Spirited Away Meaning

Animated films have the unique ability to use colors more deliberately than live action films, and can be more creative and surrealistic with color. They are given still more leniency when they exist removed from the real world, in a spirit world, as is the case with Spirited Away (Miyazaki, 2001). This allows the director to enhance and emphasize the message and purpose of a film. By using color in rhetorical ways Spirited Away, and numerous other films add to their meaning to create more impactful works.

In Spirited Away, color is used with the painterly effect to create an environment that is the spirit world. The film is not bound to the characteristics or expectations of real world, and the scenes are a reminder of that. For instance,

Expressionistic and surrealistic color are used in each of those films respectively. Ryan morphs the bodies of the characters to show the way that the subjects are decaying, and have allowed their once robust bodies to shatter immensely, often using bright color and big contrasts to show characters morphing. It also is used to show the parts of them that have been lost to people and traumatic events. This makes the documentary short more devastating and impactful because you can see the visible signs of pain in the characters, rather than usually when you must infer it. Similarly, City Paradise uses a surreal interpretation on London in order to show how surreal it feels to immigrate to a new place, or even just adapt to sudden change. Colors are typically murky, and a haze surrounds the town, but it also has bright, saturated spots, often reds drawing attention away, and a very strange, surrealist style of animation, especially with the realistic faces, but crude bodies, that jars with typical animation. This emphasizes the disconnect faced by people in her situation, foreign, unaccommodated, and alone. It creates discomfort in the viewer, just as the character was uncomfortable and intimidated. These films also use other color techniques to affect the viewer. Ryan’s use of leitmotifs also allows it to display emotions

This film is done almost entirely in black and white, absent of all color except red. Black and white gives the film a more rustic feel, a throwback to a simpler time with trolley cars and street corner flowershops. The film is a simple one as well. A worker finds swift romance with a woman and spends a day attempting to reconnect with her, and is helped along by an invisible hand. Not much is left to the nuance, and so it is set in simple black and white (with no dialog either.) The film is simple and does not need any of these embellishments. It would be a good film if it was produced in the 1930s, and it is a good film today because of this simplicity of its nature. Though the film does not use color extensively, the short is reminiscent of a comic strip. As stated above, this lends to the simplicity of the short. It is a short story that could be condensed into a comic strip in a magazine. The point is simple, the pacing is quick and short, and the message is easily understood. It doesn’t need any