studio ghibli

Spirited Away is another Ghibli Studio film directed by Hayao Miyazaki once again that I like.
The story is about the girl Chihiro followed her parents to move to a new home but strayed into another world by accident. Both parents became pigs because of greed, eating the food from restaurants that are not opened yet. Chihiro has to experience various tests and dangers, with the help of Bailong to survive in this dimension of Yaokai and rescue her parents.

I thought I understood the film but I might be not. I read an article about the hidden meanings and symbols about Spirited Away, I was blew away from what I have read.

The movie is about a girl wandered into an unknown fantasy world, she has to find a way to escape. However the article said, it wasn’t the girl wandered into the unknown world, she was sent into this weird fantasy place by her parents. The hot spring hotel was actually depicting a hooker house. The young girl was sold away by her parents to be a young female hooker. This is why the parents became pigs, not only because of greed to “free products” but greed to money, abandoning their children, sending her to an “unknown fantasy world”.

In the film, most of the workers of the hot spring hotel are female and the customers came to the hotel are creatures wearing wealthy, royal uniforms or they could be called “gods”. This is a depiction of the old times of Japan when war happened, a lot of peasants were extremely poor, selling their children away to work, war or services was a common thing to do.

One of the most shocking part to me is when the scene, a river god was polluted by garbage so Chihiro had to clean him up, that was her first job to do in the hotel too. I thought it was talking about pollution we did to river but instead…that part was talking about a young hooker’s first service to her first customer…I won’t say in details, if you understand what that means then you understand, if you don’t, it is ok, you don’t have to, really.

I cannot unseen what I have read from that article, no matter if it is true or coincidence. I can’t watch this film Spirited Away with a pure soul anymore.