Spirited Away: 千と千尋の神隠し 9781838713249, 9781844572304

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Acknowledgments This book would not have been possible without the invaluable help and insights of Yuko Tojo and Ayako Yamashita. I am also indebted to Mike Arnold, Jonathan Clements, Benjamin Ettinger, Marc Hairston, Masumi Hanaoka and Ryoko Toyama. My special thanks to Rebecca Barden of BFI Publishing for giving this book the go-ahead. Finally, my deepest gratitude must go to my parents and family for their love and support.

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1 Being Spirited Away A little girl sits on a train. But this is no normal train; it passes over a flat sea dotted with houses, roads and platforms that poke up from nowhere. The other passengers are shadow-silhouettes. The girl has three companions: a tall black phantom with a Japanese Noh mask and no face, a large white mouse and a fly-like bug with a yellow beak. The child has the grave, determined expression of a weathered adventurer in a children’s story; Alice in Wonderland, perhaps, or The Wizard of Oz. The train stops at a platform, orphaned at sea, where most of the passengers disembark, but the girl and her friends stay on board. As the train moves off, another girl, a silhouette, stands before the platform picket fence and gazes facelessly after. This is a scene from Spirited Away, the remarkable Japanese animated film directed by Hayao Miyazaki, which has beguiled

On the train

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critics and audiences ever since its release in Japan in 2001. A mysterious, dreamlike cartoon fantasy, it was received differently at home and abroad. In Japan, Spirited Away (or Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi, to give its Japanese name) was a popular blockbuster, the highest-grossing film ever released in the country. In most Western countries, including Britain, Spirited Away was a muchpraised but modestly performing film, with an indeterminate, semiarthouse status. It shared the Golden Bear at the 2002 Berlin Film Festival; the next year it won the Best Animated Feature Academy Award. Given the critical and festival plaudits, it’s ironic that Spirited Away had opened in Japan just as the computer-animated Shrek was breaking records in America. At that time, everyone seemed to be talking about how cartoons were busting out of the children’s ghetto, following the lead of The Simpsons. Western animated films were praised for including split-level, dual-response jokes and references, many designed to fly over children’s heads. Spirited Away stood out because of its lack of obvious split-level humour and also because its most obvious inspirations (to Westerners) weren’t cartoons or comics but children’s books, especially Alice in Wonderland. When asked, Miyazaki allowed that Alice might have been an indirect influence, while his supervising animator Masashi Ando indicated that the book inspired one of the main character designs (of the witch character, Yubaba). Miyazaki also specified that he made the film, ‘For the people who used to be ten years old, and the people who are going to be ten years old.’1 Appropriately, Spirited Away’s beginning has a fairy-tale simplicity, even older-fashioned than the boarding-school trappings of Harry Potter. As the film starts, a sulky Japanese girl called Chihiro and her parents are moving to a new house when they take a wrong turn into dense woods. Here they find a tunnel leading to what seems to be a cultural theme park. There are buildings, restaurants and a palatial bathhouse, all built in various styles from Japan’s prewar past. The park seems deserted, but the parents are tempted

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by delicious food at a restaurant and dig in to an unpaid-for feast. Night falls in an instant, the town lanterns glow and Chihiro races back to her parents to find they have become pigs. For all Spirited Away’s reputation as a charming family film, the opening sequence is a fairy tale played in the register of a horror film, or perhaps vice versa. It recalls Homer and Hansel and Gretel, but also classic Disney cartoons that turned a Queen into a crone and delinquents into donkeys. The first teaser trailers for Spirited Away, which drew heavily on this sequence, were made as frightening as possible by the film’s producer Toshio Suzuki, mindful of the recent Japanese horror hit Ring (1998). After its disconcerting beginning, Spirited Away leaves Chihiro and the viewer to sink or swim in a realm of gods and monsters, where a spider-man works besides walking frogs and soot-balls with eyes. A boy turns into a dragon, a baby into a mouse and, as if there weren’t enough Alice echoes already, the fearsome ruler of the bathhouse is a witch with a massively oversized head and hairdo who has seemingly stepped out of a Victorian illustration by Sir John Tenniel. The guests at the bathhouse include a ‘Stink God’, resembling a gigantic mud-caked worm, that swamps its surroundings with filth. There is also the ominous No Face, which first appears as a phantom with a Noh mask for a face (supplying an inadvertent pun not present in the Japanese original, as ‘No Face’ is translated from the character’s Japanese name, Kaonashi). Images of eating, purging and cleansing recur throughout the film, ranging from the sublime (a storm that leaves the bathhouse surrounded by sea) to the outrageous (No Face swelling into a grotesquely bloated monster, then burying the big-headed witch in a tide of vomit). Less spectacularly, Chihiro is given rice-balls to restore her in the most nostalgic scene for Japanese viewers, the food shoring up her identity by connecting her to a shared cultural memory. That brings up a further trio of motifs in the film: names, identity and memory. The ghost town at the start of the film may look lost,

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forgotten by a superficial modernity. But then the perspective switches, and it’s Chihiro who’s lost amid Japan’s heritage of gods and bathhouses, stripped of even her name. Cartoon strangeness Spirited Away is certainly a strange film. However, it’s worth pointing out that it’s not excessively weird by fantasy cinema standards. There have even been odder films about children in surreal, threatening environments, such as Terry Gilliam’s live-action Time Bandits (1981) and Tideland (2005), or Jan Svankmajer’s part-animated Alice (1988). Paradoxically, the accessibility of Spirited Away’s opening is one reason why what follows seems so puzzling. The beginning of the film seems to define Chihiro’s challenge, laying out what’s at stake. She must use her wits to survive, restore her parents and get home. But as the story proceeds, Chihiro’s adventures are diverted along strange trajectories. The film’s story seems broken-backed. Almost half the film is spent setting Chihiro up in a job at the bathhouse, washing dirty gods, before Miyazaki suddenly ditches that plotline and gives her a magic boyfriend to save instead. Bizarre supporting characters, especially the menacing No Face, seem to hijack the action. Threats are set up for Chihiro to face, then dissolve without conflicts or confrontations. The grand destination at the end of the girl’s train journey is a bucolic thatched cottage where little of consequence actually happens. For such reasons, a minority of critics have described Spirited Away as a beautiful film saddled with a half-baked story. Stephanie Zacharek, writing for the Salon.com website, puts a robust case for the prosecution: Miyazaki’s storytelling style resembles that of a breathless young tot who’s fearlessly exercising his newfound powers of expression … (His) narratives are wriggly, noodle-shaped things, and that’s not supposed to bother us. Evil beings inexplicably become good; characters set out on quests that aren’t really all that necessary but allow them to travel to weird, magical places …

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All of these things are painstakingly laid out before us, designed to make us clasp our hands in delight but never to stop to ask, ‘Why?’ or even the more deadly question, ‘Who cares?’2

True, we watch some animations expecting bafflement; the Quay Brothers’ work, for example. Do Spirited Away’s bright animation and funny critters mislead us into expecting a simple, Disneyesque story? But anyone who has seen Miyazaki’s earlier films knows that they do have simple, clear stories. Many of Spirited Away’s weird creatures, non sequiturs and unexpected tangents probably bewildered Japanese viewers as much as Westerners. At the same time, much of the film’s appeal is precisely this bubbling spontaneity, keeping us on Chihiro’s level, never guessing what will come next. For Westerners, the animated mise en scène of Spirited Away seethes with exotic mystery. Even the Japanese title is evocative: Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi, meaning roughly ‘The Spiriting Away of Sen and Chihiro’, Sen being the name that Chihiro is given in the bathhouse. The key word, though, is ‘kamikakushi’, which means ‘hidden by spirits’. According to Japanese tradition, when a person

In the bathhouse

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mysteriously vanished from human society, perhaps reappearing after a long absence, it was because they had been taken to the spirit world. This world is powerfully evoked from the film’s first scenes, where ancient stone figures and shrines encroach on the frame. Japanese tradition seems equally reflected in the film’s settings. Most of the film takes place amid the gaudy splendour of the palatial bathhouse, a nostalgic reminder of past decades when Japanese bathhouses were important community centres. But at the same time, the bathhouse in Spirited Away is multicultural, combining Western, Japanese and other Asian styles. Some Japanese viewers found it more redolent of China than Japan. Again, some Westerners presume the spirits and gods on screen concealed subtle allusions to Japanese mythology, when they were mostly made up by Miyazaki. Yet Spirited Away’s perceived Japaneseness was vital to its success. Steve Alpert, Vice-President of Studio Ghibli, the studio that made Spirited Away, stressed how Japanese people received the film differently to Westerners. ‘I’ve seen Spirited Away in many different countries,’ he said. ‘Every single time I see it in Japan, the audience is crying when the lights come up, without fail. It’s a constant in Japan you don’t see elsewhere.’3 Miyazaki had no doubt why this was the case: The setting of Spirited Away is an older Japan, one of a few decades before. Many adults felt attached to the film, many even cried, just to see that kind of almost forgotten scenery. Perhaps they were reminded of their own childhoods.4

In Miyazaki’s project proposal for Spirited Away, the director wrote, ‘We must inform (Japanese children) of the richness of our traditions.’ A few years earlier, Miyazaki’s fellow Ghibli director Isao Takahata had made the animation Only Yesterday (1991), which juxtaposed the childhood memories of a Japanese woman with a nationalist polemic about a rural Japan that the film called ‘a collaboration between man and nature’. Spirited Away similarly links

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personal and national identity. In Miyazaki’s words, ‘A place is a past and also a history. A man without a history or a people that forgot its past will have no choice but to disappear or be consumed.5 For example, there’s a brief scene in the film, bewildering to most Westerners and even some Japanese, where Chihiro performs a quick purification hand-ritual after stamping on a worm. It’s a reminder of Japan’s animist Shinto traditions, along with the minishrines, wooden gateway and statues in the early scenes. Miyazaki intersperses such reminders of Japan’s heritage with jabs at the country today. Early on, Chihiro’s father mentions the ‘bubble’ boom economy of the 1980s, a period of runaway capitalism that ended in collapse and recession. The remark foreshadows Chihiro’s parents’ gluttony in the bewitched restaurant, and No Face’s monstrous greed later on. Other images in the film can be taken as caricatures of modern Japan. For example, a great baby who lies ensconced among painted mountains and palaces, refusing to go out for fear of ‘bad germs’, seems to reflect a young Japanese generation swallowed by isolating virtual reality. And yet Spirited Away is not simply an allegory of Japan; the director himself cautioned about taking the film’s Japaneseness too far. During Spirited Away’s production, Miyazaki said, ‘Unless we try following a universal visual language, anime (Japanese animation) will stay like a disgusting Saturday morning show.’6 He also pointed out that, while older Japanese viewers found the film’s settings nostalgic, they would be ‘new and unique’ to the film’s target audience of children, and thus, ‘Foreign audiences may feel what Japanese children might have felt.’7 It can even be argued that Spirited Away’s Japanese trappings are really window-dressing for the true machinery driving the film, a blend of Miyazaki’s recurring interests in flight, ecology, strong girls, weary gods, overbuilt machinery, empowering labour, elaborate buildings and even pigs. Cinema audiences in Japan would be familiar with all of these subjects from Miyazaki’s past work. Spirited Away may have introduced Miyazaki for many Westerners, but it was his eighth

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animated feature film released in Japan. Its predecessors (discussed in Chapter 3) had been praised critically, and the more recent had been commercial hits, out-grossing Hollywood live-action competitors and Disney imports. In Japan, Spirited Away was received as a ‘Studio Ghibli film’ and also a ‘Miyazaki film’, phrases that many Japanese people use interchangeably. (As of writing, Ghibli has released ten Hayao Miyazaki features, and many others by different directors, including two more ‘Miyazaki’ features directed by Hayao’s son Goro Miyazaki.)8 Mark Schilling, film critic for the Japan Times, makes an instructive comparison: ‘Like Disney, Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli has become a brand name whose animated films appeal across age boundaries.’9 Indeed, Spirited Away has numerous Disneyesque elements: a child protagonist, a brisk pace, cute critters and a pervasive fairy-tale atmosphere. At the same time, the unironic, earnest storytelling is enough to make it look radical to Westerners used to Shrek and The Simpsons. But what makes Spirited Away distinctly ‘Miyazaki’ is the way it combines storytelling and worldbuilding to support its heroine’s journey.

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2 On the Train The train scene in Spirited Away is often considered to define the film. Even if one thinks the story is muddled, the train exemplifies the clarity and refinement of Miyazaki’s fantastical imagery, accessible to and readable by adults and children. Unlike some scenes in Spirited Away, it is not threatening or grotesque. Nor is its purpose to bemuse or wrongfoot the viewer with its strangeness. Indeed by this point, it hardly seems strange, but the natural continuation of a journey that has already taken us far past the mundane. Many Japanese viewers, including children (unlike most Westerners), would spot that the scene seemingly alludes to an older fantasy, the novella Night on the Galactic Railroad (first published posthumously in 1934) by Kenji Miyazawa. In Miyazawa’s Buddhist story, the central image is of a steam train bearing the souls of the dead Kenji Miyazawa’s classic novella Night on the Galactic Railroad, translated under its alternative English title Night of the Milky Way Railway

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down the banks of the shining river of the Milky Way. Yet such a culturally grounded derivation (and Spirited Away has plenty) is no explanation of the scene. Both Miyazawa and Miyazaki use the train to illustrate metaphysical mysteries, but in Miyazawa the image is integral to a moral and spiritual framework. The purpose of the train in his story is to convey characters who’ve learned the value of existence (their own and everything else’s) to their final destination. Miyazaki removes the image from Miyazawa’s framework, making it more abstract and more concrete at the same time. On the one hand, the scene invites endless interpretation: one could, for example, weave whole stories about the faceless girl on the platform. Alternatively, one could interpret the scene as a child’s-eye perception of the world, with the sea a dimension of haunting, blurred mystery from which a few details stand out, while the train is populated by strangers whose identities and inner lives are opaque. Yet the animated scene has a bookish warmth. Rejecting the synthetic sheen of computer animation, it nonetheless feels tangible, concrete, so that the viewer can imagine that he or she is sitting inside the carriage, experiencing the journey with Chihiro. At the scene’s end, Chihiro, head raised, eyes wide open, looks determinedly ahead. The pose is more pronounced in Miyazaki’s original drawing, included on the two-disc edition of the UK DVD, where Chihiro looks defiant and angry. In the final shot, which Miyazaki presumably approved if he didn’t draw it himself, Chihiro’s expression is softer, more neutral, stressing less her attitude than her resolute gaze. As Miyazaki put it in his project proposal, ‘The sulky and languid (Chihiro) comes to have a stunning and attractive expression.’ During Spirited Away’s production, some of Miyazaki’s colleagues worried that Japanese audiences were becoming more cynical, and would no longer relate to his brand of fantasy. Yet for a ‘fantasy’ director, Miyazaki’s films have always focused with a peculiar intensity on their protagonists’ engagement with the world. His characters are defined by their surroundings, not the other way round. Throughout his work, those characters are challenged,

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sustained, renewed and reflected by the worlds around them; these are drawn in vibrant detail, combining magic and mechanics. The bathhouse in Spirited Away is initially presented as an eerie supernatural funhouse, where Chihiro hurtles down steep steps and is yanked through hallways. Gradually, as she finds her feet, the building is revealed as a living workplace. There is magic in the carnival of gods and bathhouse denizens, but the building also has old-fashioned, bulky technology: the cogs and counterweights of the Chihiro’s expression on the train, in Miyazaki’s storyboard and in the final film

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elevators, the satanic mill of the basement boiler-room, which is lit by furnace fires as steam hisses, liquids bubble and a six-armed spiderman grinds powders, pulls levers and makes things happen. It’s not a world to be passively admired, but to be entered and explored. Miyazaki’s characters are forever opening doors, searching strange buildings, walking new streets. In his 1988 film My Neighbour Totoro, two young sisters rush round their new country house, laughing, stumbling and shouting, flinging open doors and invading

Running the gauntlet

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dark attics. When Miyazaki designed a ‘Ghibli Museum’ in Tokyo (it opened in 2001, the year of Spirited Away’s release), he made it a free-form adventure park, full of spiral stairs and overhanging landings. Chihiro may stumble and falter in Spirited Away, but she demonstrates her capability when she has to climb the bathhouse building. Her face set, she runs along a treacherous metal pipe that nearly drops her to her doom, then scales the wall to the top. Chihiro’s journey Chihiro isn’t saccharine or adorable like a Disney youngster, nor especially deep or complex. As a character, she’s less fully realised than other Miyazaki protagonists, such as the young sisters in Totoro or the feistily optimistic teen witch in Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989). And yet her perspective dominates Spirited Away. She’s not seen through another character’s eyes, and even the adult viewer is rarely conscious of observing her as a child. Rather, Chihiro is an avatar for the audience as we follow her adventures. Such identification is easy in written fiction, but Spirited Away is unusual even for Miyazaki in focusing so completely on one viewpoint. The film’s first shot, an hour and a half before the train, showed Chihiro lolling in her parents’ car, her eyes dull, bored with nothing and everything. From that point, she is assailed with experiences building from the curious to the terrifying. Her points of security – her home, her parents, her name – are taken from her as she’s plunged into a world where she must be a purposeful agent, whether to save her parents or help a struggling soot-sprite. For example, in the scene when Chihiro is forced to wash the unimaginably filthy ‘Stink God’, we see how it’s possible to survive an oppressive situation and make one’s toil one’s own. Chihiro suffers every indignity in this scene. She trips, stumbles, bangs her head umpteen times. She trudges through fecal slime, braving the god’s fetid breath. Her determination is shown not as cowed, robotic labour but as high heroism, taking every knock and standing tall. Eventually, the other bathhouse workers unite to help Chihiro clean

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the creature, flourishing fans and pulling together. Yet the pay-off stresses the individualism of a heroine’s journey as Chihiro stands alone before the revealed deity. In the dubbed and subtitled translations, it intones a transcendent ‘Well done’. The Japanese is more like ‘It’s good’, but either way the message is for Chihiro alone. Why use a girl to illustrate such themes? Perhaps simply because of the pervasive connotations of vulnerability and innocence surrounding young girls, which countless fantasies and fairy tales exploit.10 (One recent case is Guillermo del Toro’s live-action Pan’s Labyrinth, 2006, where another girl’s fantasy journey is juxtaposed with the exploits of wartime heroes in the real Spain.) Miyazaki is famous for creating young heroines in his films, leading commentators either to praise his supposed ‘feminism’ or to criticise his fixation with girls. Actually, Miyazaki’s early works (the TV Future Boy Conan, 1978, the film Laputa – Castle in the Sky, 1986) foregrounded boy heroes just as much, but his heroines clicked with the Japanese public. Miyazaki himself pointed out that one expects things of a hero, while the female can surprise. He cited the Gena Rowlands character in John Cassavetes’s 1980 film Gloria, a gangster’s moll who becomes a maternal bodyguard: ‘She shoots a handgun as if she is throwing dishes. It’s really exhilarating.’11 In Spirited Away, Chihiro grows from a weak child into a strong one, but Miyazaki stresses she’s still a child at the film’s end, more potential than realised. The director abstracts childhood to a nirvana state: When I hear talk of children’s futures, I just get upset, because the future of a child is to become a boring adult. Children have only the moment. In that moment, an individual child is gradually passing through the state of childhood … but there are children in existence all the time.12

These comments remind us of the girl on the platform; could she be a child outside time?

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The two Chihiros The portrayal of Chihiro led to some disagreement during the production of Spirited Away. While making the film, Miyazaki delegated much responsibility to his supervising animator Masashi Ando, who finessed the character designs and checked and corrected animation, tasks Miyazaki had handled himself on earlier films. According to frank interviews in the Spirited Away Roman Album, Ando wanted to make Chihiro a new type of Miyazaki heroine. In particular, he wanted to show Chihiro’s thinking, her uncertainty and hesitation before she does something frightening or difficult, so children could relate to her and feel encouraged when she triumphs. Miyazaki characters had always had moments of fear and desolation, but without doubt, Ando argued, Miyazaki was denying the uncertainties felt by the happiest child.13 Yet as production went on, Miyazaki began to adjust more and more of Chihiro’s animation. Perhaps Miyazaki’s own idea of Chihiro changed; certainly his story altered drastically in production. Yet in retrospect, it seems logical that Ando’s Chihiro is evident in the early scenes, precisely because they require an abnormal Miyazaki protagonist, listless, passive and scared. As the story continues, she is supplanted by Miyazaki’s brave heroine, exemplified in the scene where Chihiro runs along the pipe, acting from vivid, impulsive emotion. Miyazaki argued that Chihiro was a heroine not because she was pretty or clever, but because she found a universal inner strength. His Chihiro isn’t as sympathetic as Ando’s, but by the time she emerges from Ando’s timid character, she doesn’t need to be, operating as a viewer-substitute, a way into Miyazaki’s world. Cartoon reality Ando’s disagreement with Miyazaki is little known in the West, where arguments about the film are often about the animation style as a whole. For some cartoon fans and critics, Spirited Away fails because it’s not inherently animated. The train in the film runs over the sea, but has the ostensible substance and dimensions of a ‘real’ train.

