Any thoughts on ghibli? Spirited Away is my favorite movie, and I love the way you think about things so if you have any on ghibli please share!

notbecauseofvictories:

Spirited Away is far and away my favorite Ghibli movie, simply because I think I found the others at the wrong time. (Totoro terrified me when I was younger, Howl’s Moving Castle confused me, and Kiki’s Delivery Service was baffling as a child—I think that I’d be more sympathetic now, as a struggling twenty-something.) But Spirited Away has different echoes every time I revisit it, both childlike and adult, and I think that’s its staying power. At its heart it’s a fairytale and fairytales are eternal things. It doesn’t surprise me that of all the Ghibli films, it has the widest reach and most resonance.

(Though I will say, I would gladly cut my throat for Lady Eboshi, my Female Sam Vimes, with her red mouth and her double-barrel shotgun, whom I love.)

Spirited Away, unlike other Ghibli movies is a kind of eternal. I mean……..look. Let’s not give 60s-era stoner Joseph Campbell any more credit than he’s due, but he was onto something with the universality of the hero’s journey and the monomyth; of the way stories unite us, even if it’s on a level of deep-down unconscious morass. There are some stories that tap into that, wherever they originate from, no matter who crafts them. As a species, we have awkward velcro brains! Stuff catches on them all the time! And—well— 

Spirited Away is a classic example of the fantastic and the mundane colliding in a very human way. It sort of (not clearly, but understandably) articulates things about greed, about worthiness, about the brave and humble goose-girl/scullery maid/etc. who must strive and struggle against the unfairness of the world to fight towards truth and love. It is fantastic and kind and true, in the confusing liminal and flickering way stories about Cinderella and Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are.

At the end of the day, Chihiro is all these things the western world looks for in its heroines; she is humble and hardworking and kind and generous and frightened and determined despite that, and determined to save the individuals she loves. For children it’s weird and fantastic and strange, and for adolescents it’s about striking out and making decisions under your own power, and for adults it’s about choosing, again and again, even when it would be easier to let go and simply narrow your gaze, focus on the present, and now. All of the above are correct, and true, the way Cinderella is both the scullery maid and the princess and neither.

Some stories are for always, you know?