Spirited Away from Berkeley to Japan to Russia



I knew I had to see this latest movie by Hayao Miyazaki on the big screen. I have never gotten to see My Neighbor Totoro on the big screen, and only got to see Princess Mononoke once in a theater, and then in a big empty cold cheap-seats theater with bad sound in Santa Cruz, the last place playing it in the Bay Area. It cost me a $30 Berkeley parking ticket in a loading zone (in front of an abandoned building!): 2 pm on Saturday is when the entire surrounding three hundred miles of suburbs all drive in to shop and see movies. But luckily that $30 plus the $6 at the California theater door got me and a tightly clustered bunch of fans all the way from Berkeley to Japan to Russia.



You see, Spirited Away is a transporting film. I won't give it a real review, because it is in it's own genre, it's own category, unless you compare it with Totoro or Mononoke. It compares well with them. So how did we get from the Japanese bath house full of Japanese spirits and gods getting their cleansing sweats on to Russia? The elevator to the top floor. Yu-Baba, the mistress of the bath house, is Baba -Yaga! The guardian of the waters of life, prone to hiring young girls to do impossible tasks, and often depicted as having twin sisters, Yu-Baba even looks Russian, in a charicatured way. Her living quarters look royal, a mix of rich red and gold that could be just as easily Russian as Japanese.



Being a fan of this oldest of old Slavic mythic characters-- even believed to be a vestigial form of an ancient water-guardian spirit-- I went on-line to find the discussions that must be taking place about the link between Yu-Baba and Baba-Yaga, just in case other people saw more correspondences to Russian myth in this wonderful tapestry of characters. I didn't find much discussion beyond people pointing out that the Babas are similar, but I DID find this:


The Sor LaLune Fairy Tale Pages --- "A portal to the realm of fairy tale and folklore studies featuring annotated fairy tales." Including the histories of popular fairy tales! I found the discussion board where published authors were directing high school students to chapters on the anti-semitic roots of Rumpelstiltskin, and a discussion on the usage of "female cruelty" to enforce the cultural norm for women to be passive.



In that latter conversation someone pointed out how Miyazaki- who doesn't have purely cruel female characters- is writing for an Eastern (i.e. Pacific/ Asia) audience, people who are more comfortable with ambiguously good/ evil mixed characters. It's possible to have sympathy for almost any character in a Miyazaki story. Baba Yaga and Yu-Baba share this ambiguity, floating between generous and greedy, forgiving/ loving, and defensive/ vengeful. This makes me again think that Russia is more Asian than most people would expect. Their oldest mythic character may even have roots in Siberian or Near-Eastern places, where the myth tellers for centuries past the birth of Jesus still saw (still see) the forces of nature as negotiable, instead of Earth Spirit = BAD, Sky Spirit = GOOD as Judeo-Christian-influenced culture would usually have it.



Since you are ALL wondering, I won't leave you hanging. Spirited Away most definitely and easily meets the Lesbian Movie Standard (once more, the LMS requires a movie to have at least two women characters who have at least one conversation about something other than a man).