Pink Panda's Blog

   A strong and very prominent message and theme throughout the various studio ghibli films is a sense of strong young females who do not require the help of a man; instead these females may need support at times (like Chihiro needing emotional support and comfort from Haku) but never relying solely on their male counterpart for anything.    This is a huge theme for me in my paper, exploring these relationships between characters like Chihiro and Haku or Sophie and howl. and these aren’t the only films to have such relationships but I don’t want to dive too deep into...

What home means to me and how it relates back to Asian American history. Hayao Miyazaki movies had a large impact on my childhood, watching the English dubbed versions of Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle — Spirited Away being more Japanese-culturally based while Howl was more Euro-based with English actors and European settings and white characters. Chihiro was a little Japanese girl who got pulled into the spirit world of bathhouses and working for Yubaba to free her parents who were enchanted into pigs. Yubaba’s boathouse in Spirited Away, drawn by Anton Diaz Asian American culture has been vastly...