas and visions are liberated. With those I can start making a film." (Midnight Eye) He also notes that "I don't have the story finished and ready when we start work on a film. I usually don't have the time. So the story develops when I start drawing storyboards. The production starts very soon thereafter, while the storyboards are still developing. We never know where the story will go but we just keeping working on the film as it develops." (Midnight Eye)

We'll have a little more to say later about the work as animation, and Miyazaki as a key animator who retained an interest in the hand-drawn even as digital became more common. But if Miyazaki draws, so to speak, upon his subconscious then what he seems to dredge up appeals to enough viewers that the film can make many millions. If consciousness is individual, deeper levels of consciousness appear to belong much more to the collective, to a variation perhaps of Jung's notion of the collective unconscious, the idea that our minds are made up of notions that one needn't be consciously aware of, and which taps into fundamental archetypes. In contrast to personal complexes, social complexes have an archetypal character. "...personal complexes never produce more than a personal bias, archetypes create myths, religions, and philosophies that influence and characterise whole nations and epochs of history." (Man and His Symbols)

Archetypes in this sense are both unavailable to consciousness and invisible to the mind's eye, and this important point is made in a slightly different way by Miyazaki when he says, certain "...images are really interesting, even today. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is still interesting today, don't you think? Later, when submarines were built, Miyazaki notes, the sea bottom was portrayed numerous times but he reckons these images aren't of great interest. "What makes 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea so interesting even today is that the sea depicted there isn't just any sea it's a sea of the mind. At one time, flight, too, was something that just took place only in the world of imagination. Now it's strictly a matter of physics." (Animerica) Archetypes are like imagined objects: they don't quite exist in the real world and this gives them both an unreliability and an imaginative profundity. A person is merely a biological mass living a social existence at a given moment, just as a documented image of the sea is no more than a photograph whose accuracy denies it the spectacular. Those who see art as about archetypes rather than people, the visually imaginative rather than the documented reality, may be inclined to see Miyazaki as a master. But this mastery is perhaps evident for many because he combines the imaginative with the archetypal: few modern filmmakers are more inclined than Miyazaki to shape-shift these archetypes into metamorphosing possibilities. Whether it is a witch turning a young girl into 90-year old woman in Howl's Moving Castle, Haku turned into a dragon here, or the hero in Princess Mononoke aware that a wounded arm could lead to the complete transformation of his personality into a vengeful, evil figure, Miyazaki likes to turn types inside out. If fairy tales, fables and parables allow for defying the laws of physics through transmogrifications and miracles, it makes sense that in modern filmic form such possibilities would be better suited to animated works over live-action.

Later we will explore the problem with such a view; for the moment it is easy to see the appeal: that art based on the categorical evidence of our senses, allied to the demands of the physical world, limits our imaginative capacities, and these can best be released through animated features that both struggle to capture the world and at the same transcend it. The struggle is evident when digital animators discuss the difficulty in making their work look plausible, and theorist Lev Manovich sees this as twofold: it needs "...to simulate codes of traditional cinematography and to simulate the perceptual properties of real-life objects and environments. The first goal...was in principle solved early on as these codes are well-defined and few in number. Every current professional computer animation system incorporates variable length lens, depth of field effect, motion blur and controllable lights." He notes that "the second goal, the simulation of real scenes, turned out to be more complex. Digital recreation of any object involves solving three separate problems: the representation of an object's shape, the effects of light, and the pattern of movement. To have a general solution for each problem requires the exact simulation of underlying physical properties and processes." ('Assembling Reality: Myths of Computer Graphics') But this takes animation into the realm of the physical world over that of imagination, and so it make sense Miyazaki would say: "whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever. I am utterly disgusted. I believe that the tool of an animator is the pencil." (IndieWire) If Manovich insists that "the achievement of realism is the main goal of research in the 3-D computer graphics field. The field defines realism as the ability to simulate any object in such a way that its computer image is indistinguishable from its photograph" ('The Paradoxes of Digital Photography), then this would be anathema to Miyazaki's project. Miyazaki in his comment about 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea makes clear that while perhaps from one perspective technology reveals to us more and more about the world, it then leaves less and less of it to the imagination. The hand-drawn can still see the importance of working with what is in one's head rather than trying as accurately as possible to emulate what has already been captured by photography. There may be important exceptions to this, with scenes of the obsolete or the extreme using digital work to show us what couldn't otherwise be shown epistemologically or ethically. Dinosaurs no longer roam the earth but Jurassic Park made it appear as if they could again. The DNA the film hinges on may be untenable but the film convinces viewers by the quality of its digital work. The epistemologically impossible is made digitally possible. Ethically, films can also show violence more graphically, and while in most instances this might be gratuitous, a filmmaker who wants to offer the realistic presentation of a bullet penetrating a body, would be better to do so using digital means than a documentary subject, someone whose death has been captured by a news crew for example.

