Spirited Away Is About Xenophobia

It isn’t so hard to pick out.

Normally when I pick out my entertainment, I look for themes. Themes that interest me and strike a chord within me on a visceral level — and perhaps my least anticipated reaction after watching Spirited Away is to have a stronger connection with what was happening represented, instead of what took place materially within the world.

Let me preface this by saying I don’t think I understood much of the movie, or what was happening and whatever reasons made such events happen. I stopped watching anime years ago because I felt the medium was becoming stale and feeding off a cyclical desire to give into a consumerist desire to see more of what already existed, perhaps more so than other mediums. That’s completely fine if the artform is your bread and butter, but at the time, I had already immersed myself in live-action TV and found that while left with a less rich visual presentation, I was completely in awe of the writing quality and production value worked into network/streaming television. And I think there’s a push to candidness and human authenticity whenever it comes down to a presentation mostly comprised by humans, detailing their experiences and fleshing out their trials, struggles, to be human ones, such as our own.

But Spirited Away was everything but what the artform had me accustomed to. It was a tale old as time, about someone, finding themselves alienated by their newfound home. A home that they didn’t choose, that was superimposed by…