Spirited Away

• 1. Introduction

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  Spirited Away opens on a ten-year-old girl named Chihiro Ogino riding in her parents' imported Audi, sulking about moving to a new neighborhood. Her father takes a wrong turn down an unexpected road, parks in front of a tunnel, and insists the family explore an abandoned resort town on the other side. By the time Chihiro finds her parents again, they have been transformed into pigs. The spirit world has swallowed her whole.

  Released in Japan on the 20th of July 2001, Spirited Away became something that no one in the film industry had prepared for: a hand-drawn animated film that would outgross every film in Japanese history, win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and hold its record for nineteen years. The questions that follow are not just about how it was made, but about what it was trying to say, and why a film rooted so deeply in Japanese Shinto folklore touched audiences on every continent.

• 2. The Idea and Its Roots

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  Hayao Miyazaki found the seed for Spirited Away not in a studio meeting but at a mountain cabin during summer vacation. He had been spending his holidays with five young girls, friends of his family, and began to wonder what kind of film he would make for them. His previous films had served very small children, like My Neighbor Totoro, or teenagers, like Kiki's Delivery Service, but nothing existed for ten-year-old girls specifically.

  For research, Miyazaki picked up the shojo manga magazines the girls had left behind at the cabin. He read publications like Nakayoshi and Ribon, and found that they offered mainly stories about crushes and romance. He felt this did not reflect what these young friends truly held dear in their hearts, and he committed to making a film built around a heroine they could admire.

  The story itself had been preceded by two rejected proposals. One was based on a Japanese book by Sachiko Kashiwaba; the other revolved around a teenage heroine. Neither was approved. The third proposal, which grew into Spirited Away, centered on a bathhouse that had long fascinated Miyazaki. The inspiration came from a real bathhouse in his hometown, where a small door sat next to one of the bathtubs. He had always wondered what was behind it, and over the years invented several stories about it. One of those stories became the foundation for the entire film.

  The specific character of Chihiro was modeled on the ten-year-old daughter of Seiji Okuda, the film's associate producer, who visited Miyazaki's house each summer. Miyazaki wanted Chihiro to look ordinary rather than conventionally pretty. Early in production, he described her appearance as dull and worried there was nothing striking about her. By the time the film neared completion, he felt she would grow into a charming woman.

• 3. Building the Spirit World

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  Production of Spirited Away began in February 2000 with a budget of roughly fifteen million US dollars. The film was produced in association with Tokuma Shoten, Nippon Television Network, Dentsu, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, Tohokushinsha Film, and Mitsubishi. Disney's investment of ten percent secured the right of first refusal for North American distribution.

  Miyazaki drew much of the visual architecture from the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum in Koganei, Tokyo, which he visited frequently during production. The Pseudo-Western buildings from the Meiji period on display there gave him the spirit world's distinctive look. He described the experience of standing there alone near closing time, with the sun setting, as one that moved him to tears.

  A traditional Japanese inn in Yamagata Prefecture, celebrated for its architecture and ornamental features, served as another major reference for the bathhouse. The Dogo Onsen also contributed to the bathhouse's design. Producer Toshio Suzuki has cited European films as a structural influence, pointing specifically to The Snow Queen and The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep as touchstones for Miyazaki during production.

  The film deployed computer animation in limited ways. Working with programs such as Softimage 3D, the team used technology carefully so that it enhanced the story rather than calling attention to itself. Each character remained mostly hand-drawn, with Miyazaki working alongside his animators to evaluate every drawing. The single greatest technical challenge was shortening the film. When production began, Miyazaki calculated that the story would run more than three hours at full length. He cut many scenes and trimmed what he called the eye candy, aiming for simplicity rather than spectacle.

• 4. The Score and the Closing Song

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  Joe Hisaishi, Miyazaki's regular collaborator, composed and conducted the film score, which was performed by the New Japan Philharmonic. The soundtrack won recognition at the 56th Mainichi Film Competition Award for Best Music, the Tokyo International Anime Fair 2001 Best Music Award in the Theater Movie category, and the 17th Japan Gold Disk Award for Animation Album of the Year. Hisaishi later added lyrics to the track known as One Summer's Day, with Ayaka Hirahara performing the resulting new version.

  The closing song, however, has its own distinct story. It was written and performed by Youmi Kimura, a composer and lyre player from Osaka, with lyrics by Kimura's friend Wakako Kaku. The song had originally been intended for a different Miyazaki film that was never made. In the special features of the Japanese DVD release, Miyazaki explains that the song itself inspired him to create Spirited Away. The track earned Gold recognition at the 43rd Japan Record Awards.

  Beyond the original soundtrack, an image album containing ten tracks was also released separately.