Digital images have their place, but for Miyazaki they should not be replacing the hand-craft of animation, if for no better reason than that pencil passes through the mind; the digital image can all but bypass it. However, the problem with the digital isn't only that it can make animation easier, it also potentially has a different problem with the real. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are made to resemble the paleontological claims about them, and even though many scientists question that accuracy, Spielberg could be accused more of exaggeration than an over-active imagination. As palaeontologist Steve Brusatte says, "...I just remember being flabbergasted by those dinosaurs, being enthralled by them. These dinosaurs were movie monsters, but they were real animals." (NPR) Spielberg wanted the sense of accuracy as anybody making a film about dragons wouldn't: there is no suggestion dragons once roamed the earth. Dinosaurs are, if you like, real dragons palaeontologically rubber-stamped. Anybody who wished to make a scientific career out of dragon bones would be gently set right. It would be as useful an activity as examining the distribution of labour amongst tooth fairies. The developments in digital technology allowed Spielberg to make what could be seen as a relatively realistic dinosaur film, and central to its appeal wasn't that it was a product of his imagination (any more than Jaws was), but what appeared to be an accurate collective assumption of what dinosaurs would look like. All those images kids would see in books about dinosaurs were for the first time brought to life, no matter the earlier, puppet-made yet live-action feature The Land That Time Forgot.

The logic of digital animation is life-likeness to create ever more accurate versions of the real world while remaining in an animated or fantastic one. This means more facial gestures, smoother running movements etc. "As a basis, it's fantastic because we can now train the system to look at say Sigourney Weaver's face and try to solve for what the 'muscles' are doing," Ron Letteri says. "It is important to point out however that the muscle curves are not one-for-one designed to match actual muscles under the skin. The muscle curves are designed to solve the face but in a way that animators can control and yet that matches facial movements that are performance captured at an incredibly high level of fidelity." (fx.guide.com) Such a quest would be of little interest to Miyazaki, saying of AI animation "I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself." (Indiewire) Yet he also insists "You see, whether you can draw like this or not, being able to think up this kind of design, it depends on whether or not you can say to yourself, 'Oh, yeah, girls like this exist in real life. If you don't spend time watching real people, you can't do this, because you've never seen it." (GQ) This suggests firstly that Miyazaki is interested in real life; secondly that the problem with digital animation is that it foreshortens the process that drawing demands: observation gives way to algorithmic solution models. What matters it seems is the amount of subjectivity a work can produce. This doesn't mean all traditional animators will have it (as the quote testifies), but digital animation is likely to exacerbate the problem.

Yet in films like Howl's Last Castle, Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, the fantastic is prominent, indicating perhaps that Miyazaki isn't much of a realist but is strongly interested in subjectivity, though closer to one that contains the collective aspect Jung's work proposes. Such a perspective isn't based on closely observing the immediacy of the real world but tapping into the depth and breadth of the fantastic one. "I believe that fantasy in the meaning of imagination is very important", Miyazaki says. "We shouldn't stick too close to everyday reality but give room to the reality of the heart, of the mind, and of the imagination." (Midnight Eye) This is closer to a type of introspection over observation, a mind's eye that taps into myth and with the shift from the latter to the former in the scene when Chihiro witnesses her parents eating at the fairground. As they begin eating like pigs so they are turned into them and Chihiro is now on her own, entering into a parallel world as the simile that turns her parents into the porcine also becomes the metamorphic world where figures can become transformed. Miyazaki claims that he finds the models for my characters in the people who are around me. I think many of the people don't even know they're models for my characters, but what I'm doing is taking a little bit of what the people around me have in them innately and working with that and turning it into a character." (Brian Camp's Film and Anime Blog)

