Echoes of Colonialism and Identity Crisis: A Postcolonial Analysis of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away

Spirited Away, a Japanese animated fantasy film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki in 2001 brings to the audience a story of a young girl, Chihiro who along with her parents enter into the world of spirits. The film narrates a story of disruptive identity, language, and belonging of the protagonist, Chihiro and echoes themes of cultural displacement and colonization. This paper will analyze the film and the journey of the individuals into a colonized space, where conventional identities are suppressed within a dominated cultural landscape. This paper will delve into an argument where the film will be analyzed from the perspective of postcolonialism, where Chihiro's experiences in the spirit world reflect the tussle of the colonized people dealing with distorted identities, language, and complicated notion of belonging. Chihiro's arrival into the spirit world corresponds with the encounter of the colonized individual with the culture of the colonizer, where the transformation of her parents into pigs paralleled with the dehumanization and compromise of identity of the colonized. Chihiro's renaming as Sen, language as a tool of control, and disturbing their sense of belonging highlights the colonial imposition on humans in the world of the spirits. The bathhouse in the film is symbolic of the colonized space where the identities, languages of the colonized are constructed and contested. The paper will also try to analyze how the protagonist takes up the journey towards self-discovery and reclaims her identity, culture, and autonomy in the midst of oppression.