She becomes frustrated with the rude behavior that the tea partiers exhibit, so she decides to give up chasing the rabbit. As she tries to find the path home, she realizes that she wouldn’t be in this situation if she’d just been patient.
Some also argue that there is a lot of historical contexts involved in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. This can be seen with the parallel between the Queen of Hearts to the tyrant, Queen Victoria at the time which is seen during the trial when Alice is put on for being wrongly accused of playing a prank on her. This corresponds to the period as can be seen when the Queen argues “Sentence first--verdict afterward.” which represents the mess of the justice system that England was facing at the time.
At the end of the story, Alice wakes up to the real world with her sister waking her up. This part shows an insight of how much Alice grows and realizes that if the world was filled with nonsense, life could not go on. In a way, she grows up while remaining innocent. Her sister also gives up on her studies and decides that Alice still has a long way to go and will grow up eventually.
In Spirited Away, the film begins with Chihiro in the car with her parents where she continually complains and whines about having to move. Her dad drives away from the path into a forest like a path, declaring that it is a shortcut. With no idea where he is, he steps on the petal and goes even faster until he is stopped by a creeping looking statue that blocks the path. In front of the statue is a tunnel that leads to an abandoned theme park, or so they think. Chihiro’s parents want to explore and decide to go through the tunnel whereas Chihiro is hesitant and even tries to convince her parents not to go in. Her parents ignore her, and before Chihiro loses sight of her parents, she runs into the tunnel with them. On the other side of the tunnel is a grassy field with a stone staircase that leads them to a street lined with restaurants and shops. Most of them are deserted, but they follow the smell of food into a restaurant that is filled with food that, mysteriously, is deserted. Her parents are hungry, and they start devouring the food, despite Chihiro’s protests. She storms off examining a bathhouse on a bridge with a train running through. After a while, she meets a boy. He tells her to leave quickly, and Chihiro runs back to retrieve her parents, but they are still eating and surprisingly have turned into pigs! Frightened, Chihiro runs away separating herself from the pigs that were once her parents. She reaches the river that she was just rocks she had crossed before.
Haku, the boy who warned her to leave at the bridge, finds Chihiro and tells her that she needs to find a job in the bathhouse otherwise Yubaba, the witch of the bathhouse, will turn her into an animal. She first asks Kamaji, a spider-like spirit that is also the bathhouse’s boiler-man, but he refuses, and she is sent to ask Yubaba for a job at the bathhouse. Yubaba tries to scare Chihiro away and remains resolute, and finally, Yubaba agrees. She gives Chihiro a contract to sign which takes away her name and renames her Sen. When Haku takes Sen to see her parents, she finds a card addressed to Chihiro in her pocket and realized she'd forgotten her name. Haku tells her that Yubaba controls people by taking away their names and so they won’t be able to leave the spirit world.
This is where some theories arise about the bathhouse representing a brothel. Here are some reasons why: Some say that the writing on top of the bathhouse says ゆ (yu) which means hot water. This makes sense considering it is a bathhouse, but during Edo period bathhouses were brothels and the women were known as “Yuna” or “hot water women” where men would go to exchange sexual favors. Another factor that adds to the idea of the bathhouse representing a brothel is when Chihiro signs her name and changes his name and signs her idea over to Yubaba.
As Sen is working, she accidentally invites a No-Face into thinking that he is a customer. He enters and starts to tempt workers with gold and then to swallow them. Workers begin offering food to him, hoping to be tipped excessively. When No-Face begins getting out of control with swallowing the bathhouse’s workers, he calls for Sen and Yubaba forces Sen to No-Face.When Sen confronts No-Face, he is huge and continuously tries to tempt her with the gold that he was able to tempt the other workers with. She rejects it and feeds him the medicine that causes him to regurgitate everything he ate, including the bathhouse workers. This is another part of the story that adds to the brothel theory because it is like No-Face represents a patron that is trying to buy Sen for her to attend him personally.
The rest of the story continues with a theme of growing up, magic, and adventure. With beautiful music and art, the story ends on a bittersweet nostalgic note. Since Spirited Away is one of my favorite movies, I’m hesitant to spoil the details of the rest of the story, but it the movie ends with Chihiro going back to her parents who don’t remember anything and they walk back to their car and drive away.
Just from looking at the surface of these two movies, it’s hard to tell that they are similar in any way. The most obvious one, however, is at the beginning of both films where Alice falls through the rabbit hole into Wonderland and Chihiro goes through a tunnel into the spirit world, and they both get trapped. The “villains” of the story are also pretty similar in the way where they both punish people that upset them. (The Queen beheads and Yubaba turns people into pigs.) One difference is how the main characters approach being in different worlds. Alice is arrogant and rude as she meets the characters. Her curiosity is present. Chihiro, on the other hand, is a bit more cautious and doesn’t seem to elicit curiosity, but just wants to save her parents and go home. They are both growing up stories as Alice learns why the world has to have order and can’t just be “Wonderland” and Chihiro matures as she becomes more fearless and isn’t afraid to take on the future.
Another similarity is how culture is shown through both stories. In Alice in Wonderland, it dates back to the Victorian Period, with the introduction of drugs, but also challenging the ideas of government. The evidence can be found in the gentlemanly way the white rabbit is dressed, the tea party, and as well as the monarchy that holds power over their people. In Spirited Away, they introduce the culture dating from the Edo Period with the brothels, but also with identity or the loss of name. This is prevalent in Japanese society as the loss of name in Spirited Away represents not having an identity. So throughout the story, Chihiro is trying to regain her identity so she can return to the real world.
"Alice falls through the rabbit hole into Wonderland and Chihiro goes through a tunnel into the spirit world, and they both get trapped."
"She continues through the woods where she meets Cheshire Cat, who mysteriously can disappear only leaving a grin behind."