Drawing Delicious: The Food of Spirited Away

Fig. 1 - Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001).

To make the iconic French Provençal dish ratatouille, one must first prepare the ingredients, peel and cut the onions, chop the garlic, thinly slice the courgettes and the aubergines, de-seed the peppers and chop the tomatoes. To make animated ratatouille, one must simply pick up a pen. Cartoon characters have always had a way of eating that made the spectator envious. From two dogs eating what is possibly the world’s tastiest spaghetti in Lady and the Tramp (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson & Hamilton Luske, 1955) to SpongeBob SquarePants making a burger (a ‘krabby patty’ if you like) from a secret recipe, the animated world of food has delivered many instances of food envy. Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2001) while tainting this idea, uses food as a symbol of decadence and as a challenge in Chihiro’s coming of age tale (Fig. 1). While most of the conversation surrounding Spirited Away and its use of food focuses on how the film is a critique of the rise of consumerism in modern Japan, this post will focus on a much more raw and human experience: the sensory journey we go through by watching animated food. It will conclude that the spectator, just like Chihiro, comes of age and realizes their place in today’s consumerist world by craving animated food that they cannot obtain, a fantasy that does not exist in the human world.

Spirited Away tells the story of Chihiro, a young girl, and her parents who suddenly find themselves trapped in an abandoned amusement park, later revealed to be a resort for spirits who wish to take a break from the human world. Chihiro soon learns that in order to stay in the spirit world unrecognized and free her parents from the curse of the capitalist world (and return to the human world), she needs to work for Yubaba, the witch who runs the bathhouse. Beneath its rather simple plot, Spirited Away holds many metaphors. The film’s duality of the worlds, according to Susan Napier, represents modern Japan as “a society that, with its fading grip on historic tradition and an ambivalent attitude toward the future” (2006: 219). Food, on the other hand, has often been understood as a symbol for greed, with many references to indulgence as an act resulting in terrible consequences. This engagement with food is first seen when Chihiro’s parents wander into an empty yet fully operational restaurant that lures them in with a delicious aroma. Their indulging leads to their transformation into wild pigs, losing their human form and values in favor animal behavior and grunts (Fig. 2). Even when Chihiro first meets Haku, a dragon disguised as a boy, he gives her a piece of magical food that enables her stay in the spirit world. A duality surrounding food is also present in these scenes as, the more food is shown to the spectator as a symbol of greedy consumerist culture, ironically the animated food remains just as tasty looking. The main question here is how can something that is not real make the spectator envious, and lead them to physically crave it? Napier also points out that one of the few instances of animated food not drawing the spectator in is when Chihiro is eating rice balls. She says that the “foul-tasting ‘dango’ thus can be seen as a wholesome alternative to the consumption patterns of Chihiro's parents and No Face” (2006: 302).

Fig. 2 - Chihiro’s parents transform into pigs.

As the food in Spirited Away is meant to represent the greed that comes with capitalism, perhaps the aim is to trigger an awakening in the spectator that they, also, are a pawn in today’s capitalist world, all through the mouthwatering animated food. I believe that for the human brain to consider animated food ‘food’, the image has to tap into the individual’s memory, making them associate the image on screen with a sense of taste that they have already experienced and a memory they have made prior to that. A 2016 article on the psychological aspect of “food advertising” has found out that multi-sensory simulation can “affect taste perception by affecting sensory cognitions” (Elder & Krishna 2010: 748). The authors also point out that food on screen can tap into other senses (such as smell and sight) and increase the intensity of taste (Elder & Krishna 2010: 748). While food advertisements do this via a visual description of the advertised product, animated films can quite literally bring the spectator into a full sensory experience with the use of ‘visualised’ smell and imagined touch, as well as aligning the spectator with the character eating. As it is animated, the whole ride can be designed according to the experience wished to be delivered.

