Alice and Spirited Away
Last class I thought it was interesting when we talked about the similarities between Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Spirited Away. Andy compared Yubaba to the Duchess; the physcial likeness, the frong servant, the baby. Also, in Alice the baby turns into a pig and of course the babe in Spirited Away get transformed into a mouse. Any other comparrisons you guys can think of?
posted by Anonymous at 1:47 PM
2 Comments:
One of the things I noticed was how all the servants were a strange mixture between human and animal. In the original illustrations for the Alice books, all the animals have human quaities about them (the have human hands, feet, wear human clothing, etc).
I have a whole book on Alice and what inspired Lewis Carroll when writing the story. I could bring it to class tomorrow if you want.
John Tenniel did those original Alice illustrations, on which our images of those characters utterly depend, and I recall reading that he had never illustrated a children's book before and had no clear notion of what a children's-book illustration should look like -- so he just made all the humans' heads really big (the Duchess being a prime example) and drew the animals realistically, but with occasional human features -- the dodo's hand, the Cheshire cat's grin, etc. Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice, in several editions, is a trove of such Carroll lore.
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