Introduction
Contrary to popular belief, childhood is definitely not an easy period in human life. This time is characterized by many qualitative changes in the child’s physiology and consciousness, and their worldview’s serious reconstruction. In other words, in late childhood, the individual unconsciously prepares for adult life to become part of the society for which they have usually disliked over the past few years. Adult role models, conservative views, seriousness, and the frequent prohibitions that weigh on a teenager’s life meet in the path of an adult boy or girl, and they can either accept them and become adults like everyone else or reject them and try to change the world qualitatively.
It is worth acknowledging that transition issues are found in a large number of literary and film sources. On the one hand, this is not surprising, because every adult, whether writer or director, has gone through this challenging path and has an idea of what teenagers traditionally experience. On the other hand, authors seek to depict this time full of contradictions and confrontations most artistically and uniquely. Spirited away by Hayao Miyazaki and Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind are works of art that are unique and original and convey the path of teenagers on their way to adulthood.
The authors talk about the challenges of growing up, the barriers to becoming independent, and how overcoming these barriers can unlock human potential. The phrase “The tragedy of childhood,” which is the title of the play, is also relevant to a Japanese director’s seemingly carefree work. Although the different story told, even for entirely different audiences, Miyazaki’s and Wedekind’s works reveal surprising similarities in the techniques that the authors use to demonstrate how children grow up. It is important to note that the role of such literary and cinematographic techniques is not to stretch time or demonstrate the author’s skills but to hide the apparent problems of maturation in a way that does not seem so obvious. This paper aims to compare the two works of art, the Miyazaki’s film, and the Wedekind’s play, in the context of the techniques used to reveal the topic of maturation.
Loneliness
Until a particular stage of life, children tend to be dependent on the decisions of their parents. However, such a scheme also works the other way — parents must provide care and gently control their children’s actions to prevent a safety hazard. Spirited away and Spring Awakening equally reveal parental irresponsibility in raising a child (Miyazaki, 2001; Wedekind; 1916). Turning to sources, virtually all students find themselves forced into independence due to adult disinterest. As long as the mother of the main character, Wendla, was not involved in the sexual education at the stages when it was especially necessary, which led to premature pregnancy, Chihiro’s parents leave the girl to her fate.
At the same time, in the play, the two boys’ parents overlook the fact that the children are thinking about suicide, and Moritz even managed to shoot himself because of problems with school. The same disinterest is characteristic of Miyazaki’s fairytale world — Chihiro’s parents, fascinated by the abundance of free food, decide to have lunch, leaving their daughter alone in an unfamiliar and devastated city. This approach, expressed by adults’ lack of attention, leads Chihiro to wander the city and meet amazing creatures. Ultimately, it is essential to recognize that parents, by abandoning their children and giving them independence, become the reason for the intensification of children’s maturation.
Obstacles
It is known that the creation of conflict situations faced by characters leads to their personal development. The outcome of such confrontations depends on how strong the person is — if under the pressure of external conditions, the character does not withstand, then such a story will break them, not allowing blossom as a personality. It is worth saying that most professional authors demonstrate conflicts not openly but hide them under the plot turns, obstacles, and barriers that the central figures of the narrative face.
This technique is typical for both a Japanese film and a German play. From the very beginning, the main characters look like children who do not arouse the sympathy of the audience: Chihiro is a languid and naughty girl, and Wendla pestering her mother because of her dress length. Their hysterical nature leads to a negative atmosphere, although this is just the beginning of the work. However, in the plot development course, the girls face a series of obstacles, overcoming which qualitatively changes the characters’ personality. Chihiro meets dangerous with monsters, converges with the evil witch Yubaba, loses her own soul and parents to grow from a capricious girl into a strong and morally stable personality, able to sympathize, help and act. Wendla’s travels were not as fairytale, but her path was marked by lack of support from adults, concealment of useful information, beating with sticks and rape by a classmate, and finally, pregnancy. Most likely, if the Wendla’s story line had not ended with an accidental death during the abortion, the girl would have seriously outpaced her peers in psychological and even physiological development. Apparently, the authors strongly used barriers to give the girls’ characters personal growth but ended their stories in entirely different ways. While Wendla’s story ended in death, Chihiro, who felt an adult working life’s power, returned to the family environment.
