Saw it this past weekend and enjoyed it immensely, although I think I like Princess Mononoke better.
In the original thread on this great movie,
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=135553
a couple of folks mentioned that there was some religious rituals and folk tale subtext that might go over the heads of the mainstream US moviegoer.
I’m interested in a discussion of the specifics in the movie. Nothing really confused me about the movie, but if it was over my head, I probably wouldn’t realize it. :smack:
Thanks.
There may have been some religious or folkloric elements, but I don’t think anything that would make or break the movie.
(pure speculation)
Well, I don’t know if this would go over the head of a US viewer, but if you took out the supernatural elements, the hotel/bath resort was pretty close to what you’d see at any of the hundreds of rural and mountain hot spring resorts around Japan, including the staff wearing fairly traditional-style clothing. Perhaps it all looked odd for American viewers, but to most Japanese (and by “most Japanese” I mean my wife and mother-in-law) it was supernatural-looking creatures engaged in ordinary human activities.
Also, the little stone statues that Chihiro sees as the family’s driving through the woods are quite common. Take a walk out into any woods and you stand a good chance of stumbling across a little stone Buddhist Jizo statue (or of some local deity) that looks like it’s been there for decades.
Yeah, that and the dragons. I mean, there’s dragons all over the place here. They don’t fly, of course…so I guess you could say that if your average Japanese person watched it they would just see it as an ordinary dragon, only flying.
Notice there was a torii at the point where the road they’re driving up changes to a dirt track? I read in Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation that this signifies the entry into part of the mystical world.
This movie caused my friend and I to get a library card at the Japan Foundation so we could learn more…
Oh yeah, and the fact that Chihiro takes a train into the Spirit World is just a hyperbolic expression of amazement at the fact that the trains here go everywhere.
Seriously, though, what Sublight said. The whole complex where Chihiro works looks like a very typical old Japanese building, and all the details of her every day life (cleaning floors by running across them with rags on all fours, sleeping on futon, etc.) are not fantasies of the past, but still applicable to Japanese life today.