Spirited Away, all 125 minutes of it, is like sitting down to have a meal. Yet the spectator is not the one to do the eating. Instead, we are aligned with young protagonist Chihiro, sat on the other side of the table, watching the greedy consume. At first, just like Chihiro’s parents, the moment the delicious animated food interacts with saliva, the (animated) tastes lure them in further. This is where No Face comes to play. No Face is a semi-transparent spirit that becomes obsessed with pleasing Chihiro and being acknowledged by her. Due to the nature of the spirit world, No Face assumes that this can only be done through offering her gold, yet when she does not take it, he becomes violent and loud. The film, then, through No Face, shows us the corruptive side of consumerism and giving into all this animated food (Fig. 3). He is a character that constructs his whole identity hiding behind a mask, and then replicating the actions of those surrounding him and those he consumes. Ayumi Suzuki argues that “when he eats those greedy men and women, he gains a pseudo-identity through them” (2009). No Face was innocent and a good character at first, who later became corrupted and sucked into the never-ending whirlpool of consumerist culture after he figured out that the more gold he produced, the more food he would be fed. Napier argues that he is “voiceless, it must swallow others in order to speak, and it lives only to consume” (2006: 304). Although the animated food has not ‘gone bad,’ the more the spectator sees No Face consume, the more unappetizing the food looks; the more people he eats, the greedier he becomes (taking on their characteristics). Suzuki argues that “No-Face represents capitalist production and consumption, a system that grows by feeding upon human greed” (2009).  After eating numerous workers that bring him more and more greed, he wants to eat Chihiro, the only person not giving him attention.

Fig. 3 - The greed of No Face.

The animated food that once looked delicious, realistic and mouthwatering is no longer appetizing to the spectator, for it has now tapped into the part of us obsessed with consumerism. I believe that No-Face desperately wanting “to have that heart after unsuccessfully trying to satisfy himself with other material” represents the greed of humankind, always thinking that their next purchase or their next mouthful will be enough to satisfy, yet it never does (Suzuki 2009). Both of these scenes using food as a metaphor in Spirited Away contribute to the coming of age of Chihiro. Tai Wei Lim argues that as “Chihiro’s character matures in the film, a rejection of modern values of consumption and material progress is detected” (2013). It is only when Chihiro helps No-Face get rid of all the consuming he has done by feeding him the River spirit’s dumpling that he becomes docile again. Like Chihiro, the food makes the spectator aware of their own place in today’s capitalist world. In a way, craving animated food by triggering our senses is another form of us (the audience) wanting something we cannot have, for animated food does not exist in the material human world.

As the film comes to an end, Chihiro is even more repulsed by the food. The product of modern capitalism has finally ‘gone bad’. In the scene with No-Face, she refuses to accept the gold and the materialistic ideas it represents, and is absolutely disgusted by the behavior of her parents, over-indulging on something that was not meant for them. The spectator, similarly, is no longer interested in how delicious the animated food appears, and would perhaps much rather be passengers on the train flowing through the zen of the purple waters. Therefore, as Chihiro comes of age, perhaps, the spectator also has a similar experience while realizing that although tapping into our senses and making our mouths water, animated food and its fantasies of experience must simply remain on screen.

**Article published: June 26, 2020**

References

Elder, Ryan S. and Aradhna Krishna. 2010. “The Effects of Advertising Copy on Sensory Thoughts and Perceived Taste.” Journal of Consumer Research 36, no. 5: 748–756.

Lim, Tai Wei. 2013. “Spirited Away: Conceptualizing a Film-Based Case Study through Comparative Narratives of Japanese Ecological and Environmental Discourses.” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 8, no. 2: 149–162.

Napier, Susan J. 2006. “Matter Out of Place: Carnival, Containment, and Cultural Recovery in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away.” The Journal of Japanese Studies 32, no. 2: 287–310.

Suzuki, Ayumi. 2009. “A nightmare of capitalist Japan: Spirited Away,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 51, available at: https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc51.2009/SpiritedAway/.

Biography

Mina Tumay is a 23-year-old journalist, writer and photographer. She graduated from King’s College London in 2019 with a BA in Liberal Arts (Majoring in Film and Minoring in Politics), and is currently finishing up an MA in International Journalisms at SOAS, London. She enjoys storytelling more than anything in the world, and often writes about many topics ranging from foreign policy to climate change to film.