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One can imagine the scene remade in live-action, with a real actress and modest effects. Cartoon critic Michael Barrier argues that Spirited Away’s ‘exotic settings and creatures … would be much more effective in computer animation of the Industrial Light and Magic kind, in support of live actors’.14 But why stop with CGI? A lower-tech, handmade remake would immerse viewers in Miyazaki’s world; maybe an oldfashioned, Méliès-style trick film, or a Hollywood cartoon remake with the theatrical character enunciations of classic Disney. But that would overwrite its world and overturn its gravity in a shift from situation to performance, leaving us with a different film. John Grant, author of Masters of Animation, claims that Miyazaki animation, and Japanese animation generally, should be seen as a medium of comic strips ‘that happen to show motion.’15 That’s a good description of many Japanese cartoons, but it won’t do for Miyazaki, who protests vociferously against the comic-strip style pervading Japanese animation. Peter Chung, creator of Aeon Flux (1991), argues that Japanese animation is ‘film-making first, animation second’.16 Again, this is true of films such as Satoshi Kon’s psychothriller Perfect Blue (1998) and Studio Ghibli’s war drama Grave of the Fireflies (1988), directed by Isao Takahata. These films could be liveaction; the animation heightens details and atmospherics that become powerfully expressionist by being drawn. But Miyazaki films are taken to another level by their world-building, depicting characters in and of their worlds, where we feel their surroundings as richly detailed, imaginatively boundless and paper-thin. We tend to think of film animation as a medium of spectacle, reflecting the showmanship of Disney, Pixar and Akira (1988) director Katsuhiro Otomo. Yet despite his glorious screen worlds, much of Miyazaki’s film language is plain and self-effacing. His compositions are powerful but hardly radical. His ‘camerawork’, in an age where CGI cartoons have wilder cinematography than liveaction films, is usually restricted to slow horizontal or vertical pans over backgrounds, perhaps a stylistic legacy of Miyazaki’s experience

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on TV cartoons. A contributor to an online Japanese animation fan forum (posting under the pseudonym ‘Slippy’) complained that: Miyazaki has such glorious character designs and Lean-esque vastness that it’s hard to criticise, yet his film grammar is still kind of boring. What I wouldn’t give, for an animator in love with Wong Kar-Wai or Lynch films to take, say, Miyazaki’s film Kiki’s Delivery Service and re-edit, remix it with framerates and zooms and restoryboarded shots and an expressionistic Europe … Or somebody apply Peter Weir-isms to Spirited Away. Instead of appreciating one man’s dreams, we would be in dream.17

But the whole point of Miyazaki’s screen worlds is their transparency, unadorned by postmodern syntax. Like Hollywood animation, his cartoons’ vitality lies in their characters, who were informed by Yasuo Otsuka, a Japanese cartoon pioneer with whom Miyazaki worked in the 1960s and 1970s. Otsuka was in turn influenced by Western animation, copying a whole book on cartoon principles by the artist Preston Blair. It’s a frequent complaint that Japanese character animation lacks the illusion of life found in classic US cartoons, yet Otsuka and Miyazaki developed their own intuitive aesthetic. Otsuka was drawn to caricatures, working on an animated version of the crime strip Lupin III, with designs inspired by the Mad Magazine artist Mort Drucker. Miyazaki worked with Otsuka on Lupin III, but his Ghibli designs tend more towards a house formula, what Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi sardonically calls ‘undertures’ that underplay individual features. The souls of Miyazaki’s characters, especially his heroines, are located in their strong poses, their lively, cheerful expressions and their sympathetically observed movements. However, the less feisty Chihiro has a gently unconventional design, evoking those of Mad’s Mort Drucker. She is given a sulky expression, a round baby face, pipe-cleaner arms and skinny legs; her shoes are comically oversized. The overall impression is deeply lugubrious, itself funny in a child.

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When it comes to the film’s fantasy characters, Miyazaki seemingly shares the tastes of Sergei Eisenstein, who adored animation’s elemental ability to squash, stretch, mutate and subvert body and form. In that spirit, Miyazaki serves up the bloated, gurgling, shapeless No Face; a spider-man with six elongated and extendable arms; a giant-headed witch who explodes with firebreathing rage; and the oozing Stink God who’s reborn from water as a giant wizened face. (When the creature first comes to the bathhouse, its foul odour makes Chihiro stiffen comically, her hair rising as if electrified, the movement meticulously animated.) The witch Yubaba leaps and races around the screen like a whitehaired dynamo. The film also features a flurry of transformations, with characters variously turning into pigs, a dragon and a fat mouse. Interestingly, Chihiro never transforms; rather she grows into herself. The shape of her face can change from shot to shot, but she becomes a node of integrity in the transforming carnival around her. (In apparent contrast, the heroine of Miyazaki’s next film, Howl’s Moving Castle, 2004, is subjected to continual magic transformation, The lugubrious Chihiro

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shifting from girl to crone and back again, yet her identity becomes ever more constant; much the same dynamic as in Spirited Away.) Cartoon authorship Miyazaki is known for creating or amending thousands of drawn frames in his films. Few people knew he delegated much of this work on Spirited Away, but he still created the story, mapped the storyboards, sketched the characters (their designs finalised by Ando) and checked and amended much of the animation. The texture of handcrafted animation encourages the intimate identification of a film with a hands-on artist. Even Miyazaki’s well-publicised ailments – failing eyesight, inflamed finger-joints, his constant complaints of falling energy – are part of his public persona, a morbid barometer of his career. A very human Miyazaki appears in the Nippon TV special The Making of Spirited Away, included on the two-disc UK DVD. Working in daily proximity to his staff in Ghibli’s cluttered workspace, Miyazaki comes across as a benign teacher, earnestly explaining how a snake falls from a tree or preparing a group meal of instant noodles. A sweetly unglamorous scene shows him finishing work at one-thirty in the morning. He wearily dons a jacket and cloth cap, flips through sketches with an unlit cigarette in his mouth, and trudges down the studio stairs. His films, like Disney’s, are a genre in themselves. They often feature vividly drawn aircraft or other flying machines, marrying the sublimity of drawn landscapes and skyscapes with the mechanical ingenuity of hand-built, gravity-defying contraptions. Two more Miyazaki motifs, his respect for nature and his pessimism about humanity, place us in a moral relation with the panoramic worlds. In Spirited Away, the eco-message when Chihiro cleans a river god is clear, and the gentle countryside she walks through after her train journey is a tranquil, renewing fulfilment to her quest. Miyazaki leaves flying to the end, when he presents a completely magic flight on the back of the dragon-boy Haku, machines having been amply

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represented in the bathhouse. But the train sums up the story of a weak girl who finds the power to live (Miyazaki’s phrase) in an ambiguous, threatening world. Miyazaki speaks as if such encouragements to children are the only justification of his art. A cartoon director who calls for people to engage with the world, Miyazaki deplores the passive, unreal nature of animation, his own included. Interviewed by The New Yorker, Miyazaki despaired of an age where children stayed at home watching cartoons. ‘The best thing would be for virtual reality to disappear,’ he said. ‘I realise that with our animation we are creating virtual things too. I keep telling my crew, Don’t watch animation!’18 And yet it was Miyazaki’s own teen yearning for an ‘earnest and pure’ cartoon world that shaped his life.

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3 Background Miyazaki was less than a year old when Pearl Harbor changed the world. Later he would describe how as an infant he saw a bombing raid on the Japanese town of Utsunomiya, where his family’s firm Miyazaki Airplane relocated during the war. After Japan’s defeat, in the painful years of national reconstruction, it was Miyazaki’s generation that was the first to encounter a humble new kind of children’s entertainment. Japanese comics, or manga, had existed for decades, but in the late 1940s they were revolutionised by a star artist, Osamu Tezuka. He used cinematic close-ups and multiple angles in his strips, which could span many volumes; they were often adventures, but Miyazaki was struck by their tragic quality. Tezuka’s way of linking drawn and moving pictures would define much of Japan’s pop-culture in the decades to come. Miyazaki devoured Tezuka’s early comics and was drawing his own strips in his teens, but was frustrated because they ended up imitating Tezuka. Disheartened, he burned his work. The episode figures, barely disguised, in his 1989 film Kiki’s Delivery Service, in which a woman painter confesses that when she was younger, ‘I painted and painted but none of it was any good. They were copies of paintings I’d seen somewhere before … I swore I’d paint my own pictures.’ Before the war, Japanese animation had been overshadowed by American imports. Tezuka himself loved Hollywood cartoons, especially those by the Disney and Fleischer studios, and saw Bambi (1942) eighty times. As Japan moved towards war, it produced more striking cartoons, culminating in the 1945 feature Momotaro’s Divine Sea Warriors, where animal soldiers save the Pacific from Western invaders. After Japan’s defeat, the industry was dominated

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by animated commercials and contract work for America. In 1958, however, the Toei studio released a colour cartoon film, Tale of the White Serpent. Miyazaki saw White Serpent while preparing for university entrance exams. It was a time of conflict for him. On the one hand, his life had been blighted since childhood by the illness of his mother, who contracted spinal TB and spent nine years bedridden and often hospitalised. Miyazaki would dramatise the situation in Totoro, where the mother’s illness is a barely voiced fear for most of the film, breaking out with shocking force at the end. Yet at the same time, Miyazaki was self-conscious about his privileged status. His family was relatively wealthy, escaping the worst privations of the Occupation years, and Miyazaki fretted about less fortunate classmates and the ‘fraud’ of his position. As another status reminder, he was destined to go to Gakushuin University in Tokyo, a prestigious private college. Around this time, he had a fight

The Legend of the White Serpent (released in America as Panda and the Magic Serpent)

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with his parents; he also witnessed the demonstrations against the Japanese–American establishment as Japan entered the 1960s. But in the middle of all this, the cartoon fantasy of White Serpent was a revelation. Thirty years later, Miyazaki wrote: (I saw it) in a third-run theatre in a seedy part of town … I was moved to the depths of my soul and – with snow starting to fall in the street – staggered home. After seeing the dedication and earnestness of the heroine, I felt awkward and pathetic, and I spent the entire evening hunched over the heated kotatsu table, weeping. It would be easy to analyse this and write it all off as the result of the gloom I felt over the exam-hell I then faced or my youthful immaturity … But, be that as it may, White Serpent had a powerful impact on me … I really was in love with the pure, earnest world of the film

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Miyazaki’s embarrassed yet defensive confession (‘It would be easy to analyse this and write it all off …’) is artlessly earnest, precisely the quality he defends. White Serpent, a story of a snake spirit who loves a human man, looks rudimentary today, most memorable for a design that recalls Chinese prints. The film comes to life pitting characters dramatically against the elements: the heroine visits a fiery astral realm, then braves a sea-storm. The technically crude scenes have a lively, surreal integrity. Above all, White Serpent presents animation as a place, more abstracted than in Miyazaki’s films, but still a medium of immersion as much as motion. White Serpent prompted Miyazaki to learn the principles of animation while at Gakushuin, presumably from a book. On graduating in 1963, he took the enthusiastic step of applying to Toei, the studio that made White Serpent, and was hired. Toei executive Hiroshi Okawa had talked of creating a ‘Disney of the East’, and indeed the first film Miyazaki worked on, Woof Woof 47 Ronin (1963), had blatant lifts from Bambi, down to the canine hero’s mother being killed off screen, leaving the pup wandering desolate in the snow. However, Miyazaki didn’t like the Disney style, preferring cartoons such as Paul Grimault’s 1952 French feature

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The Shepherdess and the Sweep (later released in a revised form as The King and the Bird). The film is set in a vertiginous fairy-tale castle, which Miyazaki paid homage to both in his film director debut The Castle of Cagliostro (1979) and later in Spirited Away. Another profound influence was a 1957 Russian cartoon version of The Snow Queen, directed by Lev Atamov, that’s seemingly echoed in one of Spirited Away’s central scenes (see Chapter 6). Toei’s animation style was rivalled when Osamu Tezuka set up an animation studio, Mushi Productions, and produced a cartoon version of his strip Mighty Atom (known in America as Astro Boy), about a heroic boy-robot. Broadcast in 1963, this was the first major Japanese TV animation. According to Mark Schilling, it was commissioned because Tezuka said he could do it for five hundred thousand yen an episode – an unheard-of low sum … (He) devised a system of limited animation in which

The King and the Bird

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only one part of the image – a character’s lips or eyes – moved, saving on cels and costs. … His innovations became standard practice in the Japanese animation industry.20

These economies paralleled those being practised in US cartoons such as The Flintstones and The Huckleberry Hound Show, which flourished as the lavish Hollywood cartoon studios died or fell into decline in the 1960s. In Japan, Miyazaki would later criticise Tezuka for using the same approach that had made him a comics giant, linking still drawings and moving pictures. ‘Japanese animation began by giving up on movement,’ Miyazaki protested, claiming that ‘the technique of making pictures move was used to emphasise an extended and distorted sense of time and space.’21 It was a striking repudiation of the stylised, anti-realist action of much anime, celebrated in the Matrix films. Miyazaki found a like-minded colleague in Isao Takahata, a French literature graduate a few years his senior, who’d joined Toei in 1959. The two were fellow union activists and Marxists, a typical Japanese stance in the postwar years. (There’s a delicious irony in Miyazaki, the future ‘Japanese Disney’, being a union activist of the kind that Walt himself fought bitterly in the 1940s.) Miyazaki and Takahata marched in demonstrations when a labour dispute broke out at Toei, but they also found time to begin a feature animation, Prince of the Sun Hols’s Greatest Adventure, directed by Takahata. (The film is available on UK DVD, under the name The Little Norse Prince.) Production started in 1965 and took three years. During this time, Miyazaki married fellow Toei animator Akemi Ota and saw his first son, Goro, born in 1967. Goro would later direct an animated fantasy of his own, the 2006 Ghibli feature Tales from Earthsea. The Little Norse Prince, to use its Western name, is a mixture of sword-and-sorcery fantasy and redemptive drama. Its early scenes concentrate on a feisty boy-hero, Hols, who defends a village from wolves and magic adversaries. The second half focuses on a girl

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called Hilda (very much Takahata’s creation), who sings seductive lullabies that are remarkably akin to the closing song in Spirited Away. Hilda turns out to be on the side of the enemy, but is redeemed by Hols’s kindness. This redemption theme figures in several Miyazaki films, including Spirited Away, while other story ideas recur in his work. However, Prince never immerses its characters in a fully realised world; the fact that it feels so different from Miyazaki’s films shows how little his mature work is defined by plot. On the other hand, the animation is more fluid and ‘cartoonish’ than any Ghibli animation, including a vivid fight between Hols and a great fish, drawn by Miyazaki’s mentor Yasuo Otsuka. Despite its virtues, Prince failed at cinemas. (Takahata suggested that it was because the heroic Hols glared too much.) Both Miyazaki and Takahata soon quit Toei for other studios, working mostly in TV cartoons for the next decade. The most significant of these was Heidi (1974), again directed by Takahata. Miyazaki drew endless layouts of Alpine slopes, little villages and old-fashioned city architecture, the drawn detail taking viewers across the world. He also worked on several of Heidi’s successors, including Takahata’s Anne of Green Gables (1979), whose high-spirited heroine plainly influenced the protagonists in Miyazaki’s later films. The first animation on which Miyazaki worked as main director was Future Boy Conan in 1978. Although made for TV, Conan was much closer to his later film work than The Little Norse Prince. The story is set after a future world war. Conan is a boy who lives on an island, and is strong enough to lift boulders and fight sharks. The sea washes up a girl, Lana, fleeing the high-tech, totalitarian city of Industria, and the story becomes a busy adventure full of chases and rescues. As with Prince, many of Conan’s story ideas recur in Miyazaki’s later films, but the series also takes the strong sense of place from Heidi and its successors and applies it to playful but earnest fantasy. (For example, Lana’s pastoral home stands in opposition to the

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soulless production-line city of Industria, which is nonetheless full of towers to climb and chutes to slide down.) Yasuo Otsuka described how Miyazaki had changed by Conan. He could have been paraphrasing any number of reviews of Spirited Away: It was like a normal person had turned into the Hulk. He had a constant stream of totally original ideas … You couldn’t analyse his work logically, it was like he couldn’t control himself. He said it just came out that way … He didn’t have time to explain, so those crazy, innovative concepts got turned into visuals.22 Future Boy Conan

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Conan’s character animation uses fewer frames than Prince, yet it’s far more charming. The characters’ faces are cheerfully expressive, artfully timed and calibrated to evoke sympathy. Miyazaki was indebted to Otsuka’s animation and Takahata’s direction, but another important colleague was a young animator called Yoshifumi Kondo, who would work on several Ghibli films. When Kondo died suddenly in 1998, Miyazaki’s eulogy reflected the animation they had come to value. ‘I can’t forget one scene which Kondo did,’ he said. ‘It’s in Conan, when the hero laughs to cheer the heroine up … The expression of the boy was really cheerful, full of gentleness and consideration. It was really a great picture.’23 The gap between TV and film animation aesthetics had been bridged by Otsuka, who modulated and alternated between more and less ‘limited’ animation depending on what the action required. Miyazaki carried this through to his film work, where the frame rate routinely changes within a single passage of movement. In Spirited Away, for instance, when Chihiro first encounters the witch Yubaba, she is yanked forward by Yubaba’s magic, rolling onto the floor. The movement starts on ‘ones’ (a distinct picture every frame), goes to ‘twos’ (a picture every two frames, or twelve drawings a second) and ends, slower, on ‘threes’ (eight frames a second). Few Japanese animations after Prince dispense with limited animation entirely. One example is Katsuhiro Otomo’s vastly budgeted Akira, where the characters move more individually than Miyazaki’s, but with none of the pathos found in Chihiro’s or Conan’s faces. A year after Conan, Miyazaki made the film The Castle of Cagliostro, featuring the gangster-cum-thief Lupin the Third. Lupin had been created by the Japanese artist Monkey Punch, who was variously inspired by Mad Magazine, James Bond and a fictional French thief (Maurice LeBlanc’s Arsène Lupin). As mentioned in the previous chapter, Miyazaki had already worked on a TV Lupin, but in Cagliostro he made the character his own by layering the allusions. Cagliostro starts disguised as a caper film, but turns into a romantic swashbuckler à la The Prisoner of Zenda with a wicked count,

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a fairy-tale castle modelled on the one in Grimault’s The Shepherdess and the Sweep and an angelic princess straight from a storybook. Significantly, the womanising, dilettante Lupin must ‘die’ (we see him dramatically speared) before meeting her and reinventing himself as hero and taleteller, acknowledging that he’s in a fairy tale himself. Cagliostro represents the first fully fledged Miyazaki world, not only in the castle setting but its use of space and place to build and nurture character. Cars bound along bumpy mountain roads; Lupin frantically leaps from one castle tower to another. But Miyazaki could slow the pace to a dreamlike reverie, as when Lupin ponders in the mossy ruins of a burned-out castle. Cagliostro was a true Miyazaki film (John Lasseter cites it as a key inspiration), but a commercial failure. By then, however, Miyazaki had met his most important collaborator for the next quarter-century. Toshio Suzuki Toshio Suzuki was an editor on a Japanese animation magazine, Animage, which emerged from the post-Star Wars boom in Japanese animation. Thinking Animage’s publisher, Tokuma Shoten, might invest in cartoons, Suzuki helped present Miyazaki’s suggestions to the board. Like Monkey Punch, Miyazaki was creating a composite character, Nausicaa, from bit-part literary characters: a gentle princess in Homer’s Odyssey, a ‘Lady who loved insects’ from Japanese medieval literature. When Tokuma rejected Nausicaa, Suzuki encouraged Miyazaki to develop the ideas as a comic, called Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind. Miyazaki agreed, but had no interest in turning the strip into a cartoon, reflecting his belief that the media were essentially different. Secretly, Suzuki hoped Nausicaa would be animated, and finally persuaded Miyazaki. Both the strip and film Nausicaa (1984) are set on an alien future Earth, swathed in a towering jungle of fungi and spore-clouds, where humans cower from great sentient insects. Nausicaa is the courageous princess of a human end-times kingdom, the titular valley of wind. She also incarnates one of Miyazaki’s most famous visual

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ideas, the girl who flies, surfing the winds on a jet-powered glider. Nausicaa’s plot balances the realpolitik of pre-emptive strikes, military occupation and future weapons of mass destruction with a spiritual-quest story expressed in gentle, feminine imagery. Miyazaki’s world is poised between a rational science-fiction setting and an exotic, mystical neverland of feathery plant growths and giant toadstools through which Nausicaa clambers, her feminine grace suiting the organic space. The film didn’t satisfy Miyazaki, who returned to the Nausicaa comic for the next decade. Written between his later films, the 1,000-page strip stands in the same relation to the film as The Lord of the Rings does to The Hobbit. To borrow Tolkien’s phrase, the Nausicaa strip deepens into a saga about death and the desire for deathlessness. The heroine becomes a tortured saint with blood on her hands. There are epic battles with armoured knights riding horse–bird hybrids and multiple nods to mythic archetypes. For all Miyazaki’s insistence that comics and cartoons are separate, there’s much cross-pollination between the strip and his later films, including Spirited Away.

Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind

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While the strip was a massive expansion of the cartoon, the film itself was diminished in America. The rights were sold to a US video company that released Nausicaa in a shortened, simplified version called Warriors of the Wind. Consequently, Miyazaki and his colleagues were wary of selling their films abroad for many years afterward. Studio Ghibli Unlike The Little Norse Prince and Cagliostro, the Nausicaa film was commercially successful in Japan, prompting Tokuma to make a larger investment. Studio Ghibli was created in Nausicaa’s wake, although Nausicaa is usually represented as a Ghibli film today. The studio started as a tiny outfit of seventy temporary staff, whose first ‘true’ project was Miyazaki’s Laputa – Castle in the Sky. Like Nausicaa, the name comes from Western literature, the flying island in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. The film opens with a boy seeing a girl descending sleeping from the sky as a magic Other, a summation of the yearnings, fears and fantasies of human contact. (There’s a similar scene in Princess Mononoke, 1997, when the warrior Ashitaka first sees the blood-smeared girl San, feral and alien.) Laputa lacks the poetry of Miyazaki’s later work, yet it’s a remarkably pure film, with a plotline almost as spontaneous as Spirited Away. The children Pazu and Sheeta are adventurous, brave, kind, loyal and loving, able to befriend the wild, reckless pirate queen Ma Dola without making her bland or taming her. A village is framed by a ravine of toy-like bridges and cliff-hugging houses, stretching space and perspective. In the film’s aerial scenes, the clouds are towering cliffs in an ocean of awesome depths. Laputa itself is a floating world of two halves, nature above, technology below, its roots penetrating the machinery. The ending sees the battered children embrace, then recite the spell to jettison man’s works, leaving nature free-floating in a triumphant metamorphosis. Miyazaki’s next film, My Neighbour Totoro, originally envisioned as a picture book, was a hard sell to investors. It was finally double-billed with Grave of the Fireflies, Takahata’s first film

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at Studio Ghibli. This meant that Totoro’s joyous fantasy of two children who encounter magic creatures in the Japanese countryside was accompanied by Takahata’s tragedy about war orphans who only escape their hardship in death. But by a fluke, Totoro and Grave beautifully complement each other, both acute studies of childhood with more fully realised characters than any other Ghibli film. While Grave’s psychology rested on hidden subtexts (Takahata acknowledged a sublimated incest theme), Totoro’s is out in the sunlight. The interaction of the film’s protagonists, the toddler Mei and her big sister Satsuki, is built from countless subtle observations, such as an exquisite instance of sibling jealousy as the girls’ mother brushes Satsuki’s hair. Totoro is also inclusive of children and adults. Satsuki, on the brink of adolescence, hesitates before leaping on the nature god Totoro’s chest, then grins in surprised joy realising that, yes, she can share the magic. The girls’ father brays with laughter in the family bathtub to reassure his daughters against night noises, then extends the moment into a spontaneous water-splashing romp. It’s an energised response to an animist universe where a country wind is as alive as the tadpoles and snails, where the

My Neighbour Totoro

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accelerated growth of a mighty tree reveals an awesome life force. The giant Totoro, a benign bear-like creature, hears rain on an umbrella and can’t resist crashing water from the tree branches in a deluge, performing a nature haiku in his joy; for above all, Totoro is about happiness. The film had a limited release in America, where many reviewers were obtuse, one complaining that ‘Compared with the swirling kineticism of (Disney’s) Aladdin, Totoro is practically a still life.’24 Miyazaki’s next film, the more Disneyesque Kiki’s Delivery Service, had a warmer reception when it was released on US video by Disney itself. The film is set in a world where witches are part of everyday society. The titular thirteen-year-old trainee can only fly on a broomstick and talk to her black cat as she sets out to work in a European city (a blend of Stockholm, Visby, Naples and San Francisco). Miyazaki made Kiki as a riposte to ‘magic girl’ Japanese cartoons whose heroines routinely use their powers to solve problems.25 By showing Kiki living on a budget, visiting a supermarket or falling victim to a creative block that stops her flying, Miyazaki conflates the fantastic and the mundane.

Kiki’s Delivery Service

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Of all Miyazaki’s films, Kiki’s Delivery Service is thematically closest to Spirited Away, because it makes labour integral to the story. Kiki and an older girl she befriends called Ursula are self-employed workers, united in a creative-labour community as they strive to make their talents theirs. Ursula speaks of ‘The spirit of witches, the spirit of artists, the spirit of bakers … I suppose it must be a gift given by God.’ Kiki uses this communal underpinning to save the day when an airship bears her boyfriend aloft. In an evolution of the bond between Miyazaki’s protagonists and settings, the crowds cheering Kiki to victory at the end of the story close a character arc for the city where she arrived a stranger. (In an end-credit gag, Kiki even finds her dowdy witch’s clothes have sparked a fashion trend.) Kiki’s Delivery Service was Miyazaki’s commercial breakthrough, with two and a half million admissions in Japan. Subsequently, Suzuki became Ghibli’s CEO, having spent years juggling jobs at Ghibli and Animage, and the studio moved to a

The current Studio Ghibli building

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Miyazaki-designed building in Tokyo’s Koganei suburb. By then, Miyazaki had released Porco Rosso (1992), about a 1920s’ fighter pilot whose face becomes piggish to symbolise his rejection of society. While viewers remember the film’s skydiving action, its underlying themes are displaced heroes and traumatised masculinity, linking Porco Rosso to Pixar’s The Incredibles (2004) and John Ford’s live-action The Quiet Man (1952) (down to a climactic fight played for laughs). Porco Rosso topped Japan’s international box office in 1992. It was Miyazaki’s last film as director for five years, though he worked on the delightful Whisper of the Heart (1995), created with Yoshifumi Kondo. The film, about a schoolgirl flowering into first love and her first artistic endeavour, develops the creative labour themes in Kiki. The girl is writing a fantasy story and sees her everyday life in that framework, though the film commits the cardinal ‘sin’ from a Western viewpoint of animating a drama that could have been live-action, constructing and exploring its drawn world as described in Chapter 2. Suzuki criticised Whisper on other grounds, claiming that the girl wasn’t realistic, in contrast with what he wanted in Spirited Away.26 Miyazaki returned to direction with Princess Mononoke. Why the film elevated Miyazaki to the Japanese equivalent of Steven Spielberg (Mononoke broke E.T.’s fifteen-year box-office record in Japan) will never be clear, any more than why Disney’s The Lion King (1994) or Pixar’s Finding Nemo (2003) were so much more popular than their predecessors. Certainly Mononoke, which more than doubled the budget of previous Ghibli features, took Miyazaki’s worlds to new levels of hyperreality, right down to the vines and mosses in the ancient forest where the film is set. Mononoke also marked Ghibli’s wholehearted embrace of computer technology, deployed in some dynamic action scenes, which Miyazaki had dismissed a few years earlier. Mononoke was Miyazaki’s closest analogue to live-action cinema, though still closer to Japanese action cartoons like Akira.

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The story relocated Nausicaa’s plot to medieval Japan where human pioneers battle the country’s ancient nature gods. Miyazaki’s heroine Nausicaa is split into two characters: a feminised young warrior (looking very like the boy Haku in Spirited Away) and a wolf-raised, human-hating girl, the Princess Mononoke. During Mononoke’s production, Tokuma signed a distribution deal with Disney, giving it international cinema and video rights to Ghibli’s work. Following the video debut of Kiki’s Delivery Service, Mononoke was the first Ghibli film to be given a limited cinema release by Disney in America, also playing in British venues. Few people went to the film, while critics (who’d praised Kiki’s Delivery Service) were divided. Even some Miyazaki fans found Mononoke cold and preachy, while others thought it was too different from Western conceptions of a cartoon. There may have been another reason for the lukewarm reception. Mononoke was an action-heavy spectacular, atypically violent for Miyazaki, with copious bloodletting and fantastical decapitations. Yet it arrived after Akira, a testosterone-saturated teen nightmare spectacular that displaced adolescent sexuality into Princess Mononoke

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head-butting biker battles and exploding bodies, and Ghost in the Shell (1995), a melancholic, meditative sci-fi film by the Kubrickian director Mamoru Oshii, abstracted even in its violence. In the West, both films were aggressively, uncompromisingly different in their content and sensibility, while Mononoke looked relatively conventional. Spirited Away succeeded internationally where Mononoke and Totoro did not because it had the hybrid qualities of a popular crossover, poised between East and West, familiar and exotic. But it also represents an evolution that it would be tempting to call postMiyazaki were the film not so spontaneously intuitive; not postMiyazaki, then, but primal Miyazaki.

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4 The Origins of Spirited Away In September 1999, Miyazaki said: ‘At this age, I cannot do the work I used to. If my staff can relieve me and I can concentrate on directing, there are still a number of movies I’d like to make.’27 Before Mononoke, Miyazaki had investigated The Marvelous Village Veiled in Mist, a whimsical Japanese children’s book by Sachiko Kashiwaba. Its premise is broadly similar to Spirited Away. A little girl finds her way to a tiny, bright-coloured town in a misty forest, where she meets a range of magic people, does various jobs to pay her way, and uses her initiative to solve her friends’ problems. After Mononoke, Miyazaki began developing an original project, Rin the Chimney Painter, which had no obvious link to Spirited Away except, perhaps, Miyazaki’s interest in national Japanese traumas. He planned to set Rin in a Japan recovering from the 1923 Tokyo earthquake; similarly, he would place Spirited Away after Japan’s economic collapse in the 1990s. The Marvelous Village Veiled in Mist

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Meanwhile, Suzuki saw Bayside Shakedown (1999), a hugely popular Japanese cinema spin-off from a TV police drama. The Ghibli President was struck by the film’s frustrated hero, and began to wonder if Miyazaki’s optimistic, passionate characters were out of step with a disaffected young audience.28 Mononoke and Grave of the Fireflies had moved anime into the critical and commercial mainstream, but Suzuki might have been thinking of Disney’s waning profile in the 1970s, as US cinema shifted into the age of The Godfather and Star Wars. Suzuki suggested to Miyazaki that his next film should be aimed more at children, as Totoro had been. Miyazaki abandoned Rin, although one holdover from the project was ‘Always with Me’, an elegantly wistful lullaby written by Wakako Kaku and sung by female artist Youmi Kimura. The song would ultimately play over Spirited Away’s end credits. It also seems that one of Rin’s characters was a grotesque, oversized old woman, who would serve as a design prototype for the witch Yubaba in Spirited Away. One inspiration for the story that became Spirited Away was the Edo-Tokyo Architectural Museum, which preserved buildings from Tokyo’s past. It affected Miyazaki deeply, while he also decided that he would make his film for a young girl he knew, who would be the model for the film’s heroine. Given Spirited Away’s parallels with Alice, one may think of Alice Liddell, the real-life muse for Lewis Carroll, but Miyazaki’s characters are often based on real people. For example, the girl Kiki in Kiki’s Delivery Service was inspired both by Suzuki’s daughter and the women artists at Ghibli who’d moved to Tokyo, and were having to contend with city life. Spirited Away has similar themes to Kiki, and Miyazaki mentioned the women animators again in connection with the new film, comparing its fantastical bathhouse setting to Ghibli itself. ‘For us, Ghibli is a familiar place,’ he said, ‘but it would look like a labyrinth to a girl coming here for the first time.’29 He also spoke about the girl who inspired Chihiro, the daughter of a friend. Miyazaki described her humorously as ‘a kind of a lazy bum,

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which is exactly the way that my favourite ten-year-old girls are. “You lazy bum!” I want to tell them, but I know their inner resources are as rich as Chihiro’s.’30 According to Suzuki, the girl’s mother was struck by Chihiro’s resemblance to her daughter when she saw the film trailer, while her father inspired Chihiro’s screen father (particularly in the character’s haphazard way of eating). The family had been summer guests at Miyazaki’s mountain cabin together with four other girls, presumably sisters or friends. Later, Miyazaki read the comics the youngsters had left behind, dismissing them as slush. Miyazaki had long believed that Japanese children were becoming listless, a view he shared with Takahata. In fact, Spirited Away’s central themes aren’t far removed from Takahata’s animated war drama Grave of the Fireflies, which was intended to show how a child with the attitudes of Japan’s contemporary youth would buckle under the demands of the past. ‘He isn’t stoic … The Edo-Tokyo Architectural Museum

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He doesn’t endure,’ Takahata said of Grave’s boy protagonist, whose story ends tragically.31 For its part, Spirited Away confronts a cosseted modern youngster with her country’s heritage refracted through fantasy. Production Ghibli announced the production of Spirited Away in December 1999, scheduled for release in summer 2001. Two decades before, Miyazaki had turned out Cagliostro in a breakneck seven months, but Spirited Away’s staff would be hard pushed to meet their deadline. Miyazaki’s concept demanded a huge on-screen cast and several technically difficult fantasy characters. Totoro had had twelve animators; Spirited Away ended up with forty. Even so, some in-between animation and digital production had to be contracted out to South Korea, a situation Ghibli had avoided in the past. (The work was given to D. R Digital, a division of the prolific Seoul studio DR Movie.)

Hayao Miyazaki and Masashi Ando

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Much of the responsibility for checking animation was given to the supervising animator Masashi Ando, barely half Miyazaki’s age but a Ghibli veteran of ten years’ standing. The pair’s close working relationship impressed the narrator of The Making of Spirited Away documentary, who noted, ‘The way Miyazaki spoke to Ando is neither commanding nor hierarchical; he trusts his ability and consults with him as an equal.’32 However, Ando would be disappointed by the development of Chihiro’s character (see Chapter 2). Whether for that or other reasons, Ando left Ghibli after the film, moving to work with the anime director Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue, Paprika, 2006). Many of Spirited Away’s other staff were youngsters who had never worked on a Ghibli feature before.33 The situation resembled the transitional Disney studio of the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the new animators being guided by experienced seniors, especially the two other supervising animators on the film, Ai Kagawa (sometimes credited as Megumi Kagawa) and Kitaro Kosaka. One of the pair’s responsibilities was reconciling Miyazaki’s drawings, which were cartoonish and fast-timed, with Ando’s realistic style. The staff interviews suggest a slightly frantic seesaw process as Miyazaki’s style overtook Ando’s toward the end of production.34 Another Ghibli veteran was the female animator Atsuko Tanaka (not to be confused with an anime voice-actress of the same name), who had worked with Miyazaki since Cagliostro. Kosaka credits Tanaka with much of the forceful characterisation of the witch Yubaba. ‘I’m not a storyteller, I’m a man who draws pictures,’ Miyazaki once told a Paris audience.35 Most Miyazaki films reveal their stories gradually, relying less on obvious turns or twists than on developments that can seem spontaneous, even random. This is often thought to be linked to Miyazaki’s habit of commencing animation before the storyboards, or even story, are finished, any outline having fallen apart. The practice is discussed in Thank You, Lasseter-san (2003), a feature-length DVD film about Miyazaki’s trip to America to promote Spirited Away with John Lasseter.

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Pixar’s founder explains how the studio’s films are built around tentpole sequences that are finalised early, while the end and the beginning are done last. In Lasseter’s experience, ‘Once you know the end (of the film) you know how the thing should begin.’ Miyazaki works very differently: Once I start to explain the story, I realise the holes. This happens, that happens, but that doesn’t work, does it? That’s the process for me … Somewhere is the right answer, the absolute best answer. The whole movie may be going in the wrong direction, but you can still do your best.36

This might seem a recipe for what Stephanie Zacharek called ‘wriggly, noodle-shaped’ stories, but Miyazaki had used this method successfully since Cagliostro. Spirited Away, though, hit a roadblock in production. In May 2000, when the animation was already under way on the first scenes, Miyazaki showed his next batch of storyboards to Suzuki. In the developing story, Chihiro was to fight the witch Yubaba, the ruler of the bathhouse, who has stolen the girl’s name. Chihiro defeats Yubaba, but must then fight a more powerful

The first appearance of No Face

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enemy called Zeniba. Miyazaki remembers, ‘As I stood explaining, all of a sudden I said, “Oh no, this is a three-hour movie.”’37 As Suzuki quipped, it would mean moving the release back a year. Rather than compress his story, Miyazaki opted to change it completely from the midpoint onwards. The new version centred round a background character, a phantom in a Noh mask who developed into the spiritually famished No Face. (According to Suzuki, the idea of basing the second half of the film round No Face came from the art director Yoji Takeshige.) That Miyazaki could make such a drastic about-turn midway through the film demonstrates his autonomy as a director, though many fantasy storytellers have improvised a tale. Conventions The realistic drawn backgrounds and the simple designs of Chihiro and the other ‘human’ characters follow Studio Ghibli’s conventions. Some Westerners inevitably ask why Chihiro’s family looks ‘Caucasian’ (though the round-faced girl looks more Japanese than most Ghibli characters). The simple answer is that it’s a decades-old stylistic convention in Japanese cartoons and comics, influenced by Osamu Tezuka and his love of the big-eyed stars of US cartoons. A deeper reason is offered by the artist-critic Scott McCloud, who argues that simplified, iconic faces let anyone identify with them.38 (That Westerners see the Japanese cartoon characters as Caucasian supports McCloud’s point.) Other critics argue that Japan’s reconstruction by America left its people with little racial self-consciousness, but this can’t explain why the style is popular in other Asian countries. Like the designs, the choice of composer also followed Ghibli tradition. Spirited Away’s music was composed by Joe Hisaishi, who scored all the Miyazaki-directed animations from Nausicaa onwards and several films by the live-action director Takeshi Kitano. Hisaishi’s musical contribution to Miyazaki’s worlds is immense, from Nausicaa’s electronic ambience to Mononoke’s experiments with the pentatonic scale. In Spirited Away, Hisaishi’s music ‘Mickey Mouses’ the action more than any Miyazaki film since Totoro, underscoring

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the clumsy immediacy of Chihiro’s adventures. When Spirited Away’s title appears, Hisaishi throws in a recognisable phrase from Mononoke. This may be inadvertent self-plagiarism, of which Hisaishi can be guilty (for example, his music for Mononoke and Kitano’s Hana-Bi, 1997, is near-identical in parts). Or it may be a subtle self-branding, reminding the audience that this is a Miyazaki (and indeed Hisaishi) film. Then again, the studio logo at the start already shows Miyazaki’s Totoro, a character brand as well known in Japan as Mickey Mouse. However, Ghibli has put the Totoro logo before films with more mature content, such as the violent Mononoke. It’s an interesting point of principle, given Suzuki’s concerns about changing cinema audiences. When Disney tried to attract older filmgoers in the 1980s, long before it acquired Miramax and Pulp Fiction (1994), the Hollywood studio already felt it necessary to develop separate film divisions, distanced from the cartoon stars that made Disney’s name. In contrast, there’s no sense in Japan that the Totoro logo ghettoises Ghibli cartoons as kids’ fare. One is reminded of Pixar, whose hopping lamp logo accommodates both the cheerful whimsy of A Bug’s Life (1998) and the sophistication of The Incredibles. (It’s widely thought that Pixar’s logo was the basis of a jumping lantern character in Spirited Away; in return, Totoro had a cameo in Pixar’s Toy Story [2010].) Pixar’s founder John Lasseter had known Miyazaki since the early 1980s, when Miyazaki was in America to work on Little Nemo, a troubled Japanese–US co-production. During this time, Miyazaki visited Disney, where Lasseter was conducting experiments with computer animation. The two became friends and mutual admirers. The American release Twenty years later, Lasseter, whom Miyazaki called ‘an enormously effective bulldozer’, pushed for a US release of Spirited Away following the disappointment of Mononoke. Lasseter was also an executive producer on the dubbed Spirited Away, presenting a

