Spirited Away: Universal Themes

1. Spirited Away
Spirited Away was a global hit and the first anime to win the Best Animated Feature Award at the Academy Awards. As a result, it must have universal themes that people from around the world can relate to. One of the major universal themes within Spirited Away is that it is a coming-of-age story focusing on a young girl becoming her own brave and independent person. Chihiro starts the film as a nervous and slightly annoying young girl who is told what to do by everyone and lacks confidence in her actions. However, after her parents are turned into pigs and she is employed at the bathhouse, she must take the initiative to save herself and the people that she cares about. Throughout the movie, she grows into a person who takes risks and saves her family and Haku, something that would have been unimaginable at the beginning of the film. The coming-of-age theme is popular across all cultures, such as the British Harry Potter series and the recent Disney hit, Moana, and is something all can relate to because everyone must grow up.

Spirited Away is a film deeply entrenched in Japanese culture, especially in relation to the religion of Shinto.

In Shinto, it is believed that all things have a spirit, or kami. Everything in nature, such as rivers, trees, and rocks, all have spirits that should be respected and can be worshipped at shrines. In the film, Chihiro meets Haku, a river spirit, and a radish spirit in the bathhouse, which demonstrates the variety of spirits that exist in Shinto. Bathhouses also have a long history unique to Japan, where they have been known as staples in communities because people can come to interact and relax together. Public bathhouses are not popular in the United States, but can still be found in Japan

today.
A cultural observation that I made while watching the film is that Chiriro takes off her shoes before entering buildings, which is something that is not common within the United States. When I was travelling in Japan over the summer, it was common to take your shoes off before entering restaurants, temples, and homes, and many establishments had their own shelves where people would leave their shoes, which is something I had never really had to do in America. However, in Japanese culture, wearing shoes indoors can be seen as greatly disrespectful because it tracks in outside dirt and can damage tatami mat floors.
2. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
A universal theme in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is the portrayal of high school drama in film. Many anime are known as "slice-of-life" anime, which usually explore the daily lives of teenagers in Japan. Slice-of-life dramas, such as soap operas or teen romance films, are also popular in other cultures because they share stories that everyone can relate to and easily serve as a distraction from daily life. Slice-of-life themes are not unique to Japan and are quite universal, but they are certainly more popular in Japanese animation than in animation in any other country.
A culturally specific theme related to Japan in the anime is the respect that students pay to their surroundings while at school. In the movie and in Japan, students are assigned times to stay after and help to clean the school. The main plot of the films begins when Makoto is assigned the role of cleaning the supply closet after class and falls onto the walnut-shaped time travel device. This school policy teaches the students to take care of their environments because they must clean it on their own. In America, custodians are hired to clean the schools and most students are messy and do not clean up after themselves because the cleanliness of the school does not really affect them.
A cultural observation that I made while watching the film concerns how severe bullying is in Japanese high schools. During the film, the character of Sojiro is ridiculed and later physically abused while everyone watches because of a mistake that he made in class. The other students seem unfazed as if this behavior is the norm, which it most likely is in the majority of Japanese high schools where bullying is so severe. Bullying occurs in American schools as well, but many cases are not as cruel as those in Japan, which often cause young people to become hikikomori at a higher rate than any other nation.