Watching "Spirited Away," you may notice that there are an awful lot of scenes that involve eating or vomiting — or both. Chihiro's parents stuff their faces while No-Face eats anything he can get his hands on. Yet by the end, No-Face barfs everything back up again, while Haku coughs up the seal he swallowed. What's up with that?
Plain Flavored English argues that all this eating and vomiting imagery is there for a reason. There's a clear pattern: All the characters who eat voraciously undergo an unpleasant transformation (like Chihiro's parents or No-Face), while the characters who purge something from their bodies end up returning to their true selves. For instance, No-Face shifts back to his original form once he is done spewing, and Haku needs to regurgitate the seal before he can break free from Zeniba's curse. Even the stink spirit vomits, in a sense, whenever Chihiro yanks the trash from its body and allows it to become a river spirit again.
Plain Flavored English posits that this motif is a commentary on consumerism. In a consumer culture, we consume things hoping to find meaning or a sense of belonging, whether we are literally consuming food or figuratively consuming material goods. But of course, all these objects can't fill the void in our souls, just as the things No-Face swallows can't satisfy his need for an identity. Perhaps Miyazaki is saying that we need to purge ourselves of material "things" in order to discover who we are.