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gushing introduction to the DVD. The dub was produced by Disney and directed by Kirk Wise, co-director on Beauty and the Beast (1991). In both America and Britain (where the film was distributed by Optimum Releasing), subtitled prints were released alongside the dub. The reasoning was clear. Children and mainstream viewers wouldn’t watch a cartoon that wasn’t in English, while world cinema and Japanese animation fans would want to see Spirited Away in its native language. Arguably, the subtitled Spirited Away is farther removed from the original than the Disney-made dub, adapted by wife-and-husband team Cindy Davis Hewitt and Donald H. Hewitt. By its very nature, subtitling can easily categorise a film as ‘foreign’ cinema, to be framed in terms of its cultural origins and artistry. This is especially tempting with Spirited Away, where the foreign imagery is prevalent, obscuring its origins as a popular blockbuster. Westerners who saw the dub would be likely to receive Spirited Away on the same terms as a Disney or Pixar cartoon, which is no bad way to discover Miyazaki. The dub departs from Miyazaki’s version in places but is more faithful than other Disneyfications of his films. Spirited Away’s above-par dubbing is attributed by some people to Disney’s downplaying of star names in favour of experienced cartoon actors. Chihiro herself was voiced by child actress Daveigh Chase, fresh from the role of the perky Hawaiian girl Lilo in Disney’s cartoon Lilo and Stitch (2002). In contrast, almost none of the voicecast in the Japanese version had prior animation experience. Ironically, Miyazaki’s early films had used some of the best voicetalents in the industry, but from Mononoke onwards, he mostly used actors from other media. The Japanese cast In the Japanese Spirited Away, Chihiro was voiced by the thirteenyear-old Rumi Hiiragi, who had played the young foundling heroine in Suzuran (1999), a period TV drama. The spider-man Kamaji was voiced by Bunta Sugawara, a veteran of yakuza films including Kinji

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Fukasaku’s 1970s’ quintet, The Yakuza Papers: Battles without Honour and Humanity. Bunta (his name is reversed, Japanese-style, in the West) would return in another Ghibli film, Tales from Earthsea, directed by Miyazaki’s son, Goro. Yubaba and Zeniba were voiced by singer-actress Mari Natsuki, whose credits included a blood-bathing villainess in Fukasaku’s Legend of the Eight Samurai (1983). Even the great baby Boh, who spends much of the film as a mouse, was voiced by a celebrity, the seven-year-old Ryunosuke Kamiki, whom the Japanese Making of documentary describes as ‘the famous child prodigy’ from several TV dramas. Like Bunta, Kamiki would return to Ghibli’s animation in Howl’s Moving Castle and Arrietty, as well as voicing the hero in an acclaimed non-Ghibli anime film, Mamoru Hosoda’s Summer Wars (2009). The only true anime seiyu (voice-actor) in Spirited Away’s main cast was another thirteen-year-old, Miyu Irino as Haku, who went on to voice the hero of the Kingdom Hearts videogame series. The Japanese actors Bunta Sugawara (right, voicing Kamaji) and Rumi Hiiragi (left, voicing Chihiro)

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Undoubtedly, ‘name’ voice-actors can turn in performances as memorable as animation specialists – George Sanders as Shere Khan in The Jungle Book (1967) springs to mind. Yet few of the Japanese voices in Spirited Away are truly memorable, with the exception of Natsuki as Yubaba, a character in the mould of early Miyazaki, recalling the overblown, rumbustious pirate queen in Laputa. Ironically, Miyazaki dissociates himself from such ‘slapstick’ early work, bringing to mind Woody Allen’s attitude to his early, funny films. More than a decade before Spirited Away, Miyazaki said: I can understand why the adolescent audience claim that my older works are more enjoyable … But that doesn’t mean my intent has changed, just that I’ve gotten old. I am not yet 50, but I am enough of an old man to feel what an old man would feel.39

Miyazaki was approaching sixty when he made Spirited Away. It’s a fact that seems reflected in his intervening work: Porco Rosso, with its melancholic, middle-aged outsider hero; the later Nausicaa comics, where the gentle heroine becomes a genocidal killer; and Mononoke, where the inscrutable protagonists are subsidiary to the lush imagery and dialectic arguments. Spirited Away could have been Miyazaki’s opportunity to simplify things again, with a charismatic child lead. Instead, he followed Mononoke’s approach, using Spirited Away’s characters to illustrate a fantastical ethos and setting. The characters bring the film to life, from the monstrous Yubaba to the tremulous Chihiro, but it’s the girl’s journey, rather than Chihiro herself, that is at the heart of Spirited Away.

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5 Into the Woods: The Journey Begins (The discussion of the film in this chapter and the two that follow is based on the subtitled Japanese version, unless otherwise specified.) Our first sight of Chihiro epitomises listlessness. She’s introduced lying untidily on the back seat of her parents’ Audi car, sulking about their move to a new town. As she’s passively rocked by the jolting vehicle, she brings to mind an oversized toddler, foreshadowing a character she’ll meet later. Her father, sitting in the front seat, must call her name twice before she responds (Miyazaki recalled that some of his staff thought it should have been three times). The girl’s animated motion as she reluctantly half-sits to look out of the window, then curls back up on the seat, is beautifully observed, soliciting our empathy before we know anything about her. The opening scenes of Spirited Away are weighed down by anxious, ‘wrong’ elements: a passive, lacklustre child, a series of

The overgrown toddler

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unnerving events, leading to a melancholic depiction of lost Japan. The Chihiro of these scenes reflects supervising animator Masashi Ando’s idea of an emphatically ‘ordinary’ girl. Takahata’s Ghibli film Only Yesterday also had a naturalistic girl as a protagonist, her life presented as a series of joys and disappointments. However, Takahata’s extrovert child of regenerating 1960s’ Japan is far removed from the languid Chihiro, who has grown up in a recession that has caused her no physical hardship, but, Miyazaki argues, reflects an insidious spiritual decline. Chihiro glimpses a giant tree through the car window. It’s a reminder of other great trees, central to the imagery in Laputa and Totoro, but its presence here seems gently ironic. The children in those films loved travel and adventure, the thrill of new places. Chihiro is passive, disengaged; her only response to the landscape is to stick her tongue out at her new school. The wind blows her hair (a typical way in Japanese animation of expressing a character’s inner energy), but Chihiro sits like a stone. Her mood reflects the urban mundanity outside the window; even the landscape-scarring ironworks in Mononoke was more vital. The post-bubble family

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‘Did I take the wrong turn?’ asks Chihiro’s father, puzzled, as the tarmac road becomes a rutted track disappearing into deep woods. The boundary into the unknown is marked by quaintseeming Japanese symbols, marginalised by the infrastructure of modern life. The car passes a mossy wood archway, leaning on a tree trunk. It’s a Shinto gateway, an artefact of Japan’s nebulous ancient religion where such portals link the human world to an otherworld of eight million spirits. As the car drives into the woods, Chihiro glimpses a grinning, gargoyle-like statue in the trees. For older Japanese people, the statue would look benign, there to guide and protect travellers. We see this statue through Chihiro’s eyes, however, and to her it just looks creepy. The family are barely off the beaten track, but already seem like foreigners in their own country. Both Japanese and foreign viewers will recognise that we’ve entered archetypal story territory: the mysterious path, the lure away from the normal and everyday into the thickets of fairy tale. ‘Daddy, are we lost?’ worries Chihiro. ‘We’re fine, I’ve got four-wheel drive!’ her father assures her, displaying his faith in his top-of-the-range possession. He drives irrationally faster while Hisaishi’s music

The path into the woods

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reaches a crescendo. A common conceit in fantasy literature is that ‘Story’ is stronger than gravity, pulling characters into its patterns. Like Cagliostro and Whisper of the Heart, Spirited Away treats stories not as conventions to be pastiched and parodied but as magic spells, recognised but not subverted by the characters in them. Chihiro’s car screeches to a halt before a strange red building. Curious without imagination, the affectless adults consider a tunnel entrance, ignoring their daughter, who’s acutely aware of the scary shadows, the breeze blowing into the doorway. The scene plays humorously on our sympathies. We know that Chihiro’s right to be afraid, but we’re impatient to see what’s in the dark. As Chihiro sees her parents disappear into the tunnel, she grasps her oversized jumper in panic and hops from foot to foot, simultaneously anguished and comic. One suspects Ando’s touch; the movement is embellished from a rough sketch in Miyazaki’s storyboards. Chihiro, too scared to wait, runs in and grabs her mother by the arm, hanging on grimly. The trio walk through the tunnel; we see the father through Chihiro’s eyes, his back a broad shield. The tunnel opens into a space that resembles the waiting room of an abandoned

The reluctant protagonist

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train station. There are empty wooden seats, a stained-glass window, a dripping drinking fountain. The details provoke our curiosity and temper the suspense. We’re in a Miyazaki world now, actively exploring, not just anticipating. The characters emerge on a rolling green plain; stone carvings and dilapidated houses are scattered forlornly, some half-sunk in grass. They convey the weight of ages, a silent corrective to the modern world at the other end of the tunnel. Yet Chihiro’s father doesn’t see history; he sees a derelict theme park. (In Japan, ‘theme park’ encompasses everything from ramen museums to ersatz European villages.) ‘They built so many in the early 90s, but they went down with the economy,’ he says, referring to Japan’s miracle bubble economy and the recession that followed. The phrase, ‘They built so many’, reflects the huge number of postwar building projects that decimated Japan’s landscape and heritage. This will bear on Spirited Away’s plot when we learn why the river god Haku is homeless – his river was filled in. Spirited Away, it should be noted, is not the only Japanese animated film to tackle such issues. For example, the spiritual ramifications of this destruction were explored in a Ghibli film by Takahata, Pom Poko (1994), where native Japanese racoon-dogs fight human developers. In the non-Ghibli Patlabor (1989), directed by Mamoru Oshii, a policeman reflects on Tokyo: Tokyo is such an odd place … I saw some of the strangest old backwaters. But then the view would suddenly change; as each building fell, new ones rose up. Look away for a second and everything’s changed. Before you know it, the past is gone.

Chihiro and her parents find a deserted town full of old-fashioned shops and houses. As mentioned in Chapter 4, Miyazaki was inspired by the Edo-Tokyo Architectural Museum in Tokyo, finding its preserved buildings melancholic. ‘When there are few people and I go alone, I am overcome by sorrow,’ he said.40 His early sci-fi eco-romances gloried in images of nature retaking civilisation, but

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Spirited Away feels like the work of an older man. The ‘wrong turn’ opening reminded us of horror films; now another horror trope, the repressed past, unnerves adults who remember such buildings and children who see them as creepy cobwebbed mysteries. The buildings in Spirited Away were designed to look nostalgic and otherworldly, but their uneven jumble and profuse signboards also seem to be as much a parody of the pinball clutter of modern Tokyo, effectively defamiliarising past and present together. And some of the signs are worrying: ‘salty eyes’, ‘dog’, ‘fat’ or ‘flesh’ and even an old Japanese character for ‘worms’. (But in fairness to Chihiro’s crass father, the decoratively old-fashioned shopfronts also evoke Disneyland quite well.) The town’s centre is a well-kept restaurant district, where street lanterns, curtains, even the food on display, are picked out in bright, sinister reds. Again, both Oriental and Occidental viewers can guess that it’s a trap. Westerners know Hansel and Gretel; Japanese viewers also have tales like ‘The Restaurant of Many Orders’ by Night on the Galactic Railroad author Kenji Miyazawa, where travellers enter a hospitable-looking restaurant to find they’re on the menu.

The desolate town

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The parents are enticed by the food on a counter, ignoring Chihiro’s protests. ‘I’ve got credit cards and cash!’ her father assures her. The funny, unsubtle line confirms that he’s a son of the bubble years for whom the blithe assumption of prosperity never ended. The parents tuck in as Chihiro wrings her hands. She seems powerless but the staging is subversive; she now stands apart from her parents, watching, even judging them. Miyazaki leavens the suspense with cartoonish contrasts. The mother pecks delicately at the food; the dad inhales like Homer Simpson.41 Chihiro’s shoulders sag. Leaving her parents immersed in their meal, she walks to the main street and sees a flight of steps, which she climbs with effort, negotiating the world alone for the first time in the film. At the top, she sees an arching wooden bridge over a gorge. Beyond is a giant palatial building, with a flag fluttering before it bearing the Japanese character ‘Yu’, which can read ‘bath’. (The name of the building is ‘Aburaya’, which can denote a guest house, shop or restaurant.) The impressive exterior resembles any number of Japanese or Chinese castles. Bathhouses have special resonance for Japanese viewers, but the foreigner’s first impression is right; this is a fantastic palace of the kind enshrined in Disney’s logo or Paul Grimault’s The Shepherdess and the Sweep. We’re no longer in an etiolated ghost-world, but in Miyazaki’s heightened hyperreality. Chihiro is confronted on the bridge by a boy, Haku. His androgynous face and stylised elegance are Japanese cartoon conventions, seeming more magical beside the gangly, baby-faced Chihiro. His hair blows around his face, reflecting his passion; his speech is formal, occasionally antiquated. He’s alarmed by Chihiro’s presence, shouting that she must leave before dark, but as he pushes her away, the shadows lengthen like gaping jaws, the clouds roll into a clear noonday sky and Chihiro runs back through twilight. Haku stands against the unknown peril, blowing what look like petals from his fingers while the clouds roll past, suggesting forces strong and subtle. But then Miyazaki focuses on a single, evocative detail: the town’s lanterns and lights blinking on, seemingly activated

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by Chihiro’s passing. The lyrical mechanics feel like a Disney set piece, particularly the scene in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) when the terrified princess runs through a grasping forest, Chihiro’s awkward movements replacing the Disney theatrics. The Spirited Away scene is supported by the tumbling orchestral ‘Night-time Coming’, one of Hisaishi’s finest cues. Chihiro runs to the restaurant, where she finds her parents transformed. In horror-film fashion, we see the change before her, redoubling the shock. Her father turns to reveal an emptily bulging pig’s face, still chewing mindlessly. Chihiro’s cartoony reaction enhances the moment, her eyes widening, her body stiffening. She wriggles a moment in grossed-out revulsion before dashing outside. Turning the parents into pigs is Miyazaki’s cruel comment on the bubble years, but fantasy transcends allegory. Any child knows the reason why the parents became pigs: because they took the magic food without asking. In classic Disney style, we feel Chihiro’s fear and peril as she screams for her parents. The scene taps into pure, primal nightmare, yet it’s overlaid by Miyazaki’s triumphant showmanship, the thrill of

The pig father …

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the story. In the harsh way of fairy tales, Chihiro’s terrifying experience brings her to life. She flees down the town steps and splashes waist-deep into water, the dream-logic shocking her awake amid the pell-mell images. Across the water, reflected buildings blaze with fiery light. The girl pounds her fists against her head, shouting this is a dream, but with topsy-turvy logic, she starts to fade. A shining barge docks at the riverbank, unloading a crowd of phantoms. The first group are floating paper masks, bearing the stylised image of a human face. Wonderfully, they grow floating bodies to match the shadows beside them, recalling characters in vintage US cartoons such as the Betty Boop classic Minnie the Moocher (1932). Miyazaki claims that of all the fantastic creatures in the film, the phantoms are the only ones whose appearance was grounded in Japanese tradition; the masks are worn by dancers at the Kasuga Shrine in Nara. Perhaps the masks appealed to Miyazaki because their symbolic reduction of the human face represents an end-point of cartooning. Moreover, the masks look authentically Japanese to domestic and foreign viewers, anchoring the wilder beings that follow. … and Chihiro’s reaction

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Chihiro screams and runs again. Her floundering contrasts with Haku’s contained movements as he runs, searching for her. When he sees Chihiro, she’s hunched in deep shadow, hiding from the vibrant carnival of gods moving across the other side of the frame. According to Ghibli’s notes, the human Haku is about twelve years old, but that’s not clear from his androgynous design. He’s mature enough to supplant Chihiro’s pig-parents, more tender than her mother as he gives her a berry to sustain her in the spirit world. Miyazaki is never embarrassed about stressing the vulnerability of his girl characters, or his male players’ protectiveness. Haku’s gift awakes Chihiro (again) into a dream that she can negotiate. As a monstrous bird swoops overhead (we’ll later learn that it’s Yubaba), Haku shows his virtue by dispelling fear. He frees Chihiro from her terror-struck paralysis with the words, ‘In the name of the water and wind within thee, unbind her!’, as if elevating her to adventurer status. Haku pulls Chihiro on an exhilarating dash to the bathhouse through barns and storehouses. (Note the adroit bit of animation on ‘ones’ – see Chapter 3 – as he hurries her down wooden steps.) A ferryload of phantoms

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They must cross the bridge to the magnificent building shining in the night, seducing the viewer if not Chihiro. Haku warns her that she mustn’t breathe – ‘Even a tiny breath’ – to escape detection. It’s a serious children’s game, like ‘Don’t step on the cracks’, implying a world based on the rules and rituals of childhood. The creatures’ masks and cloaks suggest fancy dress. Among them is the Noh-masked No Face, though Miyazaki didn’t know it when he sketched the scene. According to Miyazaki’s assistant Masayuki Miyaji, it was only when Miyazaki saw the rushes that he remarked that the nameless form looming from the fantasy mise en scène was ‘interesting’.42 Haku and Chihiro are caught, but Haku saves them with a crowd-pleasing burst of magic. Safe in the building’s shadow, he instructs Chihiro what to do next, touching her forehead to impart instructions to her mind. In a world governed by magic rules, it seems natural that he can send the directives head to head. Rather than explain how to beat an adversary or fulfil a task, he instructs Chihiro so that she can survive at all: ‘If you don’t work, Yubaba will turn you into an animal.’ Again, this sounds like a warning to a toddler, turned into literal fact. Haku enters the bathhouse, leaving Chihiro alone. She huddles miserably for a moment, then starts crawling, a small but emblematic transition. Inching round the bathhouse above a cliff, she finds a flight of wooden stairs. We see her from above, clinging fearfully to the wall as a neon-lit millipede train roars by below. The shot sums up her vulnerability; the perspective creates a thrilling stretched space. It’s another Miyazaki tradition, the vertical, vertiginous structure to scramble up or tumble down. At first, Chihiro can’t let go of the latticed wall. She reluctantly gets down to a sitting position as Hisaishi’s music genially narrates the action. ‘How scared Chihiro is! She puts her foot on the wooden step – it holds!’ The next step sends her hurtling. It’s wonderfully timed, cruel and funny, reprising a gag in Cagliostro when the thief Lupin loses his footing on a castle roof and races haplessly down to make an impossible leap to another tower. Chihiro just hits a wall, painfully.

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The stairway sequence

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As she approaches the end of the flight of stairs, there are signs of industry, clouds of steam. Chihiro’s own animation becomes looser, weirder; it was drawn by Shinya Ohira, who would push such loose-limbed motion further in the Matrix spin-off The Animatrix (2003) (in a segment called ‘Kid’s Story’) and in the violent cartoon flashback to Kill Bill Volume 1 (2003). Ohira’s drawing of Chihiro conveys her suspense and hesitation in fluid mini-distortions: a quirky, crooked walk, the billowing of her striped jumper. Crucially, it doesn’t break sympathy with the character, which is presumably why Miyazaki left Ohira’s timing intact. Opening a door, Chihiro passes through a red-rimmed passageway and into a cavernous chamber where a strange being toils.

