How the Avatar Was Spirited Away: Similarities Between Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away and Nickelodeon’s Avatar: the Last Airbender

How the Avatar was Spirited Away: Similarities between Hayao Miyazaki’s

Spirited Away and Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender

Nick Denk

Everett Community College

The series Avatar: The Last Airbender and the film Spirited Away are both award winning pieces accounting for their brilliance and depth. The Nickelodeon series received its Emmy in 2007 and Hayao Miyazaki’s film received its Oscar in 2002. .Avatar is a about a boy, named Aang, whose sole purpose is to restore and keep the world in balance while Spirited Away is about a girl who finds herself and her parents trapped in the spirit world and must find a way to escape. Though the two seem to share nothing in common, other than their medium, Spirited Away and Avatar: The Last Airbender are very closely tied together. Both pieces share a world that is longing for the past, contain a similar use of archetype, have strong female characters, and utilize symbolism.

Both productions are set in a world that is technologically more primitive than ours. In the opening scene of Avatar: The Last Airbender we see Katara and Sokka fishing with a bone spear in a hide canoe. While this could be an isolated circumstance, we are later introduced to a whole village of people who live without modern technology, architecture, or weaponry. None of the four kingdoms in the world of Avatar utilize electricity either. The only group that uses any kind of advanced technology is the Fire Nation, but the technology that they have is what you could call somewhat “steam punk” (Avatar the Last Airbender, 2010). This technology is seen as something negative though, because it is associated only with the Fire Nation, the antagonist in this story. Similar to how technology is represented in Spirited Away. The boiler room, full of coal and pollution, is the only space in the film that has any kind of machinery similar to that of Avatar, or modern machinery at all (Spirited Away, 2003). The technology in...