It is interesting to note other characters’ lines, which through obstacles, could become a better version of themselves. It is about Melchior’s qualitative horizontal change and baby Boh’s vertical improvement, a giant baby evil witch. Melchior, from the very first act, seems to be a fairly educated boy, giving in to hope at school and having love from many girls, while Boh, on the contrary, a continually crying child who only wants to play. The conflict of sympathy, in this case, is apparent: the reader is interested in Melchior but hates crying Boh. However, a series of events realized through the fault of a schoolboy, such as the rape of a girl and the boy’s arrogance and desire to control everything, cool down the reader’s warm feelings towards the protagonist. Over time, after the other two central figures’ deaths, Melchior will remain the only one who will bear the cross of all the decisions that they made, and that led to these consequences. On the contrary, the initially unpleasant Boh becomes attractive when under the influence of the spell turns into a fat rat. In this state, the boy travels with Chihiro that expands the baby’s worldview. The culmination of his transformation from a child to a more mature person is that he could get back on his feet and stopped crawling on the floor.
Violence
There is no doubt that acts of physical or sexual violence are unacceptable in a humanistic society and should not be seen as motivating for children to grow up. However, artwork often hyperbole the phenomenon of violence, making it a barrier to a child’s development. In the sources studied, both the characters in the play and Chihiro were surrounded by violence. One of Wendla’s friends, Martha Bessell, finds herself physically abused by her father. The man bullies the child, probably because he enjoys it. Chihiro has not been noticed in physical abuse acts, but she is under psychological pressure, forcing a 10-year-old girl to work at Sentō on an equal footing with adult ladies. It is also fair that almost all meetings with adults are accompanied by contempt from them — Yubaba mocks the girl’s wishes and takes her name away from her, Kamaji initially paid no attention to the child.
However, the play and the animated cartoon authors do not have the same approach to investigating the consequences of violence. Martha does not have enough strength of spirit to resist force and asks her friends to keep it a secret while Chihiro gradually defeats each of the adults who showed violent methods. Chihiro finds herself in a winning position even at the end when she can outsmart the wicked witch, while Martha desperately asks her friend for the gun with which Moritz shot himself. One can only guess what the girl’s gun is for, but the fact remains that Martha could not find the power to get out of the vicious circle of violence.
Doubts
In attempts to demonstrate the uniqueness of the characters’ worldview, the authors often create a conflict of ideologies. Reasons for open confrontations may be natural intergenerational struggles, politics, excessive supervision by adults, or children’s frivolity. Such conflicts clearly show the grain that matures in a child’s consciousness — it is doubt about the correctness and effectiveness of adult society. On their way to maturity, children often evaluate their parents, teachers, and all other adults with which they interact. As a rule, the child does not agree with adults’ actions because they believe that they know how to do better. Ultimately, the child wants to grow up to be an adult who will dictate the rules themselves and not listen to any of the elders.
Such a technique is found in the play, and the film: the playwright tells about Melchior’s doubts about the school program’s validity, and the animator tells about Chihiro’s wavering about the correctness of the moral attitudes of the society in the spirit world. Having grown up before his peers, Melchior knows a lot about sex education, therefore, he helps Moritz with his problem of erotic dreams. Melchior believes that the educational program is designed to develop children’s standard and limited thinking — so that schoolchildren will not ask unnecessary questions, and the teacher’s authority will be unshaken. However, limited thinking is also observed in adults and fairytale creatures, because graduates of such ineffective educational programs become hostages of this type of thinking. A clear example of such doubts is the schoolboy’s reasoning about the teacher’s incorrect interpretation of a fragment of Latin text. Doubts also arise in Chihiro when she, the only one of a hundred adults, decides to trust Kaonashi to help the creature to find himself. Through the questioning of the accepted social attitudes, the qualitative development of the character takes place.
