KAONASHI

When i first watched Spirited Away, i was very young, and some of the fantasies of Miyazaki's film disturbed my childish mind. Like the part when Chihiro's parents transform into pigs... And although it was a traumatizing expierience, the movie just became crazier and crazier as i continued, showing not only a magestic and creepy world based on japanese folklore, but  even some characters that i liked a lot until this day. Every one had special characteristics, desings, quirks that made them so interesting. Some were beautiful, some were gross, and some were scary af. It is precisely the creepiest of them that i love the most and has kept my mind since childhood. An ancient spirit with no identity that eats everything in his path, growing from the greed of some, evolving, always searching for who it is. I'm talking, of course, about the No-face, Kaonashi. 

There is no way to know what this spirit is exactly, but it shows in the film to be a powerful being, who follows Chihiro as a fanatic, getting at the end to have his own family with a forest's witch, a baby transformed into a mouse and a hopping lantern. It has a black body that can become transaparent, a misshapen-like contexture that can take the shape of the individuals it ingests and, for that purpose, a really big mouth. It wears a mask, his most characteristic atribute. But there's no certainity that a face is behind it. It's cause of that sense of mistery and shapeless identity is why i really love this guy... It can transform at a unkonwn limit, as a metaphor of evolution itself.. And uses this power as a reflex of what he persieves of the world and it's habitants. But the principal contradiction that Kaonashi has, and the reason why i think it's a faceless entity in the first place, is that it doesn't know what he wants to be, and so it just follows the current of events, hoping that Chihiro, the girl that didn't feared the void within, may be able help him. 

Maybe it was just a test for Chihiro, maybe it just is an evil spirit. But the fact that is near impossible to say the intentions behind the spirit is what i think to be it's best quality, fof it's a monster and a friend at the same time, becoming something like the Shrodinger's cat of personality. It is our job to decide who it is, friend, foe or something bigger.