Yet it seems to us, that his purpose and success rest less on observing the familiar than generating the unfamiliar and the unfeasible. Certainly, in his work, there are realistic moments given no more than an exaggerated dimension (like the wizened grandmother, the younger daughter whose pants are almost as big as her skirt, and the intimidatingly rotund teacher, all from My Neighbour Totoro. But often the emphasis isn't on exaggeration but on the fantastic. In the former, the filmmakers play up characteristics while retaining the coordinates of a realist world, realist at least in the sense that Darko Suvin examines when thinking about science fiction versus fantasy. Suvin admits that "one of the troubles with distinctions in genre theory is, of course, that literary history is full of 'limit-cases'" ('Science fiction and the Novum'), as he muses over Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. We might say the same of exaggerated animation and fantastic animation: that there are too many limit-cases. But if a creature can transform into another being (as the parents become pigs, as the boy who helps Chihiro can be turned into a dragon) then we are in the fantastic. If the anthropomorphic or the metamorphic are invoked then no matter how serious the theme, the film remains in the fantasy realm. This would include Animal Farm and Watership Down, no matter if both have serious things to say about community and power: they rely on showing animals acting like humans or at least as more than animals, even if Richard Adams created his own language (Lapine) for the rabbits in the latter film.

As a rule, this is the direction animation has always moved in, with the animator's pragmatic ability to draw with more or less the same ease or difficulty a dog that can turn into a human, a cat that can talk and dance, or a boy turning into a dragon. To film rather than draw a dragon, a mermaid or a flying elephant requires at least superficially far more work than to film a person walking along the street the latter doesn't need a special effects department. But both are equally difficult to draw because both are created beings, no matter if one can be based on the sort of observation Miyazake invokes but doesn't always practice. Miyazake may say: "to be as full as possible in drawing the world that the characters inhabit, not just drawing the characters but the world that they inhabit is just as important. To be as sensitive to the seasons, the light, the rain, the history of the world that they inhabit and portray that fully. I think a lot about the world that the character inhabits (Brian Camp's Film and Anime Blog). But other animated films seem closer to this aspiration. These include Anamolisia, Waltz with Bashir, The Illusionist, A Scanner Darkly, Waking Life and The Triplets of Belleville, all sharing this greater interest in the world as it is, even if Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly are oneiric and hallucinogenic, while the animation techniques adopted vary: Anomalisia uses puppets, A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life rotoscoping, Waltz with Bashir a process called animatics, while The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist are hand-drawn. All of them would be closer to Suvin's take on what constitutes the non-fantastic: that they follow the laws of physics rather than resist them. As Suvin says of scientific principles, "naturalist fiction does not require scientific explanation. Fantasy does not allow it and S/F both requires and allows it." ('Science Fiction and the Novum') In this sense, Miyazake mainly offers fantasy while the others we mention are S/F or naturalistic. It might seem odd to call a film like The Illusionist realistic when its characters are caricatures, where director Sylvain Chomet and his animating team show short bodies and long legs, rounded bodies and tiny limbs, but this is no more than the principle of exaggeration. It doesn't defy reality, it only embellishes aspects of it. In A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life, the point is to show the workings of the mind and this can give a filmmaker freedom to escape the constraints of reality without assuming the flights of fantasy. The technique adopted suits this well: rotoscoping consists of filming traditionally and then tracing onto the frames. Waltz with Bashir is a documentary about soldiers during the Lebanese conflict in the early eighties, and Avi Folman wants to capture the elasticity of memory in how these moments are recaptured. This meant filming the interviews etc, then storyboarding around them to produce the animated.