Power
One of the most significant engines driving children to grow up is the desire for power. That is why Miyazaki and Wedekind show this idea throughout the story. Power becomes a factor in accepting new responsibilities and a tool to control not only the world but also the own mind. For this reason, young children are so eager to gain control. Throughout their stories, Wendla and Chihiro want to be involved in adult affairs and, moreover, express desire to control them. Thus, Wendla wants to step into the world of adult life from the very beginning, learning about sex education and the process of conception of children, while Chihiro wants to take the job from Kamaji and wash the River Spirit herself. Chihiro succeeds in gaining the desired power, and gradually her personality is integrated into the matrix of the fabulous spirit world. It is very likely that if the girl had stayed in this place, she would have been able to overthrow Yubaba over time, becoming the new manager of the Sentō. In Spring Awakening all children are subject to the desire for power: Melchior and Moritz want to act independently of their parents and teachers, Martha wants to control the spread of rumors about domestic violence, and Wendla wants to learn as much as possible about the adult world. These desires become a reason to manage their own lives as adults do.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it should be noted that the issues of transition between adolescents and adults will always be relevant since society is undergoing all the time changes in age. In this paper, the film Spirited away, and the play Spring Awakening were investigated in order to compare the techniques used to convey the topic of child maturation. It was shown that both works, despite their different subjects, use similar techniques to demonstrate these transitions — loneliness, obstacles, violence, doubt, and power. The author’s characters, interacting with several storytelling events, overcome them in a peculiar way and either grow up or remain at the same level of development.
Reference List
Spirited away (2001) Directed by Hayao Miyazaki [Film]. Tokyo, Japan: Studio Ghibli.
Wedekind, F. (1916) The awakening of spring: A tragedy of childhood. Philadelphia: Brown Brothers.
Autobiography Of An Ex-Colored Man By James Weldon Johnson
The novel of J. W. Johnson is a prime example of literature that highlights important issues related to racial discrimination. The main character is an African American, and on his way, he faces various difficulties. In chapter five, he discovers three types of black people: the desperate, the domestics, and the professionals, or independent workmen. Desperate people, in his opinion, hate whites, domestics serve whites, and professionals almost did not have any contacts with whites. Thus, the author shows that there is a division within the same race that depends on one’s qualities and relationships with other people.
Returning to the South, the narrator witnesses the execution of a black man. Even though he planned to make music, after this event, he understands that he is not ready to be the person who can be treated like this. Thus, he decides to change his life and “pass” as a white man. He succeeds, and he spends this way the rest of his days. However, he says that “would neither disclaim the black race nor claim the white race” (Johnson 149). The goal was to be safe and live a calmer life.
However, at the end of the novel, the Ex-Colored Man rethinks his life and feels that he made the wrong choice. He was feeling comfortable, but he sacrificed a lot for this life: music was his talent, but he refused this path. This decision contrasts with the image of Shiny, another African American character, who remained faithful to himself and achieved no less success. Thus, the reader can conclude that following the opinion of society must be very thoughtful and cautious. The main thing is to weigh all the pros and cons and clearly understand one’s strengths and capabilities.
Work Cited
Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Dover Thrift Editions, 2017.
Effective Time Management Analysis
Introduction
Time management is one of the most crucial techniques to increase productivity and reach the desired objectives. The inability to establish a structured schedule may disrupt the working and studying routine even under normal circumstances. However, with social restrictions due to the pandemic forcing to close offices, schools, and most businesses, many are faced with unexpected time organization challenges. It may seem first that working and studying from home should free up a substantial number of hours to dedicate to the family or pursue a new hobby. In reality, effective planning to stay productive while taking care of yourself and your loved ones takes a great effort. This paper aims to provide a thorough description of the tools and techniques I use to balance studies, work, family, and social life.
My Studying Routine
The undeniably chaotic events unfolding recently due to the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted the traditional on-campus studying routines for many students and teachers alike having to transition to an online format. However, distance learning is not a new concept at all, and a large stratum of people have been relying on it for their educational purposes for quite some time. According to statistics, many institutions in the US allow students to complete almost half of the classes online (Keegan, 2020). Moreover, students involved in distance learning reported absorbing five times more information per hour of online studying than in a traditional classroom setting (Keegan, 2020). Therefore, developing the necessary time management skills is the key to getting the most value out of home learning, while being able to dedicate additional time to family and work or hobbies.
The first and the most vital timekeeping tool I use in my routine is the RescueTime app since it helps me tackle and control the biggest pet peeve of independent learning – social media distractions. On the one hand, modern gadgets are undeniably useful for communicating with friends, online shopping, and paying bills, especially in the current situation that limits social interactions. On the other hand, cell phone usage does not promote learning but instead decreases the ability to concentrate on the subject at hand. Ironically, the culprit of my distraction also provides me with the tool to control phone usage. Once the RescueTime app gave me insight into how much time I spent on mindless scrolling through social media feeds, I was able to establish a personal phone-time schedule. First, I categorized the websites that take away the most of my unproductive minutes and set a time frame during which the app mutes all the notifications from these sources.
