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What can a classic of Victorian children's literature have in common with a recent Japanese film? ANDO Satoshi argues that they represent, respectively, the crisis of Victorian England and that of contemporary Japan, through their heroines' identity crises as they pass from childhood into adolescence
Hayao Miyazaki's animation film Spirited Away (first released in Japan in 2001), although written in a very different social context, has much in common with Lewis Carroll's classic children's book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Both works are products of transitional periods: when Alice was written Britain was in the midst of a great turbulence, brought about by industrialisation, urbanisation and Darwinism, while Spirited Away is set in a precarious period for Japan's economy just after the 'babble boom' of the early 1990s. In such times of crisis, anxiety and pessimism prevail and people look not to the future but to the past, feeling the need for escapism. These are the conditions in which great fantasy is created (see Ando 2003 for a discussion of Alice and other British children's classics as products of the Darwin disturbance or the decline of the British Empire). Humphrey Carpenter (1985) points out that 'optimistic societies do not, apparently, produce great fantasies'. Most fantasy novels (and films) seek the past in some way, which is a reflection of the time's anxiety and pessimism.
In both stories, a pre-pubertal girl happens to stray into a perplexing 'other world' and experiences an identity crisis there. The two girls are soon going to go through puberty - Chihiro is said to be 10 years old; Alice's age is not given in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and though she is suggested to be seven and a half in the sequel, Through the Looking Glass, she seems to be about the same age as Chihiro, considering her linguistic ability and logical way of thinking - and they will encounter various rites of passage as they pass from infant to adolescent.
Girls are likely to experience at least some level of identity crisis when they go through puberty, for it is one of the biggest discontinuous changes of their lives. The two stories seem to express the protagonists' bewilderment at the change which they are soon to confront. The...