I think I'm turning Japanese
» Jed Richards

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Slowly but surely our visual values have been changing. It’s been a serene, almost Zen-like transformation creeping into the subconscious of our popular culture, characterised by fashionable noodle restaurants, graphic designers using Japanese characters and minimalist interior design. American style imagery is becoming the faded backdrop to popular culture while the clean lines and intriguing otherness of far eastern aesthetics are the new rising sun.

One area of popular culture which has recently become the battle ground on which American cultural dominance is being challenged is animation. Enter stage left Spirited Away. This Japanese animation became the first film in history, of any genre, to gross more than $200 million at the box-office before ever opening in America. In fact, less than 5% of the film’s worldwide box-office profits came from the USA – a sign that non-American revenues are becoming more important. This is especially remarkable considering that the animation genre was until recently completely dominated by American influence.

One of the opening scenes of Spirited Away. © 2001 Nibariki, TGNDDTM.

Failure of the American giants

Disney’s last success was The Lion King in 1994, but that was almost 10 years ago and due to an ill-considered decision to rely on their traditional foundation of sexed-up fairy tales and olde-worlde yarns the company has met with a long string of complete failures. Considering that their audience is brought up on high-tech entertainment and Sony Playstation, Disney’s failure is somewhat predictable.

In recent years Pixar’s approach has been more successful. With movies like Toy Story they combined fresh ideas with advanced computer graphics. But their latest offering, Finding Nemo, was a flop. Critics called it Pixar’s worst ever and claimed that the studio had ‘gone Disney’ by recreating the distinctive (but hackneyed) ‘stretch-and-squash’ style of hand-drawn animation with the digital medium.

Success of Spirited Away

The beautifully realised interior of the bathhouse ruled over by Yubaba. © 2001 Nibariki, TGNDDTM.

Compared to the commercial and formulaic approach of the American giants Spirited Away is like a breath of fresh air. Magical is a word that is too often used to describe films about fantasy and childhood yet this time it truly is appropriate. The film is the latest work of Studio Ghibli and megastar director Hayao Miyazaki. When it was released in Japan in 2001 it overtook Titanic as the most successful film in the country’s history. Having won a Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and an Academy Award it met with almost unanimous critical acclaim when it was released here in the UK in October 2003.

Spirited Away’s warm reception here in the UK is perhaps surprising considering the film is so very Japanese – it is about the Shinto spirit world and is set in a Japanese bathhouse. It tells the story of a young girl, Chihiro, who ends up in a weird abandoned theme park after her parents take a wrong turn and get lost on their way to their new house. Her parents are soon turned into pigs after they eat some cursed food and Chihiro finds herself in front of a tall mysterious bathhouse. It turns out that the bathhouse serves the spirit world and every night hosts a bizarre procession of customers ranging from polluted river spirits that need cleaning to fat and sweaty daikon radish gods. In order for Chihiro to save her parents she has to negotiate for a job with the bathhouse’s creepy owner, a huge-headed witch called Yubaba.

One of the strange Shinto spirits that visits the bathhouse in Spirited Away. © 2001 Nibariki, TGNDDTM.

The film retains a magical and dreamlike atmosphere throughout. Too often in modern films there seems to be a rational or scientific explanation for every fantastical event, but in Spirited Away their absence is refreshing. Spirited Away’s alien and exotic qualities, which are more intense for a non-Japanese audience, are part of what makes it so pleasant to watch. When watching it I felt the same curiosity I sensed as a child when I used to stare at the illustrations in a favorite picture book and wonder what was around the corner or on the other side of some distant mountains.

Chihiro rides a dragon formed river god. © 2001 Nibariki, TGNDDTM.

Clare Matthews has lived and worked in Japan for over a year, she is now an actuary working in London. Hear her impressions of Spirited Away: modem || broadband

Warm reception for Japanese animation

Why is Japanese animation being so well received? Nick Park (founder of Aardman Animation) made this statement in an interview in the Guardian:

“I find Miyazaki refreshing precisely because so much commercial animation is lacking in imagination. Mainstream animated movies are dumbed-down and sanitised: they make the world in their own image rather than exploring the limitless possibilities out there. The mainstream wants linear story structures, character arcs and epiphanies, but Miyazaki doesn’t bother with any of that. He has a different starting place.”

Somehow Spirited Away and the other well respected Japanese animations (Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Princess Mononoke) seem to have artistic integrity and a fully rounded visual style that doesn’t rely solely on cuteness and family values. It’s a product of an animation-fanatical obsessive society – the depth and integrity of the worlds portrayed shine through every frame.

Chihiro peers through a crack into the mysterious bathouse. © 2001 Nibariki, TGNDDTM.

The genre also has the courage to add an edgy adult aspect that is sometimes disturbing and challenging. For example, in Spirited Away some commentators have seen a darker undercurrent. The actions of the strange character No-Face who seems to have a guilty fascination with the ten year-old Chihiro and the way she has to work washing dirty clients in a bathhouse (which often provide, ahem, private services in Japan) is seen by some as an attack by Miyazaki on the Japanese sex-industry – and you thought this was for kids! Miyazaki is certainly not afraid of making social or political comments through his work. His last film Princess Mononoke, also a massive success in Japan, was a comment on man’s destruction of the natural world once again wrapped up in a mysterious and beautifully realised story.

The strange character No-Face observes Chihiro. © 2001 Nibariki, TGNDDTM.

Hollywood is catching on

Spirited Away is just one example of a number of recent high-profile films that seem to be championing eastern imagery and aesthetic sensibilities rather than American visual values. For example, Tarantino’s latest film Kill Bill relies heavily on this new-found oriental cool. He shunned the all American styling of his previous two works in favour of paying homage to the Hong Kong martial arts genre, the yakuza gangster flick and indeed Japanese animation. Tom Cruise’s newest epic The Last Samurai also exploits our new curiosity about Japan, while all three Matrix movies owe everything about their visual style to some of the more action-orientated examples of Japanese animation. Despite skewing the Japanese imagery to suit its own needs it seems Hollywood has also noticed the trend.

Lucy Liu as the Tokyo gangser boss O' Ren Ishii in Kill Bill. © 2003 Miramax.

Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai. © 2003 Warner Brothers.

As globalisation continues apace we are going to be looking further afield for the next wave of popular culture, and this time the wave is breaking from the East. The commerciality, gaudiness, vulgarity and ‘big is better’ ethos of American style visuals is proving to be a turn-off, and people are looking towards the clean, simple, spiritual and ‘less is more’ attitude of the inscrutable otherness found in Japanese aesthetics and design.

Simon Hampson is an Oxford graduate in philosophy, hear what he has to say about the increasing use of Japanese aesthetics: modem || broadband

Hear Clare Matthews' comments on the Japanese visuals used in the UK: modem || broadband

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