Introduction
Contrary to popular belief, childhood is definitely not an easy period in human life. This time is characterized by many qualitative changes in the child’s physiology and consciousness, and their worldview’s serious reconstruction. In other words, in late childhood, the individual unconsciously prepares for adult life to become part of the society for which they have usually disliked over the past few years. Adult role models, conservative views, seriousness, and the frequent prohibitions that weigh on a teenager’s life meet in the path of an adult boy or girl, and they can either accept them and become adults like everyone else or reject them and try to change the world qualitatively.
It is worth acknowledging that transition issues are found in a large number of literary and film sources. On the one hand, this is not surprising, because every adult, whether writer or director, has gone through this challenging path and has an idea of what teenagers traditionally experience. On the other hand, authors seek to depict this time full of contradictions and confrontations most artistically and uniquely. Spirited away by Hayao Miyazaki and Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind are works of art that are unique and original and convey the path of teenagers on their way to adulthood.
The authors talk about the challenges of growing up, the barriers to becoming independent, and how overcoming these barriers can unlock human potential. The phrase “The tragedy of childhood,” which is the title of the play, is also relevant to a Japanese director’s seemingly carefree work. Although the different story told, even for entirely different audiences, Miyazaki’s and Wedekind’s works reveal surprising similarities in the techniques that the authors use to demonstrate how children grow up. It is important to note that the role of such literary and cinematographic techniques is not to stretch time or demonstrate the author’s skills but to hide the apparent problems of maturation in a way that does not seem so obvious. This paper aims to compare the two works of art, the Miyazaki’s film, and the Wedekind’s play, in the context of the techniques used to reveal the topic of maturation.
Loneliness
Until a particular stage of life, children tend to be dependent on the decisions of their parents. However, such a scheme also works the other way — parents must provide care and gently control their children’s actions to prevent a safety hazard. Spirited away and Spring Awakening equally reveal parental irresponsibility in raising a child (Miyazaki, 2001; Wedekind; 1916). Turning to sources, virtually all students find themselves forced into independence due to adult disinterest. As long as the mother of the main character, Wendla, was not involved in the sexual education at the stages when it was especially necessary, which led to premature pregnancy, Chihiro’s parents leave the girl to her fate.
At the same time, in the play, the two boys’ parents overlook the fact that the children are thinking about suicide, and Moritz even managed to shoot himself because of problems with school. The same disinterest is characteristic of Miyazaki’s fairytale world — Chihiro’s parents, fascinated by the abundance of free food, decide to have lunch, leaving their daughter alone in an unfamiliar and devastated city. This approach, expressed by adults’ lack of attention, leads Chihiro to wander the city and meet amazing creatures. Ultimately, it is essential to recognize that parents, by abandoning their children and giving them independence, become the reason for the intensification of children’s maturation.
Obstacles
It is known that the creation of conflict situations faced by characters leads to their personal development. The outcome of such confrontations depends on how strong the person is — if under the pressure of external conditions, the character does not withstand, then such a story will break them, not allowing blossom as a personality. It is worth saying that most professional authors demonstrate conflicts not openly but hide them under the plot turns, obstacles, and barriers that the central figures of the narrative face.
This technique is typical for both a Japanese film and a German play. From the very beginning, the main characters look like children who do not arouse the sympathy of the audience: Chihiro is a languid and naughty girl, and Wendla pestering her mother because of her dress length. Their hysterical nature leads to a negative atmosphere, although this is just the beginning of the work. However, in the plot development course, the girls face a series of obstacles, overcoming which qualitatively changes the characters’ personality. Chihiro meets dangerous with monsters, converges with the evil witch Yubaba, loses her own soul and parents to grow from a capricious girl into a strong and morally stable personality, able to sympathize, help and act. Wendla’s travels were not as fairytale, but her path was marked by lack of support from adults, concealment of useful information, beating with sticks and rape by a classmate, and finally, pregnancy. Most likely, if the Wendla’s story line had not ended with an accidental death during the abortion, the girl would have seriously outpaced her peers in psychological and even physiological development. Apparently, the authors strongly used barriers to give the girls’ characters personal growth but ended their stories in entirely different ways. While Wendla’s story ended in death, Chihiro, who felt an adult working life’s power, returned to the family environment.
It is interesting to note other characters’ lines, which through obstacles, could become a better version of themselves. It is about Melchior’s qualitative horizontal change and baby Boh’s vertical improvement, a giant baby evil witch. Melchior, from the very first act, seems to be a fairly educated boy, giving in to hope at school and having love from many girls, while Boh, on the contrary, a continually crying child who only wants to play. The conflict of sympathy, in this case, is apparent: the reader is interested in Melchior but hates crying Boh. However, a series of events realized through the fault of a schoolboy, such as the rape of a girl and the boy’s arrogance and desire to control everything, cool down the reader’s warm feelings towards the protagonist. Over time, after the other two central figures’ deaths, Melchior will remain the only one who will bear the cross of all the decisions that they made, and that led to these consequences. On the contrary, the initially unpleasant Boh becomes attractive when under the influence of the spell turns into a fat rat. In this state, the boy travels with Chihiro that expands the baby’s worldview. The culmination of his transformation from a child to a more mature person is that he could get back on his feet and stopped crawling on the floor.