The first part of my day is when I do most of my classes; therefore, hours from 9 in the morning to 3 in the afternoon is the phone-free zone for me. Initially, it was quite hard to follow my new schedule. However, once I realized how much such a quiet setting free of distractions boosted my productivity, I could easily resist the urge to turn on my phone. What benefited me immensely is a mutual agreement between my friends and me to use the same hours that block access to social media apps. This way, all of us are on the same page to complete the studying assignments while also allowing for extra free time in the evening to video chat.
The other tool I utilize to organize my day is the Calendar app. I use it to register all the assignments I need to complete while being able to set up mid-term and final deadlines. The app helps me hold myself accountable by providing reminders and notifications of the upcoming projects and allows me to allocate the time to prepare accordingly. I prefer to use the online app to schedule my studying goals rather than a traditional paper one since it provides visual and sound reminders of the upcoming deadlines, therefore keeping me proactive and self-aware.
Work Time Management
Balancing online classes and a full-time job is challenging and can get quite intense when not supported by an adequate time planning routine. I consider myself lucky enough not to have to combine work and studies since I do not have a traditional nine-to-five job at the moment. However, I dedicate part of my day to developing my drawing skills and setting up a personal online artistic gallery. My long-term goal is to be able to sell my paintings and sketches online; therefore, I consider creating the website my part-time job and try to structure my routine accordingly.
After I finish my online studies, I make sure I spend one to two hours drawing. I do not include this activity in my Calendar app because sketching is something I look forward to after classes to clear my mind and relax. However, I do register in the app my mid-term and long-term goals as to completing the creation of my website since I decided to treat it as a part-time job. I also make sure the RescueTime app is still running to block social media notifications since creative activity such as painting requires a calm and peaceful environment.
I use the checklist routine to set up my objectives for the website development. I dedicate several hours after lunch, researching similar artistic platforms to get inspiration. I also work on designing my online gallery by adding new paintings, writing their descriptions, and filling in the other parts of the website. Since it is not a traditional job, it is easy to fall behind and stop being consistent with the implementation of my project. Therefore, using the checklist helps me stay on top of my goals and be determined to achieve them. Having a strict schedule that requires a completed agenda by the end of each day eases the stress of balancing work and online classes and helps me keep my end objectives under control.
Family and Social Interactions Management
Studying and working are essential, but so is taking time to spend with family and friends. I need to have an adequate amount of social integrations to become recharged and tackle my educational goals more effectively. Every day after my running routine, I make sure to have a sit-down breakfast with my family members to catch up and share our thoughts. I consider it particularly critical as such a close connection with my loved ones motivates and inspires me to reach my full potential. I use the Calendar app to record all the family and friends’ commitments to plan my studies and work around them.
Social life is an integral part of daily routine since it provides the necessary relaxation and distraction. While the first part of my day is dedicated to studies and work, I try not to communicate with my friends on social media, and the RescueTime app is a great help in that. Before the pandemic distancing rules came into place, I used to spend a couple of hours every other day meeting with my companions to discuss common interests. Currently, video chatting is a practical way to communicate, and I try to peruse it daily to converse with my friends. I am quite strict about fitting social time into my schedule since it helps me relax and gives me the energy to head back to studying and working. Socializing, in person or online, benefits everyone by helping to stay emotionally stable and socially confident. Such qualities, in return, ensure successful learning and working experience. Thus, a developed network, including connections with other students for study collaboration and leisure time, is crucial to becoming a productive scholar.
Conclusion
Proper time management techniques undoubtedly serve as a critical tool in reaching my targets and being productive and efficient. Structuring my day, the way it is described in this paper, allows me to minimize procrastination and curb possible destructions, thereby lowering stress and anxiety levels. Using practical planning apps such as RescueTime and online calendar makes it possible to correctly allocate time to each of my checklist items while blocking unnecessary social media interruptions. Indeed, balancing online classes and a job while maintaining healthy family and social relationships is complex. However, finding the right systematic approach benefits people around me and myself and also motivates me to get the most out of my day to pursue my goals.
Reference
Keegan, L. (2020). 79+ Staggering Online Learning Statistics! (All You Need to Know!). SkillScouter. Web.