ARTICLE / SHORT READ

CUT TO [greed]

ANIMATED AVARICE
​
SPIRITED AWAY 
Hayao Miyazaki / 2001 

BY Maddy Hardman

PUBLISHED
​JULY 2018

With its luscious artwork, wonderful English dub and dreamlike plot, Studio Ghibli animation SPIRITED AWAY (Hayao Miyazaki 2001) opened a door to an audience dissatisfied with a Disney-dominated industry. But, with all the beauty on screen, comes a heavy helping of gross. The heroine Chihiro (Rumi Hiiragi/Daveigh Chase) finds herself recoiling in horror as her parents are transformed into swollen-bellied swine as punishment for pigging out on the food of the spirits that inhabit the world around them. These parent-pigs are not cute. They writhe and squeal, their stomachs stuffed clumsily into jeans and shirts and ugly features drenched with sweat and saliva. It is a truly uncomfortable image. 
 
Such vivid imagery is deployed for each character that exercises greedy tendencies. Each of the workers at the bath house within which Chihiro is trapped is driven by their greed. When the spirit No-Face (Bob Bergen) starts producing gold for those that help him, the whole institution loses its mind to impress and feed the spirit. No-Face gets bloated and swells to many times his original size, all the while the workers shower him with gifts with no hint of dignity or poise. The climax of this is as symbolic as it is nauseating. When Chihiro gives No-Face a gift given to her by a river spirit, No-Face eats it and proceeds to expel everything he has ingested over the last day, including two bath house workers. The image is truly repellent. It seems there is not one surface untouched by the spirit’s vomit. Nevertheless, the disgusting nature of the images perfectly mirrors the point that the film tries to put across from the very beginning: do not give in to greed. Chihiro’s kindness, her selflessness when No-Face would shower her with gold, seem to trigger that violent reaction from the spirit who, once emptied, returns to a state of calm and passivity. 
 
SPIRITED AWAY uses the limitlessness of animation to litter an aesthetically pleasing film with elements of mild horror and stomach-churning imagery, which bolster the strong moral compass of the film and each of Studio Ghibli’s releases. Disney, whose films are often built on the sanitised memories of once gruesome tales, encourage children (especially girls) to be nice, grow up and marry a prince. To portray greed with the same ferocity as Miyazaki would create the need for an entirely different story altogether, where the heroes and heroines are wholly good, that do not lust after fortunes at all – much like Chihiro. But therein lies the problem. The code of conduct that each of us follows is distinctly personal and it is worth nothing that Japanese culture places honour and family above much else. The greed that we see in SPIRITED AWAY simply does not fit into Disney’s world, a corporate world with an aim to make money from film, rather than art for art’s sake. 

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