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6 In the Bathhouse It is Kamaji the spider-man, ‘slave to the boilers that heat the baths’. He has the body of an old man and was originally intended to be ‘human’, but his spider appearance fits his role splendidly. Apart from the cartoon opportunities offered by his long limbs, the design works as a universal symbol (spiders are emblems of hard work) and an extended joke (the extra arms only mean that he’s worked harder). Kamaji is a caricature of the stressed working man, chained to the grindstone, faced with a dozen deadlines as he bawls at minions to work faster. The minions in question are chirping dustbunny soot-sprites called ‘Susuwatari’, who have stringy limbs, white eyes and no mouths. Cute and fascinating, they’re closer to Aardman plasticine creations than Disney critters or Hello Kitty!. (The same creatures appeared in Totoro, although they didn’t have limbs then.) ‘Go to work, you runts!’ Kamaji shouts, remarking with slave-driver

The spider-man Kamaji, whose name means ‘old boiler man’

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callousness that there are ‘plenty of replacements’ in a workplace full of soot. Miyazaki once said of Ghibli’s young artists that ‘We used them up; it’s like we ate them.’ Yet the Susuwatari aren’t cowed, massing to defend Chihiro when he demands that she leave. Kamaji at full blast is a frenzy of long arms driving an invisible locomotive, turning wheels and yanking tabs. His multitasking deftness suggests less a labourer than a craftsman. The character is an old-fashioned Japanese type: grumpy, complaining, scolding, resolutely hiding his warmer side. He’s gruffly voice-acted by Bunta Sugawara, better known for playing yakuza, while his environment reflects Miyazaki’s love of chugging industry. According to Kamaji, if the Susuwatari don’t work, the spell wears off and they return to soot, suggesting that work is a requisite of personhood. Miyazaki couches this lesson in a mini-story that again shows the influence of Miyazawa, who wrote Aesopian fables about nonhuman characters. In Miyazaki’s homage, Chihiro sees a soot creature struggling with a coal lump and impulsively takes the burden. The coal is unnaturally heavy and Chihiro realises that she’s hoist by her charitable act. ‘Do I just leave it?’ she asks. ‘Finish what you start!’ snaps Kamaji. Chihiro painfully lugs the coal to the furnace. The music lightly narrates the vignette, underplaying images that work just as well with the sound down. With a huge effort, she casts the coal in and stands gasping. The other Susuwatari regard her; then one purposefully drops its own coal on its head. Then they all do. It’s one of the film’s biggest laughs, both because of the creatures’ wriggly antics and also because we recognise the way in which the scene takes a serious moral point (about altruism and responsibility) and makes it funny. A woman, Lin, enters through a sliding wood panel. Her design and dialogue establish her as sassy, confident; not a memorable character in the film, yet important. Miyazaki often uses older women characters to complement the young protagonists. The boy Haku had magic, but Lin has the practical agency Chihiro needs to survive. Kamaji covers for the girl, revealing that he’s kind under his

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gruffness, persuading Lin to take her to Yubaba. Like Haku, Lin and Kamaji display more parental concern for Chihiro than her real parents, even if they communicate in chastisements (‘Did you thank Kamaji?’ Lin demands as Chihiro is about to leave). Outside the boiler room, Lin leads Chihiro to a wooden elevator and up to the bathhouse proper. Public bathing is part of Japanese life, whether in steaming hot-spring baths or ‘super sento’ leisure complexes. It has the weight of antiquity, as in Romanised Britain and Europe, but there’s a particular reason why a bathhouse would remind older Japanese viewers of their childhoods. In the 1960s, there were nearly 18,000 public baths, or sento, in Japan, with 2,700 in Tokyo alone. The local sento was a place where citizens undressed and washed in classless community centres, and where children learned of a wider world than home or school. Spirited Away’s bathhouse is a red and golden treasure-chest where bizarre creatures, representing some of the eight million Shinto spirits, stroll through flamboyant décor that may look Japanese (or at least Asian) to Western viewers, but draws on ‘pseudo-Western’ buildings from the prewar decades when Japan modernised and Westernised. Chihiro’s first task

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One of the building’s main models is Tokyo’s Meguro Gajoen restaurant-hotel, an opulent 1920s building still operating today that is decorated with mural paintings, carved pillars and man-sized vases. Miyazaki said that he made the bathhouse pseudo-Western to ‘make it ambiguous whether it is dream or reality … By putting in pieces of traditional design as colourful mosaic, the film’s world has a fresh persuasion.’43 The ornamentally overblown layout, full of arching walkways, stairs and elevators, gives the building the air of a whimsical play-world, like those in Rupert the Bear picture stories. As Aardman’s Nick Park observed, even the bathhouse’s denizens ‘are reminiscent of creatures Rupert would bump into in the woods’.44 They include a party of horned Ushioni, legendary bull-demons with great horns and tusks, walking placidly around in bathrobes. A homelier creature, the Daikon Radish Spirit, accompanies Chihiro the rest of the way to Yubaba. The peppery white daikon is familiar in Japanese cuisine, though the Disney dub adds a line of explanation. Despite the red dish on his head, the spirit has a voiceless dignity that’s charming and pointed, for shouldn’t such an important vegetable have nobility? Chihiro and the Radish Spirit The gods at the bathhouse

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squash in a lift like commuters on a train, echoing a famous Totoro scene where a nature spirit is encountered at a rainy bus stop. At Chihiro’s destination, the Radish Spirit bows to her, prompting her to bow back, a mutual affirmation of worth. Averse to organised religion, Miyazaki presents gods as a repository for humble piety and respect for pre-materialist reality, which Chihiro needs before meeting Yubaba, stealer of names and souls. Yubaba As Chihiro reaches for a glossy wooden door, the gargoyle doorknocker comes to life and speaks. Recalling A Christmas Carol, the following scene deploys more theatrical conjuring tricks as even the backgrounds become Victorian. Chihiro is yanked down passageways and hallways into a lavish boudoir, where a hearthfire flickers and a trio of bodiless heads bounce around her. At a writing desk is Yubaba, plainly inspired by the Duchess in Tenniel’s Alice pictures, with a giant scowling face and a great bun of hair.45 Yubaba, whose presentation was largely the work of animator Atsuko Tanaka, does most of her acting through her huge square of a mouth. Her expressions as she pushes and prods Chihiro are some of the film’s best animation; she’s an ogress, a force of nature. In a paper on Spirited Away’s use of folklore, Noriko T. Reider argues that Yubaba is partly derived from the mythical ‘yamauba’ or mountain witch (also written ‘yamanba’), who’s often portrayed as a Baba Yaga cannibal who entices and eats humans.46 But Yubaba also resembles the pirate queen Ma Dola in Miyazaki’s Laputa, a hulking matriarch who tears meat with her teeth. Both Miyazaki characters are exuberantly monstrous rather than malign, distinguishing them from Disney villainesses. The name ‘Yubaba’ itself might echo ‘yamauba’; more obviously for Japanese viewers, it’s made of the words for hot water (‘yu’) and old woman (‘baba’). When Chihiro asks for work, Yubaba zips up the girl’s mouth and bullies her, enjoying her own performance. ‘You’d make a lovely

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piglet … or maybe a lump of coal?’ she says, widening her painted eyes and puffing smoke columns from her nostrils. She’s still addressing Ando’s Chihiro, who has no Harry Potter powers, no special cunning, only – once Yubaba makes the mistake of unzipping her mouth – the talismanic words, ‘Let me work!’. In Miyazaki’s world, they’re enough, for the chaos is deflected. A giant baby’s foot kicks through the door, catching Yubaba in the head. Reider notes that a yumauba supposedly mothered the Herculean Japanese The witch Yubaba

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superhero called Kintaro, which might explain why Yubaba’s infant is bigger than she is. Bundling the baby away, Yubaba finally accedes to Chihiro’s demands and the girl signs a contract in the Japanese style, with her family name first (‘Ogino Chihiro’). ‘What an extravagant name,’ Yubaba remarks and proceeds to steal it, detaching three of the four kanji characters and drawing them into her palm. As with the earlier lighting of the lanterns, the understated effect has dreadful implications. ‘From now on, you’ll be “Sen”,’ Yubaba says, ‘Sen’ being the one character left from Chihiro’s name. The magic of a name is a fairy-tale trope, but Miyazaki was particularly influenced by Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea novels, where a key idea is that everything has a ‘True Name’ learnable by magic. The second book, The Tombs of Atuan, opens with a perversion of this principle, as a girl has her name ceremonially stripped from her to enslave her to the supernatural. Conversely, in Miyazaki’s comic strip Nausicaa, the heroine chooses a name for a man-made titan, causing it to rise spectacularly to sapience.

Stealing Chihiro’s name

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These themes are central to the film; the scene itself is not, at least in the version of Spirited Away that made it to the screen. It feels crucial; we expect a pay-off when Chihiro fights to recover her name, as Miyazaki planned. But one wonders if he might have changed the plot even if his original outline hadn’t been too long. After Laputa, Miyazaki’s films either have no conflict (Totoro) or build to a battle that’s derailed by events (Nausicaa, Porco Rosso, Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle). Chihiro’s meeting with Yubaba is only one dramatic confrontation to get deflected into something else. As the scene ends, Haku reappears, now revealed to be Yubaba’s servant and with none of his former warmth. In the bathhouse barracks, Lin complains when Haku assigns Chihiro to her, then congratulates the girl once they’re alone. Both scenes highlight how confusing adults seem to children. ‘There aren’t two Hakus, are there?’ Chihiro asks, foreshadowing the later revelation that there are two Yubabas. Next morning, Haku comes to Chihiro, bidding her meet him outside. She retraces the previous night’s journey, the ordeals she has survived. On the bridge she encounters No Face and bows, before

Chihiro among the flowers

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Haku takes her through an exquisite flower garden. In a computeraided shot, both characters seem to magically float between the garden’s hedges, as if it exists in its own distinct space. Haku leads Chihiro, as her father did earlier. Past the flower garden is a consummately realistic pigsty, containing Chihiro’s pig-parents. Chihiro’s face crumples, then she shakes the tears away, yelling that she’ll save them. Outside, Haku returns her old clothes to hide (she’s now dressed in a worker’s uniform). In a pocket, she finds a card addressed to ‘Chihiro’ and realises that overnight she has somehow forgotten her old name. One of Miyazaki’s favourite animations is a Russian version of The Snow Queen, where a sorceress with a flower garden (vividly portrayed in the Russian film) steals the heroine Gerda’s memory.47 Typically for Miyazaki, we only realise Chihiro’s memory loss when she does, surprising us both. ‘I no longer remember (my name) … but it’s strange, I remembered yours,’ Haku says, suggesting that we forget ourselves but not those we care for. Haku gives Chihiro large riceballs to eat, invoking memory as clearly as if he had offered her a madeleine. The simple food is immensely homely, reminding viewers of the bento packed lunches that Japanese parents (traditionally mothers) make for children.

Chihiro eats the riceball

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Chihiro starts eating reluctantly, realises that she’s ravenous and gobbles the food down. As Haku puts an arm round her, she cries exaggeratedly huge, healthy tears. Miyazaki animated this moment, vindicating his ideal of a universal visual language where anyone can respond to Chihiro’s feelings, regardless of culture. As Miyazaki’s son Goro noted, his father makes films with emotions rather than reasons.48 In Kiki’s Delivery Service, the girl loses her flying powers for reasons that are only hinted at, but her loss reflects her emotional state at that point. Similarly, in Spirited Away, Miyazaki doesn’t ‘explain’ Chihiro’s catharsis, but lets us share it through images and associations, which are actually stronger because Chihiro herself isn’t strongly characterised. After showing her crying, Miyazaki jumps ahead a few moments; now she’s positive again, breaking into a smile as she leaves Haku and runs back over the bridge. Ando said this touch puzzled him, but a fluid change in a child is as natural as the different faces that adults wear every day. Toil and trouble In his work before Spirited Away, Miyazaki showed labour in contrasting but compatible lights, as a social focus and a vehicle of self-expression. The early Future Boy Conan featured a harmonious village commune, while Porco Rosso and Princess Mononoke had empowered female teams in ‘male’ industries, building aircraft and working furnaces. In contrast, the character Ursula in Kiki is a painter living happily alone in a wood, while Whisper of the Heart’s schoolgirl protagonist is so determined to write a story that she neglects her studies. Some of Miyazaki’s comments suggest that child labour doesn’t have so many negative historical connotations in Japan as elsewhere. His own grandfather worked in a domestic household from the age of eight. In Kiki, set in a modern-looking parallel world, witches leave home to work at thirteen, while the boy Pazu in Laputa is a cheery miner’s apprentice. Miyazaki said that he didn’t want people to forget that children were sent out to work in Japan only a few

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decades ago, or that child labour continues elsewhere in the world.49 That said, Chihiro’s first duty of scrubbing the bathhouse floor is exactly what many Japanese children do in class every day. (When Lin scolds Chihiro for not doing it properly, Japanese viewers of different ages will smile in rueful recognition.) Workers file round the building’s different levels, giving an impression of cramped complexity that finds a balance in the echoing central atrium. The cleaning women have oval faces and twin dots on their foreheads.

Working in the bathhouse

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They’re supposedly transformed slugs, complementing the male frog workers; the personification of humble creatures is typical of Miyazawa. (Lin, with her elongated face and no ‘dots’, seems to be an exception, being originally designed as a weasel creature.) The dots suggest slugs’ antennae (though a few of the men have them too), and humourously echo the painted eyebrows of Japanese ladies in the country’s fabled Heian period, a thousand years ago. It’s occasionally claimed that the bathhouse is a metaphor for Japan’s sex industry. Some arguments for this view are spurious, but it’s true that many Japanese bathhouses offered private services in the past. Miyazaki’s extravagantly overdecorated building could be seen as having adult undertones as well as enthralling children. Around this part of the film, there’s a teasing glimpse of a sultry bathhouse woman leading a tall, towel-clad humanoid. On a personal level, Miyazaki remembered the red-light district in the Tokyo of his childhood, saying Spirited Away ‘unintentionally’ depicted such marginal environments. But while the gaudy mise en scène may be broadly comparable to a brothel, there’s little to take the metaphor beyond ideas of forced

Private services?

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servitude and sacrificed identity (few prostitutes keep their names). The comparison is undercut by the whimsical, non-human designs of the bathhouse customers, though other efforts to decode a sexual subtext focus on the enigmatic No Face, who enters the plot here. Chihiro sees ‘him’, if it is he, standing outside the window in the rainy night. Thinking he’s a guest, she leaves a door open, before being called away by Lin. After she’s gone, No Face crosses the threshold. Chihiro’s innocent invitation reminds us of vampire stories; it also mirrors how she helped the Susuwatari in Kamaji’s boiler-room, unaware that good deeds don’t go unpunished. As Chihiro helps Lin prepare a sludge-caked big tub, she slips and stumbles, banging her head and wincing; the environment is against her. No Face materialises and steals a wooden ‘herbal soak’ token that she needs for the bath. (The workers send these tokens to Kamaji on a pull-cord dumb-waiter system, a charming instance of Miyazaki’s old-fashioned mechanisms.) After helping her the first time, No Face reappears with a heap of tokens, holding them out to Chihiro pathetically. ‘There are so many …’ the confused girl says, unconsciously echoing her father’s comment about bubble-era Japan and giving a clue to No Face’s nature. Another visitor emerges worm-like from the night. The socalled Stink God will turn out to be something else entirely, reflected in a scene that progresses from low comedy to high fantasy. The opening is silly fun. The Stink God’s stench spoils food and knocks workers senseless, while Chihiro, Lin and even Yubaba are comically grossed out. The creature drops brown muck into Chihiro’s hands, suggesting that the Land of the Spirits revolves round eating and excretion as much as ours. As Chihiro leads the creature to the bathtub, Hisaishi’s cheery music lends a circus spirit to proceedings, and Yubaba gleefully watches from the gallery. Chihiro is now on show on the painted bathhouse stage, reminding child viewers how it feels to be forcibly called up before class. The girl wades sluggishly through the Stink God’s muddy gloop, her actions vivid and visceral. The ponderousness has a mock-

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epic quality that becomes real as Chihiro persists with winning determination. The scene was inspired by Miyazaki’s experience of cleaning a river, yet it’s a properly Herculean turning point, not because of the spectacle but because of what Chihiro is shown doing, taking dehumanising drudge work and making it her own in a mythic struggle. The scene is one of two occasions in the film when Chihiro bathes, the water rippling in a sine wave off her head and encasing An epic task

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her like amniotic fluid. The undertones are ecological and religious, paralleling Shinto purification rituals where practitioners wash in rivers or waterfalls. Chihiro finds a ‘thorn’ in the god’s side that turns out to be a rusty bicycle, holding back a torrent of rubbish festering like pus in the divine body. The detritus is removed with a beautiful ‘pop’ and the god deflates with a sigh. The water explodes upward as a serpentine dragon, somewhere between solid, liquid and gas as it thunders out of the bathhouse with a jovial laugh. The implication is that Spirited Away’s world is a dumping ground for our jetsam, a conceit that might have been the basis of a whole other film. Instead, Miyazaki regales us with Chihiro’s triumph and an image of renewing purity as the landscape surrounding the bathhouse is shown to have turned into sea (‘What did you expect after all that rain?’ asks a practical Lin). As Chihiro looks down from the night-time barracks balcony, justly tired, a train runs over the moonlit surface. Soon she will ride it.

‘What do you expect after all that rain?’

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7 Adventures in Wonderland In the Spirited Away Roman Album, Suzuki reveals how the film was eventually constructed from two different stories, each with different protagonists.50 The Chihiro in Spirited Away’s early scenes is scared and vulnerable. The Chihiro of the second half is a Miyazaki heroine who meets strange new characters, defeats the monstrous No Face and takes them all on a train journey into the unknown. Her pigparents and her stolen name are forgotten until the end, when they’re dealt with in a couple of minutes. It’s easy to imagine how Spirited Away’s story could have continued more ‘logically’, because Miyazaki had done it already in Kiki’s Delivery Service. Like Spirited Away, much of Kiki’s first half is spent showing a girl’s arrival in a new place (an idealised European city), with Miyazaki making a charming adventure out of Kiki’s problems in finding somewhere to stay. Eventually, she establishes herself in an offbeat job, a flying delivery service, and settles into a new life as time skips forward (the film’s second half seems to be set over a few weeks). The action involves her various adventures at work, some comic, some charming, all character forming. Finally, there’s a crisis over which Kiki prevails, drawing on the skills and spiritual resources she’s acquired. One can picture Spirited Away proceeding in parallel, following Chihiro’s stay at the bathhouse over days or weeks as the girl faces more tasks, encounters more spectacles and strives to save her parents. The obvious climax would be a face-off between Chihiro and Yubaba, but Miyazaki found this a dull way to end the film and invented a back-up witch, Zeniba. Spirited Away’s strangest visions, mostly in the film’s second half, captivated viewers and critics because they seem delivered direct from the unconscious, from the seabound train to the explosively puking No Face.

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In one interview, Miyazaki talked of falling Alice-like through doors in his mind that brought him closer to the film’s world, though he was disappointed how little he could capture in his drawings.51 But despite bewildering, spontaneous images, the central themes remain consistent. The new characters, No Face and the giant baby Boh, can be seen as state-of-the-nation comments on Japan, but in story terms, they’re understandable as versions of Chihiro, redeemed like her through empowering labour. Few adult reviewers discussed these themes in depth, but children engaged with them seriously. ‘I received a letter from a child who really liked No Face and was relieved he was able to board the train with Chihiro,’ Miyazaki said. ‘I was pleased to hear his comment because I felt the same. I received another letter from a child who felt No Face is exactly like her mother.’52 When Chihiro lets No Face into the bathhouse, she’s called away by Lin before he enters. When No Face reveals his monstrous nature in the dead of night, again she’s not present; and when he causes an uproar at the bathhouse, she’s busy with other things. In a story told from Chihiro’s perspective for the first hour (barring brief inserts showing Yubaba’s toing and froing), it establishes No Face as a different kind of consciousness. In his early appearances, he makes sighing grunts, pitiable yet repellent. Later, he takes the voices of those he eats as his stomach bloats with their bodies, a sarcastically reductive metaphor for how people develop through exchange and interaction. No Face’s first victim is a greedy frog worker whom he entices with gold that seemingly grows from his hand. It’s played humorously – the monster emerges from a bathtub like a pantomime demon and flashes the gold seductively, making it even clearer what’s going to happen than when Chihiro’s parents were snared in the restaurant. The surprise is that, rather than eat through his mask, No Face opens a red mouth lower down to consume the frog. The discontinuity in design is startling. Is the mask actually the top half of No Face’s ‘true’ face, or are there other features that are perpetually hidden?