Violence
There is no doubt that acts of physical or sexual violence are unacceptable in a humanistic society and should not be seen as motivating for children to grow up. However, artwork often hyperbole the phenomenon of violence, making it a barrier to a child’s development. In the sources studied, both the characters in the play and Chihiro were surrounded by violence. One of Wendla’s friends, Martha Bessell, finds herself physically abused by her father. The man bullies the child, probably because he enjoys it. Chihiro has not been noticed in physical abuse acts, but she is under psychological pressure, forcing a 10-year-old girl to work at Sentō on an equal footing with adult ladies. It is also fair that almost all meetings with adults are accompanied by contempt from them — Yubaba mocks the girl’s wishes and takes her name away from her, Kamaji initially paid no attention to the child.
However, the play and the animated cartoon authors do not have the same approach to investigating the consequences of violence. Martha does not have enough strength of spirit to resist force and asks her friends to keep it a secret while Chihiro gradually defeats each of the adults who showed violent methods. Chihiro finds herself in a winning position even at the end when she can outsmart the wicked witch, while Martha desperately asks her friend for the gun with which Moritz shot himself. One can only guess what the girl’s gun is for, but the fact remains that Martha could not find the power to get out of the vicious circle of violence.
Doubts
In attempts to demonstrate the uniqueness of the characters’ worldview, the authors often create a conflict of ideologies. Reasons for open confrontations may be natural intergenerational struggles, politics, excessive supervision by adults, or children’s frivolity. Such conflicts clearly show the grain that matures in a child’s consciousness — it is doubt about the correctness and effectiveness of adult society. On their way to maturity, children often evaluate their parents, teachers, and all other adults with which they interact. As a rule, the child does not agree with adults’ actions because they believe that they know how to do better. Ultimately, the child wants to grow up to be an adult who will dictate the rules themselves and not listen to any of the elders.
Such a technique is found in the play, and the film: the playwright tells about Melchior’s doubts about the school program’s validity, and the animator tells about Chihiro’s wavering about the correctness of the moral attitudes of the society in the spirit world. Having grown up before his peers, Melchior knows a lot about sex education, therefore, he helps Moritz with his problem of erotic dreams. Melchior believes that the educational program is designed to develop children’s standard and limited thinking — so that schoolchildren will not ask unnecessary questions, and the teacher’s authority will be unshaken. However, limited thinking is also observed in adults and fairytale creatures, because graduates of such ineffective educational programs become hostages of this type of thinking. A clear example of such doubts is the schoolboy’s reasoning about the teacher’s incorrect interpretation of a fragment of Latin text. Doubts also arise in Chihiro when she, the only one of a hundred adults, decides to trust Kaonashi to help the creature to find himself. Through the questioning of the accepted social attitudes, the qualitative development of the character takes place.
Power
One of the most significant engines driving children to grow up is the desire for power. That is why Miyazaki and Wedekind show this idea throughout the story. Power becomes a factor in accepting new responsibilities and a tool to control not only the world but also the own mind. For this reason, young children are so eager to gain control. Throughout their stories, Wendla and Chihiro want to be involved in adult affairs and, moreover, express desire to control them. Thus, Wendla wants to step into the world of adult life from the very beginning, learning about sex education and the process of conception of children, while Chihiro wants to take the job from Kamaji and wash the River Spirit herself. Chihiro succeeds in gaining the desired power, and gradually her personality is integrated into the matrix of the fabulous spirit world. It is very likely that if the girl had stayed in this place, she would have been able to overthrow Yubaba over time, becoming the new manager of the Sentō. In Spring Awakening all children are subject to the desire for power: Melchior and Moritz want to act independently of their parents and teachers, Martha wants to control the spread of rumors about domestic violence, and Wendla wants to learn as much as possible about the adult world. These desires become a reason to manage their own lives as adults do.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it should be noted that the issues of transition between adolescents and adults will always be relevant since society is undergoing all the time changes in age. In this paper, the film Spirited away, and the play Spring Awakening were investigated in order to compare the techniques used to convey the topic of child maturation. It was shown that both works, despite their different subjects, use similar techniques to demonstrate these transitions — loneliness, obstacles, violence, doubt, and power. The author’s characters, interacting with several storytelling events, overcome them in a peculiar way and either grow up or remain at the same level of development.
Reference List
Spirited away (2001) Directed by Hayao Miyazaki [Film]. Tokyo, Japan: Studio Ghibli.
Wedekind, F. (1916) The awakening of spring: A tragedy of childhood. Philadelphia: Brown Brothers.