Spirited Away's (Okinawan?) music

[Jonathan M. Hall]

I'm not sure which scene markus is describing, but, yes, I too had a similar
reaction at the music--especially in the opening.

With the opening setting of the film in a kind of Chinatown as tourist site,
I think we have a confluence of the other (okinawa/china/the past in
general) as carnival with a simultaneous nod to the complicity of that
system with late capital consumption.

Jonathan



> From: Mark Nornes <amnornes at umich.edu>
> Reply-To: KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
> Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2002 12:33:34 -0400
> To: kineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
> Cc: Chris Ames <amesc at umich.edu>
> Subject: Spirited Away's (Okinawan?) music
> 
> Susan Napier was just at Michigan's Center for Japanese Studies
> presenting some work on the shojo and liminality. The talk was
> interesting, using Totoro, Spirited Away, and Lain to think about the
> shojo as inhabiting a "betwixt and between" space, an ambivalence raked
> by either/both nostalgia and the uncanny.
> 
> But what I wanted to ask the list had to do with the short clip we saw
> of Spirited Away, which has yet to come to Ann Arbor. I could have
> sworn the melody of the clip's music (perhaps the first time she sees
> the spirits?) is referencing Okinawa. Do other people have this sense?
> If so, what kind of use of "Okinawa" is this? As carnivalesque?
> Grotesque? Otherworldly?
> 
> Curiously,
> 
> Markus
> 
> 
> A. M. Nornes
> Kinema Club 
> http://pears.lib.ohio-state.edu/Markus/Welcome.html
>