Spirited Away (2001): Miyazaki's Gift to Every Ten-Year-Old, and Everyone Else

Chihiro is not a cute heroine. When we meet her, she's slumped in the back seat of her parents' car, sulking about the move to a new home in the countryside. Critics have called her "sullen," and Roger Ebert agreed. Then he added that this is exactly why she matters. She isn't one of the cheerful little automatons that fill so many animated films. She's a real ten-year-old.

Her father takes a wrong turn, and the road ends at a mysterious tunnel. On the other side is what looks like an abandoned theme park. Her parents find a food stall heaped with steaming dishes and start eating with no one there to pay. Chihiro refuses. Her parents keep eating, and eating, until they turn into pigs. As night falls, lanterns flicker on, ghostly shapes appear, and Chihiro realizes she is trapped in a world of spirits, with a vast, glowing bathhouse at its center.

What follows is Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away, the film that broke box-office records in Japan, won the top prize in Berlin and an Oscar in Hollywood, and quietly convinced a generation of Western audiences that animation could be art.

Why It's a Masterpiece

Start with the sheer invention. Ebert asked whether any film had ever contained more kinds of beings we'd never seen before. Soot balls with eyes steal Chihiro's shoes. A spidery old boiler-man with eight long limbs runs the furnace. Three bouncing, bodiless heads hop around the witch's chambers. A masked, silent spirit called No-Face follows Chihiro and begins to swallow everything in sight. A creature everyone calls a "stink spirit" oozes into the baths, a reeking heap of black sludge.

But Ebert's favorite quality was something he called generosity. Look at the corners of the frame. When Chihiro stands on the bridge leading to the bathhouse, dozens of spirits watch from windows and balconies, and every one of them is moving in its own way. Most viewers will just register "background." If you look, Ebert wrote, "things are really happening there." The animators cared enough to give even the unimportant parts of the frame life.

Then there's the story. Chihiro has to work in the bathhouse to survive. The witch who owns it, Yubaba, gives her a job contract and then takes away part of her name, renaming her "Sen." Unless she gets her real name back, she can never leave. It's a fairy tale about a child who grows up not by becoming a princess or a warrior, but by working hard, being kind, keeping her word, and remembering who she is.

The world agreed. The film opened in Japan on July 20, 2001, and became the highest-grossing film in Japanese history, a record it held for 19 years until Demon Slayer: Mugen Train passed it in 2020. It shared the Golden Bear at the 2002 Berlin Film Festival and became the first hand-drawn, non-English-language film to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. In the 2022 Sight and Sound poll it placed No. 75 among the greatest films ever made.

Behind the Scenes

Miyazaki made Spirited Away for a very specific audience. Every summer he stayed at a mountain cabin with his family and a group of girls who were family friends. He wanted to make a film for them, and when he flipped through the girls' manga magazines, he felt the stories were all about crushes and romance, not what these kids really cared about. "I wanted to make a movie especially for the daughters of my friends," he told Ebert in 2002. When he looked for ideas, he said, "I opened all the drawers in my head" and found them empty. So he made something new, "just for 10 year olds."

The setting came from his own childhood. Miyazaki had always found bathhouses mysterious. He remembered a small door next to one of the tubs in a bathhouse in his hometown and used to make up stories about what was behind it. He also spent hours at the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum in Koganei, Tokyo, and based some of the spirit town's buildings on the Western-influenced Meiji-era architecture preserved there.

The film nearly became an epic. When production began in 2000, Miyazaki realized his story would run more than three hours, and he cut scene after scene. Even so, the film grew. He told Midnight Eye he had envisioned about 1,200 shots, and ended up with 1,415, because "the film told me no." He also didn't want a pretty heroine. Early on, he worried that Chihiro looked "dull" and wondered if something could be done. By the end, he felt relieved that she would grow up to be a charming woman.

The film's road to America ran through Pixar. John Lasseter, director of Toy Story, told Ebert that the very first screening outside Japan was at Pixar, and that he was stunned. Lasseter oversaw the English-language version for Disney. Miyazaki said Lasseter "turned into a human bulldozer" to get the film released in the U.S.

Hidden Details You Might Have Missed

The stink spirit is a polluted river. When Chihiro pulls a "thorn" from the reeking guest, out comes a flood of human junk, including a bicycle. Once it's clean, the spirit reveals itself as the god of a river. Watch what it leaves her as thanks. That gift saves the day later on.

Haku's lost name is a lost river. The boy Haku has forgotten his real name, which is why he is stuck serving Yubaba. Chihiro eventually remembers falling into the Kohaku River as a small child. Haku was its spirit, and the river was filled in and built over with apartments. A river without a home is a spirit without a name.

The lamp that hops. Late in the film, Chihiro and her companions get off a train at a lonely station. A streetlamp comes hopping toward them on one leg, bows, and lights their way to a cottage, then hangs itself up by the gate. Ebert loved this moment because it is completely unnecessary to the plot. It is, he wrote, "a gift from Miyazaki."

The train only goes one way. Ebert noticed this detail. The train across the flooded plain runs in one direction, which tells you a lot about the stakes of Chihiro's journey.

It's mostly hand-drawn. Studio Ghibli used computers carefully, but Miyazaki insisted to Ebert that "everything starts with the human hand drawing." Even the colors were set by the painted backgrounds, not invented on a computer.

The end song was meant for another film. "Always With Me," the closing song by composer and lyre player Youmi Kimura, was originally written for a Miyazaki project that was never made.

The Director's Genius Moment

When Ebert met Miyazaki in 2002, he told him how much he loved the "gratuitous motion" in his films, moments when characters sit, sigh, or stare at running water, not to move the plot forward but just to let us feel time pass. Miyazaki said there is a Japanese word for that: ma, or emptiness. Then he clapped his hands three or four times. "The time in between my clapping is ma," he said. Without it, he explained, you just have "busyness."

The best example in Spirited Away is the train ride. After all the noise and chaos of the bathhouse, Chihiro sits quietly on a train gliding over shallow water. Shadowy, semi-transparent passengers sit around her. Stations pass. The sun sets. Almost nothing happens for several minutes, and it's one of the most moving sequences in the film. It's the breath before the end. Miyazaki told Ebert that filmmakers who are "scared of silence" fill every second because they fear kids will get bored. He believed children would follow you anywhere if you stay true to "joy and astonishment and empathy."

Another Way to See It

Spoiler warning: this section discusses the ending.

On one level, it's a coming-of-age story. Chihiro arrives whiny and helpless and leaves brave and capable. In the final test, Yubaba shows her a pen of pigs and asks which ones are her parents. Chihiro knows that none of them are.

On another level, it's a quiet critique of greed. Many viewers have read the parents gorging on food as a picture of the excess of Japan's bubble-economy years. Yubaba lives among Western-style dresses and European furniture, while her workers live in plain Japanese-style quarters. No-Face is a spirit who becomes whatever surrounds him. In the greedy bathhouse, where everyone grabs at his gold, he turns into a monster. Away from it, he becomes gentle again. The film doesn't preach. It simply shows a child who refuses to take what isn't hers, and that refusal saves her.

Should You Watch It?

Yes, at any age. Miyazaki made it for ten-year-olds, and Ebert argued that's exactly why it works for adults: movies made for "everybody" are made for nobody in particular, while a film made for someone specific becomes "defiantly, triumphantly" itself. Watch it in Japanese with subtitles if you can. The English dub, supervised by Lasseter, is a good alternative for younger kids. Either way, keep an eye on the corners of the frame.