Environmentalism In Spirited Away

In Japanese culture, it is a common belief that everything in life thing has a spirit. The spirit world exists apart from the human world, however, the two coexisting realms have the ability to influence each other. In the natural world, humans often tend to disregard the conservation of the environment around them. Instead, they become fixated on desires stemmed from greed. Director, Hayao Miyazaki demonstrates many instances of the idea of environmentalism in our world, in his film Spirited Away, as well as how it relates to the popular japanese concept of spirits. The movie Spirited Away utilizes environmental imagery as a method to demonstrate the ways in which human activities have affected spirits, thus suggesting that the complex relationship …show more content…
A primary example of this shown in the movie would be the “stink spirit” that visits the bath house. Chihiro is placed with the task of bathing this being. The spirit is so filthy and polluted that he is barely approachable. Chihiro soon realizes that there is something wrong with this spirit. She nearly drowns while trying to get this spirit clean, but succeeds in the task. There was a “thorn” stuck in him which seemed to be the problem, and, when she pulls it out, all of the pollutants are expelled from the spirit, revealing his true identity- a river spirit. The river which this spirit represents is an disturbing outcome of human pollution to the organic world. The consequence that the spirits have to face are a result of human carelessness. This instance helps to further emphasize the directors message about environmentalism and to illustrate the parasitic exchange in which humans take part in with the spirit …show more content…
Greed is one of the traits displayed in the film that humans and spirits share. Humans almost always wish to have things done their own way. Take Chihiro’s parents for example. When exploring the abandoned amusement park, they took it upon themselves to pig out at one of the open food stations without and regards as to who’s the food was. They crossed over into and disrupted the order of the spirits, and in return, were turned into pigs. As pigs, they were no longer able to feed into greed and have things go their way, instead they were helpless and dependent on others in the spirit world. Even Chihiro put on a whiny display in the beginning of the movie of wanting to get her own way when she did not want to continue on but her parents went on anyways. However, once apart of the spirit world, she has to learn to do things in their way. Haku helps her learn how to survive and eventually escape this realm, but in the process, she couldn’t whine or cry about how she wanted things to be. The spirit world plays an effective role with the human world in teaching them a lesson about greediness. The human world is not the only world, and humans should not indulge in gluttony and greed for themselves