• 5. Crossing Into America

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  John Lasseter, a Pixar animator who had long been a fan and personal friend of Miyazaki, had a habit of watching Miyazaki's work with his staff whenever they ran into story problems. After seeing Spirited Away, Lasseter's reaction was described as ecstatic. Disney CEO Michael Eisner heard about his enthusiasm and asked whether Lasseter would be willing to bring the film to American audiences. Lasseter agreed to serve as executive producer of the English adaptation.

  He recruited Beauty and the Beast co-director Kirk Wise as director, and Aladdin co-producer Donald W. Ernst as producer. Screenwriters Cindy Davis Hewitt and Donald H. Hewitt wrote the English-language dialogue, working to match the characters' original Japanese-language lip movements throughout.

  The English dub cast included Daveigh Chase, Jason Marsden, Michael Chiklis, Lauren Holly, Susan Egan, David Ogden Stiers, and John Ratzenberger. Suzanne Pleshette, who voiced Yubaba, died in January 2008, making this her final film role. The North American premiere of the dubbed version took place at the Toronto International Film Festival on the 7th of September 2002, with a wide release following on the 20th of September 2002.

  Disney's marketing for the film was notably restrained. The film was mentioned only in a small scrolling section of Disney.com's film listings, and its promotional budget was comparatively small. Film writer Marc Hairston, writing for FPS Magazine, argued this was a consequence of Studio Ghibli retaining the film's merchandising rights, which restricted Disney's ability to mount a full campaign. The film opened in just 26 theatres and grossed $450,000 in its first weekend. After the Oscar win in 2003, it expanded to 714 theatres and ultimately earned around ten million dollars in the United States.

• 6. Themes of Identity and Greed

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  Yubaba's most consequential act in the film is not transforming Chihiro's parents. It is taking Chihiro's name. Yubaba removes the second kanji from the written form of Chihiro (千尋), reducing her to Sen, an alternate reading of the first character. Haku warns Chihiro that if she completely forgets her real name, as he once did, she will never be able to leave the spirit world. The theft of a name functions here as a kind of social death, a concept the film ties directly to the Japanese word kamikakushi, meaning hidden by gods.

  Miyazaki embedded pointed commentary on consumerism into the film's visual design. Yubaba alone in the bathhouse wears a Western dress and surrounds herself with European decor, contrasting sharply with the minimalist Japanese style of her employees' quarters. Chihiro's father arrives wearing a European-styled polo shirt, driving an imported Audi, and reassures his daughter that he has credit cards and cash before he transforms into a pig. Miyazaki described this directly: some people turned into pigs during Japan's bubble economy of the 1980s, and those people still have not realized what happened to them.

  No-Face operates as a mirror of his surroundings, absorbing the traits of whoever he encounters and granting gold copied from the river spirit. His rampage through the bathhouse is the expression of greed amplified by an environment built around it. When Chihiro feeds him the emetic dumpling, he vomits the gold back and becomes timid again.

  The environmental reading of the film runs through Haku himself. He cannot remember his own name because the Kohaku River, of which he is the spirit, was filled in and replaced with apartment buildings. The pollution spirit that arrives as Chihiro's first customer turns out to be a river deity buried under car tires, garbage, and a bicycle, and only becomes recognizable again after Chihiro pulls all the debris free.

• 7. Records and Recognition

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  Spirited Away grossed 1.6 billion yen in its first three days in Japan, breaking the previous record set by Princess Mononoke. It remained at the top of the Japanese box office for eleven consecutive weeks and spent sixteen weeks there total. After twenty-two weeks and $224 million earned domestically, it began its international release. It went on to gross 30.4 billion yen, making it the highest-grossing film in Japanese history according to the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan. It also set the all-time attendance record in Japan, surpassing the 16.8 million tickets sold by Titanic. That record stood for nineteen years, until Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba - The Movie: Mugen Train surpassed it in 2020.

  At the 2002 Berlin International Film Festival, Spirited Away shared the Golden Bear. At the 75th Academy Awards in 2003, it became the first hand-drawn, non-English-language animated film to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. On Nippon TV in Japan, it aired on the 24th of January 2003 and drew a 46.9% audience rating, making it NTV's most-watched film of all time, surpassing Princess Mononoke's 35.1% record from 1999.

  The film sold 5.5 million home video units in Japan by 2007, a national all-time record. In 2016, the BBC polled 177 film critics from around the world for their list of the 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century; Spirited Away placed fourth, the highest position achieved by any animated film on that list. In 2022, it ranked 75th on the Sight and Sound greatest films list, one of only two animated films to appear, alongside Miyazaki's own My Neighbor Totoro. Steven Spielberg called it possibly better than any Disney film he had ever seen. In 2024, Billie Eilish released the song Chihiro, named after the film's main character.