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Speaking in a distorted version of the frog’s voice, No Face demands food from the bathhouse staff, who didn’t see the crime. In grotesque cutaways, we glimpse them feeding it a banquet that it gobbles frantically, spitting and spilling half-eaten food. It recalls the debased ugliness of Chihiro’s pig-parents, also surrounded by the filth of their meal; both scenes remind us how good food turns to shit. But the scene also echoes Chihiro’s exquisite human need when she ate the rice-balls, humanising No Face even as he tips food down his neck and showers gold on the workers. The images resonate beyond the film, but the obvious themes – consumer lust, flagrant waste, mass hysteria – relate to bubble-era Japan. At one point, No Face advances through a crowd of staff as if borne aloft, parodying festival processions where celebrants carry shrines shoulder-high. The bathhouse foreman dances in front, waving fans and chanting a foolish ditty. According to Miyazaki, ‘It’s like a banquet where the chief clerk comes out playing the clown.’ For foreign viewers, it’s one of the film’s most attractively exotic images, but at the same time it’s satire, depicting the corruption of traditional Japan.

The false god

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No Face himself is squarely in the tradition of monsters with bottomless appetites. His wretched, empty hunger could be the spiritual nadir of any comfortable citizen in the modern capitalist world. A monster fixated on a child also raises paedophile shadows, at least for uneasy adults. No Face ‘wants’ Chihiro to alleviate his loneliness; at one point he makes gold for her, suggesting that he wants to buy her. (Chihiro is innocently baffled by the gold: ‘Don’t want any, don’t need any.’) But one can equally see No Face as a lonely innocent like the Boris Karloff monster in Frankenstein (1931), who joined a little girl in a game of floating flowers. (The famed shot from that film of the playmates sitting on their haunches before a lake is visually echoed in the eventual confrontation between Chihiro and No Face.) The ‘innocent’ versus ‘covert’ readings of No Face increase the indeterminacy of a character whose mostly expressionless mask lets us project what identities we choose. Like the Beatles’ ‘Nowhere Man’, he might be us. His condition, after all, is his facelessness in a world of colourful characters, chiming with subjective experience where we see every face through our eyes but our own. The heroine’s journey ‘Part two’ of Chihiro’s story starts with a dream. Before his thunderous departure, the cleansed Stink God gave her a gift, a ballshaped dumpling. Fried dumplings are familiar Japanese fare, but Chihiro’s is inedible; who is it for? In her dream, she takes it to the pigpen to restore her parents, but she can’t recognise her mum and dad while the pigs squeal and bellow. The dream is drawn like the rest of the film, passing up the opportunity for surrealism that would have pre-empted Chihiro’s progression into ever ‘curiouser’ territory. Much of the following adventure is set against sky and water, the natural colours contrasting with the reds and golds of the bathhouse interior. Beautiful in themselves, they advance the film; Chihiro is at sea, in transit. Awaking in the barracks, she meets an excited Lin but declines to see the munificent guest she describes,

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not realising that it’s No Face. As Chihiro returns to the balcony, she’s seen in profile, chin lifted, suggesting that she’s a different girl already. There’s an interval as she rests her head, gazing at the water. We periodically pay such respects to nature in Miyazaki films. Suddenly a great white serpent, a Chinese-style dragon, wriggles through the air like a kite. It’s Miyazaki’s first dragon, surprisingly for such a flight-enamoured director. It’s drawn side-on, easier for

Dragon at bay

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artists to handle, but also felicitously highlighting its resemblance to a storybook picture. The animation only switches to 3D to show the dragon’s viewpoint. The creature is pursued by a swarm of paper planes or birds that flatten into origami shapes as they hit the bathhouse windows and Chihiro herself. A dragon is moderately strange, though less so in a fantasy; living paper planes are stranger; their collision takes us into a higher fantasy order where bits of dream accrete. The planes recall the playing cards in Alice, or perhaps they’re a nod to Night of the Galactic Railroad, where herons melt into puddles on the sands of the Milky Way. Finally, they reference cartoons themselves, which bring paper characters to life. The wounded dragon, which Chihiro intuits is Haku, flies up to Yubaba’s room. His blood spatters the railings, but Chihiro doesn’t hesitate, determining to save him. The question ‘Why?’ doesn’t arise. Haku is Chihiro’s friend, he’s injured, and Chihiro has been strengthened in the earlier scenes. This was the source of the dispute between Miyazaki and Ando, who wanted to show Chihiro continuing to fight her fears. As Ando recognised, Chihiro becomes a Miyazaki ‘type’ at this point, though less like other Miyazaki heroines than the boys in Laputa and Conan who protect magic girls. Like those characters, Chihiro is a transparent viewer-substitute whose character has already turned on broad, exaggerated gestures, when she cried oversized tears or waded through a Stink God’s filth. Accepting her reality requires that we trust the earnestness of line and expression, as Miyazaki did when he saw White Serpent four decades earlier. This is easier to do in animation than live-action; cartoon characters have an inherent symbolic quality, aligning them with even the blank slate of No Face. The shift in Chihiro’s character from a scared child to a go-getting protagonist may have alienated some viewers from the film, but one suspects they were adults. As she starts her new quest, Chihiro’s awkwardness is played up even more. She swarms up the bathhouse steps on all fours. She’s flustered when she runs into the giant No Face, who wants something

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from her she can’t give. The encounter is one of the few points where we know more than she does, so we better appreciate her heroically innocent rejection of No Face’s gold. Then she’s running, bumping off walls, oblivious as the angry No Face eats the fawning foreman and an imprudently greedy woman. Climbing from a window, Chihiro must cross a metal pipe to reach Yubaba’s room. She contemplates the danger, looks at Haku’s dried blood on her hand and closes her fist against the wall. Then she hitches up her uniform for her task, tying a cord round her shoulders to pull the sleeves back. She holds the cord briefly in her mouth, a slightly sensual gesture. The animation of her sprint over the pipe, one of the film’s most exciting moments, wasn’t by Miyazaki, who asked for revisions when he found it insufficiently gripping. As Chihiro climbs, she’s framed against clouds and sea; her horizons are widening. From the ladder, she sees Yubaba flying to the bathhouse to be met by the bouncing heads and a hawk-like creature, (apparently a magic Mini-me with the face and hairdo of the witch). The appearance of these creatures is ‘Oriental’ in the way of Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion. Chihiro reaches Yubaba’s quarters,

The nursery

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unaware that she’s being helped by a paper plane that’s attached itself to her clothing. Inside, she passes funhouse-style mirrors that reflect her running in multiple directions, celebrating her purpose. (Satoshi Kon used a dizzy montage of a running girl in his 2001 animated film Millennium Actress to make the same point.) Chihiro ends up in a giant’s nursery with trompe-l’œil wall paintings of mountains and castles. The floor is cluttered with oversized cushions and toys; a sun is painted on the ceiling. It’s a low-tech virtual reality of the kind Miyazaki affects to despise, but created in appealing detail. A pterodactyl hanging from the ceiling adds particular charm; this could be the mind of an idealised storyteller. Miyazaki would return here in Howl’s Moving Castle, where he turns the nursery into a cavernous womb-space with the wretched Howl in its midst. (By then, the toys and talismans will suggest childhood dreams and ideals, tragically unrealised.) The nursery contains Yubaba’s baby Boh (the name can also mean ‘young child’ in Japanese). Like No Face, Boh spins conventional notions of monstrousness. Originally, he was planned as an adult–baby hybrid, but ended up as a cute baby whom we

The baby Boh

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regard as grotesque only because he’s gigantic. Miyazaki plays up the disproportion by having Yubaba come in and croon over the larger infant, ensconced in a mountain of cushions. She tips over cartoonily and plants a wet kiss; it’s a broad moment that, like the Stink God dropping poop on Chihiro’s hand, makes the weird grossly familiar. When Yubaba leaves, Boh catches Chihiro and pulls her to him with a child’s brutality. He accuses her of being a bad germ, claiming that he’ll get sick if he leaves the nursery. ‘It’s staying in here that’ll make you sick!’ responds Chihiro. Any child will get the point, though the scene has a double meaning in Japan, thanks to news reports about hikikomori, a pathological disorder where people, especially teens, can’t leave their homes or rooms. If Boh is indeed a parody of the Japanese hero Kintaro, it would be a particularly sardonic way to overlay a modern malaise on a national legend. (The main evidence that Boh spoofs Kintaro is that the barebottomed infant wears a red apron or harakake embossed with his name, just as Kintaro was said to do.) Chihiro breaks free, running into Yubaba’s room where the Haku-dragon lies wounded. With Yubaba absent, she must contend with the bouncing heads, the Yubaba bird and the lumbering baby. The concealed paper plane comes into play, turning into Yubaba, or so it seems. The newcomer announces that she’s the witch’s hitherto unmentioned sister, Zeniba, and starts to transform things around her. The baby becomes a mouse; the bird becomes a bug with button eyes and a yellow beak; the heads turn into a fake Boh. In Miyazaki’s whole oeuvre, this scene feels the most as if it was spontaneously improvised on the storyboard, and quite possibly it was. (Asked about the mouse and bug, Miyazaki said they were included just to add a ‘touch of lightness’ to the film.) Was it here that the film started boring Stephanie Zacharek, and other reviewers for whom it lost the plot? The transformations are both exhilarating and wearing, a welter of non-sequitur tangents and fantasy MacGuffins; what the sci-fi/fantasy critic Nick Lowe called

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‘plot coupons’, or objects in a story that have an arbitrary magic connection to the outcome. The exposition is clear as mud. Apparently, Yubaba has an identical sister, from whom Haku stole a ‘precious seal’ for Yubaba, but the seal is imbued with a deadly charm that’s killing him. Are we meant to understand all this, or care? One might claim that our confusion mirrors Chihiro’s (but this feels like we are merely excusing a clumsy scene), or that the seal and twin devices have deeper thematic meanings. Actually they do, but that doesn’t make their introduction feel any less forced. The scene’s virtue is that it’s unexpected, for Japanese viewers as much as foreigners, and this unexpectedness works forward through the film. It’s especially charming that the mouse and the fly, whom we expect to be one-shot gags, are allowed to stay with Chihiro for the duration of the story and develop mini-arcs in parody of hers. Their moral lessons start at once, as the false baby tries to squash the mouse it’s replaced, displaying the same infant brutality seen in Boh. Haku ‘destroys’ Zeniba (whom we just about register was an astral projection) and falls into a chimney chute, taking Chihiro, the mouse and the bug with him. We glimpse Chihiro underwater (to be explained later), and phantoms in the depths, not seen again. The film’s first flight is framed in a constricting space; the water and tunnel imagery suggest a torturous birth for the reunited characters. (We later learn that the water was part of an identity-forming event.) They end up sprawled in Kamaji’s boiler room, the Haku-dragon hissing and coughing blood. Chihiro takes the river god’s dumpling, which she’s realised isn’t food but medicine. Fearlessly, she forces the dragon’s jaws open, shoves the dumpling down the creature’s throat, and forces its mouth shut. The dragon convulses, its serpentine body lashing the walls, while Chihiro presses desperately, moaning with the strain. The monster’s throat swells and it vomits a lump of black goop, which dissolves to reveal a gold object (the seal) and a surprised black worm made of goop that wriggles away. The visceral struggle between Chihiro and the

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Haku-dragon, far more masculine than he was in human form, feels like a proto-sexual enactment of adult trials, à la the decoded fairy tales in Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves (1984). The funny worm distracts us from such thoughts, however, as it scurries toward safety, to be blocked by the chirping Susuwatari. Chihiro stamps frenziedly on the zigzagging worm; it squelches underfoot and she reacts as she did to the Stink God. Kamaji shouts ‘Engacho!’ which the subtitles unhelpfully translate as ‘Gross!’. Chihiro forms a finger-square that Kamaji slashes, pronouncing ‘kitta!’ (cut). The ritual will baffle foreigners and even some Japanese; in The Making of Spirited Away film, Chihiro’s actress Rumi Hiiragi has never heard of it. As one might guess, it’s a Japanese custom with many variants, performed when one touches a ‘bad’ thing such as dog dirt. Its effect is to cut one off from impurity, but it’s usually performed by children, reminding us of the literalised, rule-bound nature of Spirited Away’s world, while also being a light-hearted nod to the Shinto heritage from which the practice derives. As the mouse-baby and the Susuwatari replay Chihiro’s actions, Kamaji explains Haku’s background. Like No Face and Chihiro, Taming the savage beast

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he’s a lost spirit, corrupted when he became Yubaba’s apprentice. ‘As time went by he turned increasingly pale and his eyes took on a sharp gleam.’ Though it adds baggage to a convoluted plot, the Haku story resonates satisfactorily when Chihiro declares, ‘Haku helped me; now I want to help him.’ The words tie her story to Haku’s similar one, expressing a web of obligations and affinities. Chihiro plans to save the dragon-boy by returning Zeniba’s seal. Like the Engacho ritual, the object means little in the West but in Japan, such personalised stamps (hanko) are part of everyday business. They also bear their owners’ names, implying that Yubaba wanted to hijack her sister’s identity by stealing the seal. To help Chihiro reach Zeniba’s home and return the seal, Kamaji gives her a train ticket that he has been hoarding for forty years. Anime critic Jonathan Clements points out that this is probably a jokey reference to Miyazaki’s four-decade tenure in animation, from which he seems unable to escape. Lin reappears and Chihiro learns of No Face’s rampage, which she triggered by letting him in an hour before. ‘I’ll go to Yubaba now,’ she says, her lack of hesitation confirming the ascent of Miyazaki’s Chihiro over Ando’s. Engacho

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As Chihiro kneels to say goodbye to Haku, Lin asks what’s happening and Kamaji tells her it’s ‘love’. The Japanese ‘ai’, which he repeats, is a more passionate word than is traditionally used in such dramatic situations, even with adult protagonists, though it’s more carelessly used in modern Japan by a generation reared on translations from English. The emphatic description of the relation between two such young characters is a Miyazaki quirk; there’s a similar moment at the end of Whisper of the Heart (which Miyazaki wrote) when a schoolboy in his mid-teens asks his platonic girlfriend to marry him. Both scenes would get a big laugh in Japan from many viewers, even more than in Britain. In Disney’s version Kamaji strangely adds that Lin would not ‘recognise’ love (because she’s not human?). But then, ever since Chihiro set out to save Haku, we’ve been watching what’s increasingly clearly framed as Chihiro’s story, complemented now by the telling of Haku’s story. More than ever, the film is playing by the rules of children’s reality, where love is fairytale currency and any child watching Snow White can connect with the prince’s kiss. In Conan and Laputa, ‘romances’ between child characters are marked by heroically scaled passions and commitments from the start, though even they never say ‘ai’. But nor do Chihiro or Haku; the line is given to the frank oldster Kamaji, whom we can presume doesn’t care what anyone thinks, and to the tough-guy voiceactor Bunta Sugawara, whom the Japanese audience knows does not. It falls to Chihiro to slay the No Face dragon, a task Miyazaki inverts by replacing the destruction of an outer evil with the purging of an inner sickness. In Miyazaki’s later works (at least after Laputa), the opposition between good and evil is replaced by one between pity and hate, where there are no inherently evil beings and monsters can be unravelled to innocence for another try. ‘In films for children,’ Miyazaki said, ‘there is always the option to start again, to create a new beginning.’53 The grown-ups cowering from No Face are scared and selfish, desperate for Chihiro’s sacrifice to placate the monster. Chihiro responds with Haku-like calm and poise, while Yubaba, smaller than

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she was in her office, is animated in sped-up, comic fashion. She fails to recognise her mouse-baby (‘How disgusting!’), in contrast to Chihiro’s earlier perspicacity in recognising the dragon as Haku. The meeting between Chihiro and No Face takes place on another enormous stage, with painted demons on the walls and waste on the floor. The gurgling monster asks Chihiro what she wants; she kindly tells it to go home. The Noh mask sinks into its inflated skin in both self-defence and a pathetic self-cannibalism. It tries forcing Chihiro to take its gold, to communicate in a way predicated on its control. It could be a metaphor for prostitution, for ersatz ‘virtual’ reality, or for the bubble assumption that credit cards buy anything. Chihiro throws the rest of the Stink God’s dumpling into his jaws. When asked about No Face’s violent sickness, Miyazaki merely said that the character had to rid his body of the poisons in order to purify himself. Surely there’s more to a scene evoking the gleeful grossness of the ‘Mr Creosote’ sketch in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life, where a bloated giant vomits over a genteel restaurant and bursts asunder. The animation is elementally repulsive as No Face’s

Confronting No Face

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huge tongue lolls from his mouth, covered with muddy vomit. The creature convulses peristaltically, his mouth beneath the mask recalling a different orifice. No Face’s loss of control is counterpointed by Chihiro’s prompt reaction, as she dashes before him to lead him from the bathhouse. The wild chase is more straightforwardly scary than the scene where Chihiro’s parents turned into pigs, but the animation transforms her into a different character. She sprints like a champion, terrified but unpanicked, the fly and mouse whizzing along by her side. The enraged Yubaba vanishes in vomit but No Face disgorges his earlier victims alive and well, presumably to stop children worrying about their deaths or that Chihiro may have caused them. The chase ends not in No Face’s destruction but his humiliation. In a bathetic shot, he pauses, thin and ragged, at the end of a narrow passage, pukes weakly and moves on. Finally, they exit the building, where Lin waits in a basin-like boat. Incorrigible, Chihiro shouts to No Face to follow. ‘He’s only bad in the bathhouse!’ she says wisely. ‘He needs to get out of there.’ One can complain that she has no grounds for this belief, but we can surmise that she’s earned the insight by a heroic acceptance of self, entailing an acceptance of others. Or maybe No Face was her all along. Shedding the bathhouse uniform for her own clothes, Chihiro walks alongside the sea to a train platform that seems stranger than any fantasy monster. In less than a minute, she’s left society, her world reduced to sea and sky. The train arrives; Chihiro boards. Her act of inviting the docile No Face on the train with her parallels a scene in the Nausicaa comic where the heroine defeats a monstrous phantom, then takes it through a dreamscape with her. According to Miyazaki: Most people who remember the first time they took the train all by themselves, remember nothing of the landscapes because they are so focused on the ride itself. So to express that, there had to be no view from the train. I had created the conditions for it in the previous scenes, when it rains and

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the landscape is covered by water. I did that without knowing the reason until I arrived at the train scene, at which moment I said to myself, ‘How lucky that I made an ocean!54

Beyond the parallels with Miyazawa, one might read a real-world significance into the train, as symbolic of nation-building in Japan as it is in America. Sanshiro, a 1908 Japanese novel by Natsumi Soseki, who wrote I Am a Cat, opens with its protagonist experiencing modernity through a train journey as he’s thrown together with fellow travellers, including an uncouth peasant man stripped to the waist. Spirited Away’s train suggests a democratising social space, closer to the traditional Japanese bathhouse than Yubaba’s gaudy travesty. We don’t see the faces of the phantom passengers, but they appear to be weary labourers, weighed down by heavy bags, strangers but not strange. The sight of the enigmatic girl on the platform confirms their shared humanity, saving them from the anonymity of No Face. Back at the bathhouse, Haku awakes. ‘Chihiro kept calling my name in the darkness; I followed her voice and woke up lying here,’ he says. ‘Can’t beat the power of love!’ replies Kamaji. One could dismiss At sea

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this as drivel, but it establishes that Chihiro’s train journey (which she took to save Haku) has now transcended the plot. (Miyazaki had already completed a long version of this filler scene in the Nausicaa comic, in which the comatose heroine is telepathically revived by a magic boy.) The next scene, where a recovering Yubaba finds that she has a changeling baby, is weakened by Chihiro’s absence. The witch displays splendid face-acting but only has the stoic Haku to play off, so she feels like an effect more than a character. Miyazaki saw the train as the film’s true ending, with the rest serving as a coda. Chihiro’s train ride is followed by a gentle walk through moonlit woods. The landscape could be from Totoro, while the strange set of travellers – girl, mouse, fly and phantom – seems to parody the quartet in The Wizard of Oz (1939). The fly and mouse swap their roles of burden and bearer, the mouse primly ignoring Chihiro’s offer of help. Guided by a hopping lantern, they reach a homely (if not particularly Japanese) farmhouse and are greeted warmly by Zeniba, who’s plainly expecting them. Originally, Zeniba was to look different from Yubaba, but the time-saving decision to make them identical fits better with Spirited Away’s themes and heritage, recalling Peter Pan’s ‘doubling’ of Mr Darling and Captain Hook. Miyazaki himself called Zeniba the ‘at home’ version of the workaholic Yubaba. The film highlights the surprise that Zeniba is benign, suggesting a fairy-tale rationale for the contradictions and ambiguities of grown-ups by separating them into clone bodies. When Zeniba laughs hugely, she looks like Miyazaki’s porcine hero Porco Rosso, while a close-up of her face, her eyes smiling and maternal, contrasts skilfully with Yubaba’s animation when she bullied Chihiro with delight. A fantasy-adventure film winding to a sedate end is as unusual in Japan as in the West. (The extended end to Peter Jackson’s last Lord of the Rings film, The Return of the King, 2003, was out of loyalty to the novel.) Perhaps Miyazaki was influenced by his colleague Takahata’s film Only Yesterday, where the emotional climax has two people talking softly in a car. Whisper of the Heart

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also has a low-key climax, similar in tone to Spirited Away, in which a kind old man reads a story that the girl protagonist has striven to write. Zeniba herself recalls Ursula, the wood-dwelling painter in Kiki’s Delivery Service, though Zeniba’s industry is handicrafts. Chihiro’s companions eagerly take up knitting and spinning, becoming comic proponents of unalienated labour. Miyazaki ties up the business with Zeniba’s seal briskly, caring little whether we catch the explanation or not. The slug Chihiro squashed was Yubaba’s device to control Haku, while Zeniba’s curse on the seal dissipated, presumably unable to harm the empowered girl. Clearly, Miyazaki doesn’t care about the details; even if we haven’t realised that the plot has ended, we should enjoy the Zeniba scene as a resting place, like the waiting room in the tunnel at the beginning of the film. Zeniba gives Chihiro a hairband spun by her friends and the assurance that nothing is truly forgotten, both to pay off in the last scene. The director animated the shot where Chihiro ties back her hair, holding Zeniba’s band in her mouth and momentarily looking more womanly than childish. It half-mirrors the earlier shot where she

Donning the hairband

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hitched up her uniform before crossing the bathhouse pipe. According to animation supervisor Ai Kagawa, some staff found the hairband shot suggestive – ‘ecchi’, to use the Japanese expression – though Kagawa thought Miyazaki, like Kamaji, was too old to be embarrassed.55 Miyazaki also animated the comic business with the mouse and fly in the same scene. Haku arrives in dragon-form to fly Chihiro and Boh to the bathhouse. Chihiro hugs Zeniba: ‘What a nice name!’ Zeniba compliments her. Leaving the rehabilitated No Face with Zeniba, Chihiro soars into the heavens on the dragon’s back. The flight is brief but then the scene’s not really about flying but Chihiro’s and Haku’s joy together as the landscape vanishes under clouds. Hisaishi’s swelling music and the clean-cut drawings, enlivened by the coiling dragon’s body, return us to the world of a picture book. In mid-air, Chihiro realises how Haku knows her. They met once in her world, when she fell in a river that, she now recognises, was the material body of Haku’s animist spirit. Miyazaki’s twist is that Haku’s river was destroyed by Japanese materialism: ‘My mother said they’d drained it and built things on top.’

