Representações de uma identidade japonesa contemporânea em a viagem de Chihiro (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the representations of a contemporary Japanese identity that the Spirited Away director Hayao Miyazaki builds in his movie. Spirited Away is the most successful feature film of the Studio Ghibli, co-founded by Miyazaki and the most internationally recognized Japanese animation studio. These representations occur mainly from the way the director builds the fantastic world where the story takes place, in the relationship of this “other-world” that seems to seek to articulate Japan's Shinto tradition with contemporary Japan. For our task, we will analyze both the internal and external aspects of the movie. First, we will try to understand the Spirited Away narrative and characters, from the uses that the film makes of mythological structures, using the “hero’s journey” concept developed by Joseph Campbell, especially Christopher Vogler's reading of this model of analysis transposed for cinematographic language, in order to understand how in the use of these structures, director Hayao Miyazaki articulates elements of Japanese tradition with modern Japanese elements and Western elements. From this point, we will deal with the relationship of the film with the reality that produced it, the historiography and, mainly, with its author. Finally, we will examine the role of the anime in contemporary Japanese culture, what kind of Japan the anime represents and how Japan uses these representations. To account for the Japanese specificities in this process of cultural hybridism, we will mainly use the work of the Japanese sociologist Koichi Iwabuchi and his concept of strategic hybridism, which studies the way Japan appropriates foreign cultures in a planned and strategic way, unlike cultural hybridity thought from the relationship of the western powers with their colonies. On the contrary, since Japan itself has a history of regional imperialism, our hypothesis is that Spirited Away serves, to some extent, Japanese post-World War II soft power: a friendly, peaceful and, and as characteristic of Miyazaki’s work, concerned with the environment.