I woke up sweating, my heart beat pulsing in my ears, and frantically jumped out of bed. The morning light cut through my blinds and my eyes flashed around the room as I slowly came to my senses. It was a dream, actually it was a nightmare. I felt like Chihiro in the beginning of the film when she is crouched at the foot of the river after her parents were transformed into pigs, rocking back and forth “I’m dreaming, I’M DREAMING!” In my dream I found myself running to class, late, the day of the presentation without a clue as to what I was going to share with the class, terrified. In reality I was prepared. I had seen Spirited Away each night for the last few days, our group had met, but I was still unsure of what was going to happen the day Team Awesome was to present.
I loved Spirited Away. I loved the characters and Miyazaki’s vision. I had seen the film when it first came out but revisiting it while taking this class gave me a very different insight. Through each scene I felt I was able to appreciate much more about the film, and of course spent much of my time appreciating the similarities from the other works we have visited. I couldn’t help but think that the film was a tribute to Alice, Wendy and Dorothy. It was because of this that I felt the one downfall to doing the project on this film was there was no literature to accompany it. I have so much enjoyed comparing and contrasting books and film since taking this class I felt like there was more that I could have done if I had some literature to go along with them film.
While I was nervous for the presentation, I felt that it went very well. We tried to vary the structure and our approach with the class. While the other people in my group didn’t have the same experience, I felt breaking into smaller groups was one of the high points of our presentation. The smaller group allowed us to get deeper into the individual topics. I felt our presentation was thorough but the actual delivery didn’t allow us the time to fully explore everything we had planned. All in all I felt the presentation covered the topics well and did just to the film.