On the train
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 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 much-praised but modestly performing film, with an indeterminate, semi-arthouse status. It shared the Golden Bear at the 2002 Berlin Film Festival; the next year it won the Best Animated Feature Academy Award.
On the train
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 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, 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 … 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 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.
In the bathhouse
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.’3Miyazaki 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 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 mini-shrines, 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 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 world-building to support its heroine’s journey.