We contend that in the examples we have just given, many of Miyazake's comments make more sense in the context of others' animation than it does of his own work. If people are responsive to the Japanese animator it rests much more on his capacity to imagine worlds. When Einstein proposed "logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere" (BBC), Miyazake offers this in practice. Logical or realist narratives are consecutively coherent; fantastic ones are more escalating they may have to abide by rules of their own but that is the point; they can make them up as they go along and aren't constrained by scientific laws. Haku says that Chihiro must be careful to remember her name. If she forgets it all together then she will no longer be able to return to the normal world and will remain in the spirit one. The logic is contained within the parameters the film creates; it has no bearing on ours where name forgetting falls under amnesia, Alzheimer's etc. Also, long after her parents have been turned into pigs, she wishes to save them as she tries to spot them in a pen with a hundred others. She can't and it would have felt like a cheat if she could have intuitively done so. They are no longer human and the film plays fair with this fact. Yet at the same time and returning to an earlier point, while the purpose of fantastic films is the creation of their own internal rules, they are also clearly part of a tradition, a little like Jung's collective unconscious but less mystically so. Peter Bradshaw sees in Spirited Away, "many Western influences and resemblances: Homer's Odyssey, Lewis Carroll, L Frank Baum and maybe even The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett" (Guardian), while in Shinto, "there is a belief called kamikakushi, which is the death or disappearance of a person after they have upset kami. Kamikakushi literally translates to 'Spirited Away.'" (Connecticut College) Others have noted the Japanese myths and religions the film draws upon, with Zachary Moser seeing too that "the look and feel of Spirited Away are based on the Japanese Shinto religion, an East Asian religion based on animism and polytheism. In this religion, there are many kami spirits that inhabit everything in the world." (Screen Rant)

This suggests that while the logical world follows rules that we all have to abide by where no one can fly without the aid of technology, where nobody can turn into a dragon at will or under another's spell, myth may not have to follow these rules but they have to create their own, one that while indebted to a history of myth, gives them the jurisdiction to play with the laws of physics. It is this other law that Miyazake obeys and that contrasts with the non-fantastic animation we have invoked. Not all Miyazake films are as imaginatively metamorphic as 'Spirited Away'; My Neighbour Totoro, for example, despite various fantastic elements, including a cat that can become a bus, could have worked as a non-fantastic account of a couple of sisters' misadventures while living in their new home near the hospital. Tmy hey are waiting for their mother to be released from hospital after a long term illness. The fantastic elements seem much more incidental, no matter the dust-like house spirits and a tree that grows quickly when the spirits engage in a ceremonial dance. But these elements don't for example make the mother better, which would have made them an integral part of the plot.

In Spirited Away this leads to a paradox: that the fantastic is integral to the story but is often close to disintegrating the tale it tells. Fantasy usually offers both self-contained rules, and the ability to absorb sometimes thousands of years of myth. Spirited Away is so prodigal in the use of the latter that we might lose sight of the former. Near the beginning, when Chihiro and her parents find themselves in the abandoned amusement park, the father says that it would have been built like many others in the early 90s but when the economy went bad they all went bankrupt. Nothing indicates the father would have been one of the victims of this failed economy, and makes a point of saying when they start eating in the amusement park restaurant, with food in abundance but nobody around mentions he has plenty money to pay for it. However, though Miyazaki then turns the parents into pigs, he doesn't seem interested in extending this into a broader critique. They are greedy and become porcine within the film's reasoning: they are eating the food of the spirits, but this isn't quite reason enough for them to be transformed into literal guzzlers. If they had been also feeding off a stagnant Japanese economy, making money while others suffer, this may have justified the deed. But they go into the park, don't see anyone around, eat the food and are happy to pay if and when someone appears. Some might insist this is too literal an account of a film that is a fantasy but we have no problem with people turning into pigs; we just want a rationale for it.