Lovers united

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Such meetings between humans and spirits are the stuff of myth, derailed by the modern impulse to build so much, as Chihiro’s father said at the beginning of the film. In solving Haku’s riddle, Chihiro, having already reclaimed her name, recognises the true story of which she was part. The bathhouse was a sideshow; her tale started before she was ever spirited away. The unsympathetic viewer may regard the scene as a makeshift tying of loose ends that Miyazaki may well have composed on the fly, though that wouldn’t preclude an elegant result. Many viewers and reviewers were plainly satisfied by the scene’s flowing visual pleasures.56 The dragon’s scales blow away to reveal Haku in human form and he and Chihiro fall, the girl’s happy tears blowing up into the night sky. Haku’s and Chihiro’s shiny-eyed expressions are played up with all the cartoon excess that Ghibli’s house-style will allow, relying on the sweetness of Chihiro’s fluid expressions (now definitely a child’s) to avoid bathos. The use of falling as a romantic metaphor, as opposed to the flying we expect from Miyazaki, is charming and perhaps a selfreferential joke about the Miyazaki brand. Haku’s true name is expansively extravagant, Nigihayami Kohaku Nushi. ‘Sounds like a god!’ Chihiro exclaims. Reider sees a reference to the Japanese deity Nigihayahi, but his story has so little obvious relevance that it seems more likely that Miyazaki just half-borrowed the name. Chihiro and her companions descend to the bathhouse. Boh is reunited with his mother (‘You’re standing all by yourself?’). Riled, Yubaba resorts to childish pedantry: ‘This world has rules, you know! A rule’s a rule!’. Chihiro’s last test, to break her contract and restore her parents, is to pick her mum and dad out from a line-up of a dozen pigs. She looks at them for a moment and declares that her parents aren’t there: the right answer. The Disney adapters inserted a line in an earlier scene when Haku takes Chihiro to see her pigparents. In the dub, Haku tells her to look at them closely, which presumably is meant to account for Chihiro’s triumph, though the pigs look practically identical on screen.

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The original scene is as ambiguous in Japan as anywhere else – how does Chihiro know her parents aren’t among the pigs? The suggestion may be that Chihiro just intuits the truth, in the same way that she realised Haku was the dragon or that No Face was only bad in the bathhouse. This makes sense if the adventure is Chihiro’s dream – which is an issue raised at the end of the film – or at least a dreamlike, malleable reality that Chihiro is learning to control. This would also fit with Yubaba ‘turning good’ as Zeniba, while in the flying scene Chihiro almost seems to decide who Haku is. On the other hand, the live-action director Nobuhiko Obayashi interprets Chihiro’s test as expressing her love for her parents: few children would believe that their mum and dad had really turned into pigs.57 Yubaba’s contract explodes in a puff of magic, and the fantasy characters cheer Chihiro from the bathhouse (echoing the ticker-tape parade ending in Kiki’s Delivery Service). ‘Get away from here!’ Yubaba snaps, as Chihiro bows and thanks her. Hands joined, Chihiro and Haku run away through the town. Behind them, the cheering fades abruptly. Chihiro asks where her parents are; ‘They’ve gone on ahead,’ Haku says. On the other side of town, the water has

Leaving the world

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gone, leaving the grass plain from the opening scenes. ‘I can’t go any farther,’ says Haku, warning Chihiro to go the way she came and not look back, a nod to Orpheus or Lot. He assures Chihiro that now he has his name, he can quit his service to Yubaba and return to his world too, wherever that is. ‘Can we meet again?’ Chihiro asks. Haku promises that they will, but as they part, his hand stretches plaintively after her, then falls slowly out of frame. Miyazaki was surprised by how sad the ending was, perhaps because it was his first story where a character crosses to another world and then must come back. Japanese reviewer Kumi Kaoru complains that ‘Chihiro would have been happier if she had stayed in the spirit world … Miyazaki made (maybe unconsciously) a story about the denial of the real world and the escape to his own fantasy.’58 But this runs against the ethos of a film about responsible choices, while Kaoru’s casual association of fantasy with escapism forgets that children’s fantasy is full of tragic partings. As Miyazaki put it: ‘An adult can feel nostalgia for a specific time in their lives, but I think that children too can have nostalgia … When you live, you lose things. It’s a fact of life.’59

A last look

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Chihiro descends the grass slope and sees her parents waving to her in front of the tunnel. ‘Where have you been?’ chides her mother. As her parents walk into the tunnel, Chihiro starts to turn her head, but then sets her eyes forward. Zeniba’s hairband glints protectively. The family fade briefly into blackness and shots from the start of the film are repeated. Chihiro clings hard to her mother’s arm, moving with trepidation. Has she already lost her memories? Did anything really happen in the interim? Apparently so, as the tunnel exit has inexplicably changed (it’s stone, not plaster), while the family car has a covering of branches and dust. As her parents exclaim over the mystery, Chihiro looks at the tunnel longingly, her eyes wide open – the Chihiro who sat on a train, on a pilgrimage into the unknown. Miyazaki holds the girl’s pose, still but immanently alive as her parents call to her from the car. She turns; Zeniba’s hairband glints once more. We hear the door shut, and the car drives away through the woods.60

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8 Conclusion For more than five decades, feature-film animation was dominated by the output of the Disney studio. Spirited Away, however, was released in a post-Disney period of cartoon features, often criticised as homogenous but nevertheless including titles ranging from The Incredibles to Belleville Rendez-Vous (2003). Animation is no longer stereotyped as the domain of talking animals and Disney princesses. Any cartoon buff knows there is serious, adult content in Snow White or Bambi, but Spirited Away could persuade twentyfirst-century grown-ups to look afresh at the artistry of a contemporary ‘children’s cartoon’, without the trappings of knowing in-jokes or Broadway songs. It’s unlikely that Spirited Away will be as well remembered in future decades as Snow White and Bambi are today. For all its splendours and delights, Miyazaki’s film lacks emotional peaks to match the (reversible) death of Snow White or the (traumatically ‘real’) shooting of Bambi’s mother. Nor do its animated characters have the star qualities of Bugs Bunny or Wallace and Gromit. Yet Spirited Away’s vibrant imagination, its immersive world, inimitable idiosyncrasies and eloquent fables suggest a long life in a plural cartoon age where moving drawings and plasticine stop-motion coexist with hubristically ambitious CGI simulations of reality. The failings of the latter films renew calls for the return of ‘traditionally’ animated pictures, enthusiastically led by Pixar’s John Lasseter. In a time when fantasy films are a lucrative genre, Spirited Away may well become a touchstone for other film-makers, like Alice or Peter Pan before it. Guillermo del Toro was a professed Miyazaki addict many years before he made Pan’s Labyrinth, which may well include Spirited Away among its influences. However, del Toro’s film is no closer to Spirited Away than Miyazaki’s was to Alice, and better for it.

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Among Miyazaki’s own films, there has never been a consensus as to which is best, although Totoro and Spirited Away are nominated most frequently. Many Western reviewers who praised Spirited Away had only Princess Mononoke for comparison, while older critics and fans had more mixed reactions to the film, some feeling its obvious virtues (its wit and charm, the beauty of its drawn world) were familiar, while its perceived faults (especially in its story) were less forgivable. Like any long-standing artist, Miyazaki is regularly accused of being past his peak, with Ghost in the Shell director Mamoru Oshii mischievously claiming that his rival has been going downhill since Conan and Cagliostro in the 1970s. Less radically, one might make a division between the (relatively) early Miyazaki who made films from Cagliostro to Porco Rosso and the late Miyazaki from Mononoke onwards. The newer films are Japanese megahits, but with more elliptical storytelling, often relying on stretches of faith in things happening because they should. This is especially true of Miyazaki’s follow-up to Spirited Away. Howl’s Moving Castle was another huge box-office success in Japan, earning almost as much as Spirited Away, but it was the most criticised of Miyazaki’s films. Many reviewers and fans found the story – loosely based on a book by British author Diana Wynne Jones, but parting company with her plot around the halfway point – shambolic and incoherent, far removed from the accessibility of Totoro or Kiki’s Delivery Service. The film, about the relationship between two frequently transforming characters in a war-torn fantasy Europe, makes most sense in particular lights. One way to see it is as a sequel to Porco Rosso, extending the earlier film’s treatment of immature male heroism, much as Spirited Away sequelled the empowering labour themes in Kiki’s Delivery Service. Like Spirited Away, Howl seems to depict its core moral in a single image. While Spirited Away had an alert girl on a magic train, Howl has a flashback of a boy swallowing a star, an expression of male desire at its brashest and most thoughtless.

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Another way of seeing Howl is as a riff on the live-action Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), with a love story played impossibly out of synch. In Miyazaki’s film, the heroine, Sophie, continually shifts back and forth in age, while she and the wizard Howl find themselves with a family (including a dog and a mother-in-law) before they even get around to courting. Finally, even the film’s risibly arbitrary ending might be taken as a benign subversion of the ominously ambiguous conclusions to Mononoke and the comic strip Nausicaa; less a postmodern irony than Miyazaki exercising his storyteller’s fiat to declare that he has nothing more to say about war, so let love conquer all. Yet even Howl’s defenders must regret that audiences who know only the director’s recent work now think of him as an elliptical creator of confusing fantasies, incapable of straight storytelling. Aside from Howl’s Moving Castle, Ghibli has also released what can only be seen as imitation Miyazaki films. The Cat Returns, released in Japan a year after Spirited Away, was directed by Hiroyuki Morita and shares the premise of a girl whisked to a fantastical world. It was, however, completely marginal, running out of ideas as soon as the real world is left behind. Much more contentious was Tales from Earthsea, based on Ursula Le Guin’s fantasy novels (see Chapter 6). This was a ‘Miyazaki’ film directed by Hayao’s son Goro, a complete newcomer to animation. Hayao Miyazaki was vehemently opposed to the venture, while Goro says that his elevation to director was completely engineered by Suzuki. Earthsea was a box-office success, but it was cruelly – and largely unfairly – slammed by Japanese critics and viewers, ‘winning’ the Worst Film prize at Japan’s Raspberry Awards. The film was melancholy, unlovable but honourable, and any chance it had of being judged on its own terms was scuppered by endless visual borrowings from the senior Miyazaki’s works (though not notably from Spirited Away). With Miyazaki and Takahata both in their seventies, Earthsea exemplifies the how-to-survive dilemma faced by the Disney studio envisaging life after Walt.

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In February 2008, Suzuki stepped down as Ghibli President, handing over to Koji Hoshino, formerly the President of Walt Disney Productions Japan. Hoshino oversaw Arrietty (2010), directed by a fomer Spirited Away animator, Hiromasa Yonebayashi. It was followed by From up on a Poppy Hill (2011), a period drama which was the second film directed by Goro Miyazaki. His father Hayao contributed to both Poppy Hill and Arrietty. While Arrietty is a fantasy (based on Mary Norton’s classic British book The Borrowers), it is the non-fantastical Poppy Hill that has more overt references to Spirited Away. It features another labyrinthine edifice – in this case, a venerable school clubhouse – as well as a call to Japan’s youngsters to hold on to the past, both personal and cultural. As of writing, Hayao Miyazaki’s own latest film is Kaze Tachinu (The Wind is Rising) (2013), a based-on-fact drama about the life of a historical fighter plane designer. His most recent fantasy, though, is Ponyo (2008), a proudly cartoonish fairy tale about a little boy and a fish princess who wants to be human. From almost any other popular director, this would be viewed as a whimsically twee indulgence, but not when it comes from the maker of Totoro and Spirited Away. For all his extravagant visions of enchanted bathhouses and fabulous monsters, Miyazaki’s deepest art is to draw poetry from both the adventure and nirvana of childhood. As he put it without words in Spirited Away, it’s as simple as a little girl sitting on a train.

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Notes (All internet links cited were working at the time of writing.) 1 Quoted in the production notes for Spirited Away released by Buena Vista. 2 Stephanie Zacharek, Howl’s Moving Castle review on the Salon.com website at . Although this is a review of Howl’s Moving Castle, the film Miyazaki made after Spirited Away, Zacharek’s comments are aimed equally at the earlier film, which she cites in the first paragraph. 3 From a presentation on Studio Ghibli given by Steve Alpert at the FITA (Forum International des Technologies de l’Animation) 2005 animation conference in Angoulême, France, December 2005. 4 Email interview with Hayao Miyazaki by the author (answers translated by Howard Green of Buena Vista), Animerica vol. 10 no. 12, December 2002, p. 49. 5 Translated in the English-language edition of The Art of Spirited Away, VIZ 2002, pp. 15–16. 6 Hayao Miyazaki, ‘A Modest Proposal’, Manga Max no. 15, February 2000, p. 66. 7 From the Animerica interview, 2002. 8 To be strictly accurate, Ghibli has released nine Miyazaki features. Miyazaki’s 1984 film Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind was made by the Top Craft studio and produced by the publishing company Tokuma, which created Ghibli a year later. However, Nausicaa has been counted retrospectively as a Ghibli film in all the studio’s literature and video/DVD collections for the past two

decades. Miyazaki’s ‘real’ Ghibli films are Laputa – Castle in the Sky (1986), My Neighbour Totoro (1988), Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), Porco Rosso (1992), Princess Mononoke (1997), Spirited Away (2001), Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), Ponyo (2008) and Kaze Tachinu (The Wind is Rising, 2013). Miyazaki’s colleague Isao Takahata directed Ghibli’s Grave of the Fireflies (1988), Only Yesterday (1991), Pom Poko (1994) and My Neighbours the Yamadas (1999). As of writing, Takahata’s The Tale of Princess Kaguya is due for release in 2013. Ocean Waves (1993) was a feature-length Ghibli animated TV film made by Tomomi Mochizuki. The late Yoshifumi Kondo directed Whisper of the Heart (1995), written and storyboarded by Miyazaki. Some fantasy threads in Whisper were extended in The Cat Returns (2002), directed by Hiroyuki Morita, while Miyazaki’s son Goro directed Tales from Earthsea (2006). Later Ghibli releases include Arrietty (2010), directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, and From up on Poppy Hill (2011), by Goro Miyzaki. While the Ghibli studio mainly specialises in cinema features, it has also produced numerous short animations. Among the most celebrated are two Miyazaki shorts: On Your Mark (1995), a music video, and Mei and the Baby Cat Bus (2001), a mini-sequel to Totoro. The latter short film is one of several that Miyazaki made to be shown exclusively at the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Tokyo, mentioned in Chapter 2. 9 Mark Schilling, Contemporary Japanese Film (New York: Weatherhill, 1999), pp. 256–7.

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10 The point is made by Savin YeatmanEiffel, a Miyazaki fan who created the French-Japanese TV cartoon Oban StarRacers, which features a feisty girl heroine: ‘If it’s a young girl thrown into a big adventure and fighting monsters, it’s even more difficult for her to triumph, which gives the story a touch of frailty.’ Interview with Savin Yeatman-Eiffel, Total Anime, September 2007, p. 94. 11 Translated from Young Magazine, 20 February 1984, as reproduced in Archives of Studio Ghibli Vol. 1, Studio Ghibli, 1996, p. 57. 12 Hayao Miyazaki, ‘I understand Nausicaa a bit more than I did a little while ago’, Comic Box vol. 98, January 1995, pp. 3–4 (English section). 13 Masashi Ando interview in the Spirited Away Roman Album (Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten, 2001), pp. 75–82. 14 ’The New, Improved Puppetoons’ on Michael Barrier’s website at . Although primarily a review of Pixar’s Monsters Inc. (2001), it leads on to a general discussion of animated acting, where the subject of Miyazaki is raised. 15 John Grant, Masters of Animation (London: B.T. Batsford, 2001), p. 162. 16 Quoted in ‘Scrolls to Screen: The History and Culture of Anime’, a documentary included on Animatrix, a mostly Japanese-animated DVD spinoff from the Matrix films. 17 The discussion was previously archived on the website but unfortunately it appears to be unavailable as of writing. 18 Margaret Talbot, ‘The Auteur of Anime’, The New Yorker, 17 January 2005, p. 74.

19 Hayao Miyazaki, Starting Point 1979–1996, p. 70 of the American translated edition (San Francisco: VIZ Media, 2009). Miyazaki’s response intriguingly parallels that of the teenage Tezuka to Japan’s 1945 cartoon film Momotaro’s Divine Sea Warriors, which he saw when Japan was near defeat: ‘I sat in the freezing movie theatre which had somehow survived the bombings … I was so impressed that I began weeping uncontrollably. The lyricism and the childlike spirit were like a warm light, illuminating my mummified spirit, depleted of both hope and dreams.’ Quoted in Frederik L. Schodt, The Astro Boy Essays (Albany, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2007), p. 59. 20 Mark Schilling, Encyclopedia of Japanese Pop-Culture (New York: Weatherhill, 1997), p. 266. 21 Miyazaki, Starting Point 1979–1996, pp. 77–8. 22 Quoted in the DVD documentary Otsuka Yasuo no Ugokasu Yorokobi (Yasuo Otsuka’s Joy of Animating), Studio Ghibli, 2004. 23 Reported on , the website of the Nippon Television Network, one of the backers of Spirited Away. 24 Bob Strauss, ‘A Loveable Adventure But No Thrill’, San Jose Mercury, 10 May 1993. 25 Miyazaki animated on a handful of episodes for the earliest ‘magic girl’ cartoon series in the 1960s, Little Witch Sally (1966–8) and Akko-Chan’s Secret (1969–70). Both were produced by Toei in the wake of the imported US sit-coms Bewitched (1964–72) and I Dream of Jeannie (1965–70). 26 Toshio Suzuki interview in the Spirited Away Roman Album, pp. 72–3.

