As we discussed in class, the initial intrigue within Spirited Away was that it was an eastern (Japanese) film while most of the others were usually western films. Despite this, my group faced little trouble in completing the monomyth. This only furthered the notion of how widespread the monomyth is. The one intrigue within Spirited Away is that the film is not centered around the journey, but around how Chihiro grows through the film and shows how responsible she is to both herself. Due to this we had trouble finding an answer to the "return from without" part initially since Chihiro does not rely on anybody in the end. Other than that one part, we did not have much disagreement on any of the other parts.
It seems that many of us followed a similar approach towards the monomyth chart since most of the movies had relatively transferable sources. I feel that the Batman trilogy could have worked chronologically if they had tried to fit the triology first rather than trying to fit the 2nd movie and then taking material from the other two to try and fit the unfilled spaces. I also found in interesting how many of the movies followed the monomyth generically but very few could have a perfect answer for every blank, and I think that it is interesting that people had to change the chronology of the movies to try and fit it properly.
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I thought about your Western v Eastern comment. This doesn't exactly pertain to what we are supposed to be discussing, or actually even what you were saying, but I thought it was interesting haha:
ReplyDeleteI think Spirited Away may be more of the product of its times rather than a similarity in narrative. It's a post-colonial work saturated by Western influences in storytelling. Comparing a modern example like this to classic Eastern literature is revealing.
I find that Eastern storytelling, though I am definitely generalizing, tends to take a longer, less concise or climatic, and more holistic approach to narratives. Journey to the West is the only piece I've read personally, but its focus is on the journey rather than the resolution. Complicated and multilayered works like the Maharbata, which I have not read and only read about, I believe fit under this observation. Classic Western pieces of mythology, like The Illiad, which is long and complicated, but still concentrates on building a well-defined storyline that builds up to a sharp climax (Hector's death) at the end, don't have the same meandering quality as their eastern counterparts.
This didn't really address your post at all, but I wonder if it would have been harder to apply the monomyth to one of the pieces of Eastern literature mentioned above.
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