Commentators may justify it as allegory, seeing the whole film as a critique of capitalism in metaphoric form. Nicole Zhou reckons "with his materialistic mindset, he [the father] sees the situation as an economic problem rather than a moral or social one" (The Science Survey) that they can eat as much as they like and pay for it all later. But we would need more evidence to judge the characters as cruel and capacious figures of capitalism. The father may drive a German car but it would be a stretch to insist this is part of the rationale to turn him into a pig, even if part of that economic collapse he mentions was the decline of the country's automobile industry and there he is driving an Audi. Zhou also notes that, "...at the film's core, Spirited Away is a critique of the failures of capitalism. Not only does the system promote materialism, but it also traps the low-class laborers at the bottom while lining the pockets of the rich." No doubt greed is a key feature of the film, and exploited labour too, with the figure of No-Face, a spirit fascinated by Chihiro, becoming increasingly obese in his unhappiness, and the workers slavishly working for the head of the spirit world, Yubaba who lives in immense luxury. Spirited Away may well be an attack on capitalism, but if critics are inclined to call it allegorically so this may rest on the vagueness of its critique. If we knew the father happened to be driving an Audi because he didn't care about the Japanese economy, that he had a history of taking things to which he wasn't entitled, and that in the course of the film realised that he needed to think again about his materialist mindset, then the film could have absorbed the various metaphoric elements into the critique. Instead, the parents disappear from the film except as the occasional mindless piggy presence, and appear again at the end, telling Chihiro off for disappearing. The film has taken place in no time at all from the parents' perspective; it has been monumental from Chihiro's. If Spirited Away has a message it would appear to be much more a rite-of-passage film about a single child who clings to her parents but has seen a world her parents will never know. At the beginning, her mum says "don't cling like that it will make me trip" and the same line is repeated at the conclusion. We then realise that some time has past; the events haven't been a fantasy inside Chihiro's head. When they get back to the car it is covered in leaves and dust. The parents don't understand; clearly Chihiro does. They are practical people but Chihiro has witnessed a magical existence.

It seems the film wants to say no more (and no less) than that children have imagination and parents for whatever reason either lack it or have lost it. It is a fair claim, no doubt, but its accumulated manifestation of the magical can perhaps seem an odd type of diminution; that it can appear to credit the imagination as a virtue initself, when usually if we look at myths, fables, parables etc. they offer the magical within the context of another value. Maybe Spirited Away is an allegory of capitalism but that is quite different from saying the Midas touch is about greed, the Tortoise and the Hare about taking your time, and Jesus walking on water about belief. (If the latter weren't, he could have administered them without witnesses and it would be a pretty erroneous take on The Gospel According to St Matthew to say Jesus wants people looking on so he can show off.) If one responds more to the non-fantastic films we have earlier invoked, it isn't because they are more realistic than Spirited Away and most of Miyazaki's other films; more, the values explored and the images created are more coherent. The Illusionist for example is a wonderful film on obsolescence as the magician (as well as a clown and a ventriloquist) can no longer ply his trade. Waltz with Bashir muses over memory and forgetting within the context of atrocity: it ends with archival footage from the destroyed refugee camps Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon, as the film has examined the characters' involvement in the incident. In Anomalisia, the film explores hell as other people when you yourself may be hellish. They might not have the directness of a parable or a fable (which themselves of course can be read many ways within the undeniable moral). However, one does feel that the films are focused and ethically extractable: a clear point and purpose can be taken from the material without claiming allegory for its extraction. When Zhou speaks of Japan's wealth in the period the father in Spirited Away describes, she says that "...to conceptualize the country's obscene wealth, picture this: the Tokyo Imperial Palace (1.15 square kilometers) had a higher land value than all of California (423,970 square kilometers), America's most populated state. Japanese investors also bought out movie studios like Columbia (Sony) Pictures, golf courses, and even landmarks like the Rockefeller Center." (The Science Survey) But to draw from the film its meaning in the opulence of Japan in the late 80s and early 90s that it then rejects, is to read into the film more than to extract meaning from it. If this were what the film was about, then it would have been better focusing on the parents, who are completely ignorant of what has happened to them, than a child who goes off on this journey her parents remain oblivious over.

Yet we proposed at the beginning that Spirited Away is a simple story, and its simplicity doesn't reside in the meaning it contains but more the feeling it elicits. Zhou is right to say that the music is memorable. A "single F Maj chord ripples through the air" she says. "For three seconds, the note lingers in a suspended breath until its poignant sharpness fades away. There is no mistaking it; this is Joe Hisaishi's One Summer's Day, the main theme of Hayao Miyazaki's 2001 animated feature Spirited Away." (The Science Survey) Whatever personal reservations one may have Spirited Away undeniably struck a chord which is more than just the success of its musical composition, yet it might still have done so with a less convoluted surface plot and a clearer comprehension of what it is about. It is finally the triumph of affect over the concentration of narrative coherence but many it seems have had no problem with that, enjoying the simplicity and complexity as one.


© Tony McKibbin