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27 Quoted in The Making of Spirited Away documentary included on the two-disc edition of the Spirited Away DVD. 28 Suzuki interview in the Spirited Away Roman Album, pp. 72–3. 29 Miyazaki interview, Animage, vol. 275, May 2001, pp. 9–12. 30 Quoted in an ‘extra’ film on the Region 1 edition of the Spirited Away DVD, entitled The Art of Spirited Away (not to be confused with the book of that name). Unfortunately, this extra is omitted from Region 2 editions. 31 ’Takahata and Nosaka: Two Grave Voices in Animation’, Animerica vol. 2 no. 11, November 1994, p. 7. 32 From The Making of Spirited Away documentary. 33 The trials of the younger Ghibli animators on Spirited Away were the subject of a Japanese TV documentary on the state NHK channel, broadcast in May 2000 (Breathing Life into Drawings). An English-language summary of the programme, written by Mikiyo Hattori and Tom Wilkes, is available on the fanmade Nausicaa.net website at . 34 See particularly the interview with Ai Kagawa in the Spirited Away Roman Album, p. 84. 35 Transcribed on the Midnight Eye website at. 36 From the DVD documentary Arigato, Lasseter-San, Studio Ghibli, 2003. 37 ‘Spirited Away Has New Spirit with English Release’, on the Anime Tourist website at . The article transcribes a Q&A with Miyazaki following a Los Angeles screening of Spirited Away.

38 Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (New York: Paradox Press, 2000). The discussion of ‘iconic’ character designs appears in Chapter 2. 39 Translated from Comic Box vol. 3 no. 52, October 1989, pp. 48–9. 40 Quoted in The Making of Spirited Away documentary. 41 This action was a particular headache for the young Ghibli animator (Hiromasa Yonebayashi) who had to draw it, as recounted in a 2000 NHK documentary (see n. 33). Yonebayashi went on to direct the 2010 Ghibli feature, Arrietty. 42 Masayuki Miyaji interview in the Spirited Away Roman Album, p. 97. 43 From Miyazaki’s project proposal (alternative translation to that in the English-language Art of Spirited Away book). 44 Nick Park, ‘Shinto Daydreams’, Guardian, 1 August 2003, archived online at . 45 In the book, The Art of Spirited Away (p. 104), Ando says, ‘In our previous project, which ended up being cancelled, we had a character with many of the same characteristics as Yubaba. At that point she was drawn as a grotesque character, the kind that might appear in the illustrations of Alice in Wonderland. We did this to emphasise the difference in height between her and the heroine.’ The cancelled project was presumably Rin the Chimney Painter, mentioned in Chapter 4. 46 Noriko T. Reider, ‘Spirited Away: Film of the Fantastic and Evolving Japanese Folk Symbols’, Film Criticism vol. 29 no. 3, March 2005, and available online as an e-document.

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47 Homage is also paid to The Snow Queen towards the end of Miyazaki’s comic strip Nausicaa, where the heroine has her memory stolen in a tranquil Shangri-La-style retreat. 48 Interview with Goro Miyazaki by the author, SFX Collection: Anime Special, 2006, p. 70. 49 Miyazaki interview in the Spirited Away Roman Album, pp. 114–18. 50 Suzuki interview in the Spirited Away Roman Album, pp. 72–3. 51 From Miyazaki’s interview in the Spirited Away Roman Album, pp. 114–18. 52 From the Animerica interview, 2002. 53 From the Midnight Eye talk (see n. 35). 54 Ibid. It might be argued that this account disproves the idea that the train scene was inspired by Miyazawa’s Night on the Galactic Railroad. However, even according to the crudest view of authorial intent, Miyazaki’s creative process is plainly so intuitive that anything seems up for grabs. 55 From Kagawa’s interview in the Spirited Away Roman Album, p. 84. 56 This scene is reversed at the climax to a later Ghibli film, Tales from Earthsea, directed by Miyazaki’s son Goro (see Chapter 8). In Earthsea, it is the girl who turns into a dragon. The scene was widely criticised as a meaningless non sequitur, though it makes as much – or as little! – structural and thematic

sense as the one in Spirited Away. Tales from Earthsea is a fable about a soulless, sickening world, making explicit the subject of Spirited Away’s early scenes. In Earthsea, however, the two protagonists are either one torn in two or two beings united in one. Earthsea’s boy protagonist is constantly chased by his doppelgänger, literally divided from himself; conversely, the girl realises her doubled but unified identity at the film’s end to restore the world’s balance. 57 Nobuhiko Obayashi discussing Spirited Away in Forty Eyes Read Spirited Away, a special edition of the Japanese film magazine Kinema Jumpo, 15 August 2001, p. 29. 58 Kumi Kaoru, ‘Kamikakushi – Anime Master Miyazaki’s New Ambition’, on the Animation World Network website at . 59 From the Midnight Eye talk (see n. 35). 60 The Disney dub dilutes the scene’s wistfulness by adding dialogue in which the parents are unusually sympathetic to Chihiro. Her mother tells her, ‘Don’t be afraid, honey, everything’s going to be okay.’ As the car drives off, the father is heard to say ‘New home and a new school: it is a bit scary.’ Chihiro answers, ‘I think I can handle it,’ a line that ends the film on a humorous note and suggests both that she remembers her adventure and will benefit from it.

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Credits Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi/ Spirited Away Japan 2001 Directed by Hayao Miyazaki Producer Toshio Suzuki Written by/Original Story & Screenplay Hayao Miyazaki Art Director Yoji Takeshige Editing Takeshi Seyama Music Joe Hisaishi ©2001. Nibariki – TGNDDTM Production Companies Studio Ghibli, Tokuma Shoten, Nippon Television Network, Dentsu, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, Tohokushinsha Film and Mitsubishi present Production: Studio Ghibli Production Staff Chief Executive Producer Yasuyoshi Tokuma

Executive Producers Takeyoshi Matsushita Seiichiro Ujiie Yutaka Narita Koji Hoshino Banjiro Uemura Hironori Aihara Associate Producers Seiji Okuda Ryoichi Fukuyama Production Manager Nozomu Takahashi ‘Spirited Away’ Production Committee Tokuma Shoten Hajime Akimoto Sanae Mitsugi Junki Ito Minoru Muroi Nobue Saito Nippon Television Network Toshio Hagiwara Takashi Tanatsugu Hotoshi Toya Kazuaki Ito Takeshi Inoue Kyoji Otsuka Yuko Iwabuchi Tatsuya Iwasaki Yuko Kozuchi Dentsu Toshitaka Shimojo Sumio Kiga Nobuyuki Toya Tatsuya Tanemura Yushin Soga

Tohokushinsha Film Mamoru Yakushiji Keiichi Kosaka Keisuke Konishi Dai Ikeda Mitsubishi Takeshi Hashimoto Masuyuki Annen Naohiko Nishio Daizo Suzuki Toru Itabashi Satoko Hayakawa Production Desk Atsushi Kamimura Yuichiro Mochizuki Kazuyoshi Tanaka Production Assistants Kenji Imura Junya Saito Eiichiro Tashiro Kyohei Ito Norifumi Matsubara Production Secretary Chikako Sasaki Production Administration Shinsuke Nonaka Production Administration Desk Toshiyuki Kawabata Hiroyuki Watanabe Assistant to the Producer Tomohiko Ishii Coordinator Shokichi Arai

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Finance & Personnel Management Miyuki Shimamiya Accounting Department Akio Ichimura Hisayo Ito Tamami Yamamoto General Administration Taisei Ishiseko Tomoki Horaguchi Naomi Atsuta Eiko Fujitsu Shogo Komagata Sueko Numazawa Mitsu Watanabe Assistants to the Director Atsushi Takahashi Masayuki Miyaji Casting Coordinator Pug Point Motohiro Hatanaka Keiko Yagi Naomi Yasu Director of Digital Imaging Atsushi Okui Digital Camera & Composite Operators Junji Yabuta Wataru Takahashi Atsushi Tamura Supervising Animators Masashi Ando Kitaro Kosaka Megumi Kagawa

Key Animation Takeshi Inamura Kenichi Yamada Masaru Matsuse Hideaki Yoshio Eiji Yamamori Katsutoshi Nakamura Kazuyoshi Onoda Makiko Suzuki Mariko Matsuo Atsushi Tamura Hiromasa Yonebayashi Kaori Fujii Tamami Yamada Makiko Futaki Yoshiyuki Momose Akihiko Yamashita Nobuyuki Takeuchi Shogo Furuya Misuzu Kurata Atsushi Yamagata Shigeru Kimishima Hiroomi Yamakawa Nobuhiro Osugi Yuichi Tanaka Shizue Kaneko Hideki Hamasu Hisaki Furukawa Kenichi Konishi Masaru Oshiro Shinya Ohira Shinji Hashimoto Hisashi Nakayama Noboru Takano Masako Shinohara Kuniyuki Ishii Shojuro Yamauchi Telecom Animation Film Atsuko Tanaka

Animation Check Hitomi Tateno Mariko Suzuki Masaya Saito Minoru Ohashi In-between/Clean-up Animation Akiko Teshima Rie Nakagome Minori Noguchi Nozomu Ito Aya Onishi Tsutomu Kaichi Masafumi Yokota Masako Sato Chikako Sasagawa Kojiro Tsuruoka Mioko Katano Fumie Konno Naoko Takahashi Gosei Oda Shinichiro Yamada Masashi Okumura Ikuko Shimada Alexandra Weihrauch Masako Sakano Mayumi Omura Yumiko Kitajima Reiko Mano Seiko Azuma Sumie Nishido Kiyoko Makita Keiko Tomizawa Komasa Yayoi Toki Ritsuko Shiina Emiko Iwayanagi Maya Fukimori Yumiko Ito Akiko Toba

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Akihiko Adachi Atsuko Matsushita Yukari Umebayashi Kumiko Ota Hisako Yaji Tomoko Miyata Miho Otsuka Yukari Yamaura Rie Kondo Jinko Tsuji Yoshitake Iawakami Kumiko Tanihira Hiromi Nishikawa Masahiro Ohashi Hiroaki Nakajima Morihiko Yano Naoko Fujitani Kazuki Nakamoto Yohei Nakano Mai Nakazato Kumiko Terada Kyoko Okabayashi Norihito Ogawa Shinobu Saeki Satoko Yamada Motonobu Hori Takeyoshi Omagari Hideto Fujiki Kunitoshi Ishii Shinichi Abe Chika Okubo Akiko Seki Nobushige Ishita Satoshi Mikage Kumi Hirai Akira Hosogaya Daisuke Makino Emiko Fujii Tsutomu Shibutani

Satoshi Hattori Saho Saito Chikako Yamada Junko Komatsuzaki Hanako Enomoto Haruka Tanaka Tadahito Matsubayashi Hideo Watanabe Yuka Shibata Atsushi Nishigori Yu Maruyama Yasuto Murata Yuki Nakajima Daizen Komatsuda Reiko Sakai Naoyoshi Shiotani Muneyuki Yamashita Takashi Mori Kazuyuki Ueda Masmai Inomata Ayako Fuji Rie Hirakawa Ryozo Sugiyama Yukari Ishita Masako Terada Natsuko Goto Rie Yamamoto D.R Digital Cho Hyun Mi Song Hyun Ju Kim Eun Young Seo Kum Sook An Mi Kyoung Jang Cheo Ho Kwon Bok Kyoung Kim Ji Eun Jun Hyun Ju Huh Young Mi Yoon Mi Kyoung

Lee Hye Sung Lee Mi Ok Pyun Eun Mi Choi Hee Eun Joung Hyeon Soo Soung Jee Young Jung Sung Hee Park So Hwa Seo Jin Hyuk Byeon Eun Soon Byeon Hye Soon Lee Sue Shang Kim Jung Hee Park Ji Hyun Park Suk Hwa Park Young Suk Supporting Animation Studios Anime Torotoro Oh Production Studio Cockpit Studio Takuranke Group Donguri Nakamura Production Gainax Doga Kobo Studio Kuma Production I-G Studio Musashi Studio Boomerang Studio Deen Studio Hibari Radical Party Kiryu Mugenkan AIC Shaft Liberty Ship Mad House

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Backgrounds Kazuo Oga Sayaka Hirahara Yoshikazu Fukutome Naoya Tanaka Naomi Kasugai Ryoko Ina Masako Osada Tomoe Ishihara Kikuyo Yano Keiko Itogawa Osamu Masuyama Hisae Saito Masanori Kikuchi Kyoko Naganawa Hiroaki Sasaki Nizo Yamamoto Studio Fuga Kazuo Nagai Ogura Kobo Hiromasa Ogura Masahiro Kubota Ink & Paint Check Kanako Moriya Fumiko Oda Hiroaki Ishii Digital Ink & Paint Naomi Mori Masayo Iseki Akira Sugino Akihiro Oyama Yumiko Ukai Rie Okada Tomotaka Shibayama Takahashi Production/ T2 Studio Kanako Takahashi Akiko Nasu Kumi Nanjo Yuki Yokoyama Michiko Saito

Akiko Shimizu Fumino Okura Hiroshi Iijima D.R. Digital Ham Sun Ki JEM Kim Byong Yor Kim Tae Jong Lee Eun Kyung Lee Do Hee Kim Mi Sun Han Keum I Her Soo Kyung An Myoung Hio Choi Soon Hwa Park La Sung Kim Mung Sook Kim Myoung Sun Yun Hea Yeop Kim Jin Wook Director of Digital Animation Mitsunori Kataama Digital Animators Yoichi Senzui Masaru Karube Miki Sato Hiroki Yamada Yuji Tone CG Engineer Masafumi Inoue System Management Noriyuki Kitakawachi Editing Assistants Kyoko Mizuta Megumi Uchida Mutsumi Takemiya Associate Art Director Noboru Yoshida Colour Design Michiyo Yasuda

Colour Design Assistants Kazuko Yamada Yukie Nomura Titles Kaoru Mano Malin Post Optical Recording Futoshi Ueda Digital Optical Recording Noboru Nishio Film Developing Imagica Timing Hiroaki Hirabayashi Film Recording Shingo Toyotani Masao Shibata Masahiro Honma Colour Management System Ado Ishii Kohei Endo Lab Coordination Yoshiro Nishio Lab Management Takehisa Kawamata Music Performance New Japan Philharmonic Conductor & Piano Solos Joe Hisaishi Music Producer Masayoshi Okawa Music Production Management Wonder City Masaki Sekijima Soichiro Ito Music Recording Wonder Station Sumida Triphony Hall

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Orchestra Recording Shinichi Tanaka Surround Mixing Suminobu Hamada Assistant Engineer Hiroyuki Akita Soundtrack CD Production Tokuma Japan Communications Tomoko Okada Sound & Music Production Studio Ghibli Kazumi Inaki Tamaki Kojo Music Copyrights Takashi Nagai Soundtrack Theme Song ‘Itsumo Nando-Demo’ (’Always with Me’) lyrics: Wakako Kaku, original music/vocal performance: Youmi Kimura (Tokuma Japan Communications) Audio Director Kazuhiro Hayashi Recording & Sound Mixing Shuji Inoue Sound Effects Michihiro Ito Toru Noguchi Sound Effects Production Sound Ring Anime Sound Production Sound Effects Assistants Daisuke Murakami Rie Komiya

Sound Effects Support Eiko Morikawa Ayako Ueda Mayuka Miyazawa Kazuaki Narita Toshiaki Abe Mausu Promotion Sound Effects Recording Toho Sound Studio Recording & Mixing Tokyo T.V. Center Tsukuru Takagi Takeshi Imaizumi Tetsuya Satake Dolby Film Consultants Mikio Mori Tsutomu Kawahigashi DTS Mastering Noriko Tsushi Atsushi Aikawa Public Relations Junichi Nishioka Minako Nagawawa Merchandising Development Tomomi Imai Koichi Asano Rieko Izutsu Publishing Development Yukari Tai Ryoko Tsutsui Mine Shibuya Naho Takahata Special Media Support The Yomiuri Shimbun Lawson Advertising Producers Minami Ichikawa Toho Atsuo Ogaki Yusuke Kikuchi Major

Morikazu Wakizaka Naoto Okamura Masaru Tsuchiya Michiyo Koyanagi Nozomi Fukuda Yasushi Kanno Ai Nakanishi Mieko Hara Hiroi Hosokawa Hiroyuki Orihara Special Media Advisers Masaya Tokuyama Masaru Yabe Overseas Promotion Stephen M. Alpert Haruyo Moriyoshi Mikiko Takeda Nao Amisaki Film Preview Production Gal Enterprise Keiichi Itagaki Special Thanks to Audi Japan Alpine Kusatsu-Onsen Hotel Village Kiyoshige-kan Kagoshima-ken Yaku-cho Yakuba The People of Yaku-cho Swinery Atara-Kilns Sawai-Agriculture Sado Television Yamaguchi Unmo Kogyosho Fumio Yamazaki Kino Arai

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English-language version U.S. Production Director Kirk Wise Executive Producer John Lasseter Producer Donald W. Ernst Associate Producer Lori Korngiebel Assistant Production Manager Jeff Deckman English-language Adaptation by Cindy Davis Hewitt Donald H. Hewitt Translated from the Original Japanese by Linda Hoaglund Jim Hubbert Voice Casting Jamie Thomason David H. Wright III Title Design by Brian King Colour Timer Chris DeLaGuardia Telecine Operators Robert Bagley Robert Hansen Negative Cutting Buena Vista Negative Cutting Mary Beth Smith Rick MacKay Digital Film Recording and Scanning Walt Disney Feature Animation Camera Department

Supervising ADR Editor Petra Bach ADR Editor Jessica Gallavan Sound Effects Editor Robert L. Sephton Post-production Engineer Michael Kenji Tomizawa English Dialogue Recorded by Jackson Schwartz Doc Kane Dialogue Recordist Sam Kaufman Re-recording Mixer Terry Porter Re-recorded at Buena Vista Sound Services Dubbing Recordists Judy Nord Jeanette Cremarosa Studio Teacher Karen Erlich With Special Thanks to Steve Alpert Mary Hidalgo Nao Amisaki Matthew Jon Beck Ellen Keneshea Thomas Baker John K. Carr James ‘J.R.’ Russell Bill Shaffer Brenda McGirl Hermann H. Schmidt David Bossert Bruce Tauscher John Cjeka Stephanie C. Herrman Carlos Garcia Paul Cichocki Katie Hooten

Voice Cast (Japanese language) Rumi Hiiragi Chihiro Miyu Irino Haku Mari Natsuki Yubaba/Zeniba Takashi Naitô Akio, Chihiro’s father Yasuko Sawaguchi Yuko, Chihiro’s mother Tatsuya Gashuin Little Green Frog, assistant manager Ryunosuke Kamiki Boh (baby) Yumi Tamai Lin Yo Oizumi frog men leader Koba Hayashi river god Tsunehiko Kamijô Chichiyaku Takehiko Ono Aniyaku Bunta Sugawara Kamaji Noriko Kitou Shiro Saito Ken Yasuda additional voices

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Voice Cast (English language) Daveigh Chase Chihiro Suzanne Pleshette Yubaba/Zeniba Jason Marsden Haku Susan Egan Lin David Ogden Stiers Kamaji Lauren Holly Chihiro’s mother Michael Chiklis Chihiro’s father John Ratzenberger assistant manager Tara Strong Boh (baby)

Mickie McGowan Sherry Linn Jack Angel Mona Marshall Bob Bergen Candi Milo Rodger Bumpass Colleen O’Shaughnessey Jennifer Darling Phil Proctor Paul Eiding Jim Ward additional voices Dolby Digital In Colour Prints by Technicolor Produced and Distributed on Eastman Film MPAA: 38987 [1.85:1]

Released in Japan by Toho Company on 27 July 2001. Running time: 125 minutes. Released in the US by Buena Vista Pictures on 20 September 2002. Running time: 125 minutes (MPAA rating PG) Released in the UK by Optimum Releasing on 12 September 2003. Running time (Japaneselanguage version): 124 minutes 33 seconds; (English-language version) 124 minutes 53 seconds (both BBFC certificate PG) Credits compiled by Julian Grainger

List of Illustrations While considerable effort has been made to identify the copyright holders this has not been possible in all cases. We apologise for any apparent negligence and any omissions or corrections brought to our attention will be remedied in future editions. Spirited Away, © Nibariki–TGNDDTM; p. 28 – The Legend of the White Serpent, Toei Animation Studio; p. 30 – The King and the Bird, © Paul Grimault Films; p. 36 – Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, Tokuma Shoten/Hakohodo Co./Top Craft/Studio Ghibli; p. 38 – My Neighbour Totoro, Tokuma Group; p. 39 – Kiki’s Delivery Service, Tokuma Shoten/Studio Ghibli/Nippon Television Network Corporation; p. 42 – Princess Mononoke, © Nibariki TDDG.

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