Connie

This essay makes an interesting comment on the relationship between race and gender. I think the passage of time is also a key important theme and is one that also shows up commonly in fairytales, like Sleeping Beauty, concerned with the deposition of an evil establishment by a younger generation after time has passed.

I’m interested in the idea of the spiritual world is a symbol for postmodern Japan, or as exemplified in your essay, a traditional world that is in the process of becoming corrupted by globalization. It sparks the question of what the real world, or the world Chihiro is from, stands in as? Also, I really enjoyed the idea of Chihiro as an agent of change, and I wonder if she can become a symbol of hope for change catalyzed by the newer Japanese generation.

This is an interesting topic. I think there are some important arguments to be made for the value of stories that never end as well. Stories that never end provide hope and provoke the imagination. There are also stories that end with an open-endedness, in the sense that they provoke us to imagine any number of alternative endings. This isn’t related to film, but Borges wrote a short story about infinite courses that our lives could take and how we are always living alternative lives in alternate universes while we are living the one we are in.