"Spirited Away" and Shinto

I found one Hayao Miyazaki interview and there are many thoughts/explanations about his ideas in “Spirited Away” that shows that this film is strongly connected with Japanese spiritual practices Shinto/ Shintao as we talked in last class + other interesting details.

Interview with Hayao Miyazaki

movies.ign.com

by Steven Horn

“I am not a big fan of evaluating a film based on its box office receipts. I believe a film should represent a very intimate personal encounter between what’s on the screen and what’s in an individual’s heart. To try to reduce that to numbers on a page is not something I can be a fan of.” Whether Spirited Away finds a wide audience here or not, it stands as a must-see for fans of animation and of storytelling in general. During a recent question and answer session at Hollywood’s famed El Capitan theater, Mr. Miyazaki shared his thoughts on a variety of subjects both in the animation world and film as a whole.

On the motifs of flight and pigs in his films: “My feeling is that we human beings are able to exist on planet Earth and are also stuck here because of gravity. Flight expresses a liberation from that grounding. Pigs symbolize greed but they are also quite likeable and you really can’t bring yourself to hate them’ just the way I feel about humans.” On some of the themes in Spirited Away: “The relationship between Chihiro and her parents is very typical of most family relationships in Japan. I was inspired to make this film when a daughter of mine turned 10. The most important thing for me in making this movie was to persuade the 10-year-olds that this movie was for them. I wanted them to be able to recognize themselves in the characters. I think I would like them to leave the movie theater with a sense of humility about the complexity and difficulties of the world we live in. I think an encounter with film is always an encounter with something new, so I think the possibility for everyone in the world appreciating the film is definitely there.” On Shintao and its inspiration for the film's setting: “My understanding of the history of Shintao is many centuries ago, the originators of Japan used Shintao to unify the country and that it then ended up inspiring many wars of aggression against our neighbors. There is still a great deal of ambiguity and contradiction in Japan about our relationship to Shintao. Many wish to deny it, to reject it. My feeling is that I have an appreciation for the very humble rural Shintao rituals that continue to this day throughout rural Japan, especially one ritual that takes place on solstice. The villagers call on all of the local gods and invite them to bathe in their bath.” On the look of the film: “All of the design that is featured as artwork in the movie is hand-drawn. We’ve given it a little elegance boost with digital technology. In digital technology, the color hues remain profoundly unstable so I instructed my staff to never trust the computer screen, rather only the way the color looks to their own eyes on paper.” Fundamentally, the animation is all pencil-drawn. In a few scenes we turned to digital; for instance to create patterns on the waves or to show bubbling water. As we headed into production on this film, I gathered my staff and I said to them, ‘This is a two-dimensional film. This is our strength.’ There is a fundamental difference in thinking about how to approach a 2-D versus a 3-D film. For example, Yubaba’s head (large as it is) is not always the same size in every scene. Depending on my mood and her mood, the size of her head changes. This is an emotional relationship we develop through scale with the audience, one that we would have to abandon if we wholeheartedly embraced digital technology. I'm holding onto my pencil, thank you.”

(http://movies.ign.com/articles/371/371579p1.html - all)

Then I had a question:

What is Shintao?

Shinto (神道, Shintō?) or kami-no-michi is the natural spirituality of Japan and the Japanese people. The word Shinto ("Way of the Gods") was adopted from the written Chinese (神道),[1] combining two kanji: "shin" (神?), meaning gods or spirits (originally from the Chinese word shen); and "tō" (道?), or "do" meaning a philosophical path or study (originally from the Chinese word tao). [1][2]

Shinto incorporates spiritual practices derived from many local and regional prehistoric traditions, but did not emerge as a formal centralized religious institution until the arrival of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism, beginning in the 6th century.[3] Buddhism gradually adapted in Japan to the native spirituality. (See article on "syncretism".)

(Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinto)