Spirited Away (2001) (with Susan Napier)

Episode 108 returns Chris and Alex once more to the world of Japanese anime as they look at the images of displacement, gluttony, and labour in Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001), perhaps the flagship Studio Ghibli animated feature and a film that won the 2003 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Special guest for this instalment is Professor Susan Napier (Goldthwaite Professor of Rhetoric, International Literary and Cultural Studies at Tufts University) whose work spans the history and theory of Japanese animation as well as issues of gender, science-fiction, and fantasy. Susan is also the author of a number of monographs and essays on both fantasy and animation, from The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature: The Subversion of Modernity (1996) and Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Japanese Animation (2005) to the recent Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art (2018). Topics for this episode includes tropes of the ‘portal quest’ narrative within fantasy storytelling, and child protagonist Chihiro’s quest to both ‘escape’ and ‘prove’ her identity; distinctions between human and spirit worlds that permit an interrogation of modern society’s capitalist consumptions and expenditures; the animated representation of cleanliness and disgust, including the portrayal of food; and how Spirited Away navigates spectators through the uneven, ambivalent, and transformative fantasy space of childhood. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**