Despite my great love for animation I only watched Spirited Away for the first time yesterday! Unexpectedly I came across this and thought I'd share. Despite liking Spirited Away I much prefer both Howl's Moving Castle and then even more so Princess Monoke. I think what sets Studio Gibli anitation apart is definitely the uniqueness of the fantasy worlds that they create. All the underlying concepts are the hero, demons, spirits, transcendence into the other world, but they're all unlike any other. It makes me wonder about the parallels between Western fantasy and Eastern fantasy and why we both have a passionate culture of fantasy but they are both so distinctly different. Obviously the human imagination is then a constant between the two but why do our fantasy concepts follow similar lines, is it unconsciously brought out of our inherent biology, or do we reach outside of ourselves to intuit it?
I feel I have to put something here. It's cool you're watching Studio Ghibli stuff if you have not seen it, I've seen many of their features and they all have a high degree of polish to them. The rest of your post asks some pretty deep questions, the relationship between biology, language and the nature of knowledge. You could go on and branch so many more questions. I'm sure answers are out there, but it is difficult to follow these through with a simple comment. It did get me thinking though :P
ReplyDeleteYou're asking some big questions, Ivan. Where does imagination come from? For that matter, where do knowledge, remembrance and forgetfulness come from? Is it from within? Or without? To tap into that source... is that not the purpose of all human endeavor?
ReplyDeleteFor me the evolutionary imperative of survival satisfies a few of these topics. The brain has developed so as to help us survive, remembering or needing to remember things such as paths and routes locations, the way physical objects work, people necessary to ones survival all things worth remembering can just be seen as a clever ability of the brain to help us survive. Forgetfulness can be seen as a malfunction of the memory circuits, a highly complex system of neural pathways, synapses and other cool brainy things. Knowledge being an accumulation of memory fits in too. All of these stem away from any external or metaphysical/spiritual influence but then we come to imagination. I don't know, maybe evolution has created something within our need to survive that makes us creative and imaginative so as to come up with multiple solutions for problems but imagination seems somewhat less bound to needing to survive or having a place within the natural world so this is where my fantasy intrigue begins... I also like the idea that we have inherent purpose but I think we create our own purpose often subconsciously and then when concious we create it powerfully and are aware of that generation of that decision...
ReplyDeleteWe say "my brain". Who is that I? A singularly empirical explanation will always fall short. The physical and metaphysical sciences exist side by side. When you try to divorce them from each other, you're bound to run into incomplete, lopsided pseudo explanations each vying for ascendance, as they say.
DeleteTraditionally, in story, we resort to myth, metaphors and symbols to try to explain or present concepts in understandable terms. But we must remain wary of not dismissing an idea as unfounded simply because we lack the consciousness to comprehend it. A complex mathematical formula, to one untrained in mathematics, may read like a load of gibberish, but to a mathematician it makes complete (and indeed, sometimes even sublime) sense :)
A reflection on the "survival issue".
DeleteOf course we do everything within our capacity to survive. On a very basic level one living entity is food for another. So anything with a pulse will do its damndest to be the eater and not the eaten.
It therefore becomes very convenient to try to explain all behaviour in terms of a response to this survival instinct. It falls short on two fundamental issues. One, if the body is indeed a very complex machine, who's the driver? Even if we accept the idea of a simple mechanism constantly evolving in order to better its chances of survival, where did that initial impulse come from? I return to that question, "Why is the sky blue?" Not how, why.
The second issue is that despite all evolutionary endeavors, the "machine" does eventually break down. Nature bats last, as they say. So, an explanation based solely on the survival instinct seems pretty incomplete, even meaningless.
This is not to say that we give up the process of inquiry. As Plato concluded in his great wisdom, the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being. But expand that process of inquiry to go beyond the merely popular.