Kenji Miyazawa’s classic novella Night on the Galactic Railroad, translated under its alternative English title Night of the Milky Way Railway
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.
Kenji Miyazawa’s classic novella Night on the Galactic Railroad, translated under its alternative English title Night of the Milky Way Railway
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 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, sustained, renewed and reflected by the worlds around them; these are drawn in vibrant detail, combining magic and mechanics.
Chihiro’s expression on the train, in Miyazaki’s storyboard and in the final film
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 elevators, the satanic mill of the basement boiler-room, which is lit by furnace fires as steam hisses, liquids bubble and a six-armed spider-man 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 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.
Running the gauntlet
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 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?
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. 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 old-fashioned, 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’.16Again, this is true of films such as Satoshi Kon’s psycho-thriller Perfect Blue (1998) and Studio Ghibli’s war drama Grave of the Fireflies (1988), directed by Isao Takahata. These films could be live-action; 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 live-action films, is usually restricted to slow horizontal or vertical pans over backgrounds, perhaps a stylistic legacy of Miyazaki’s experience 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 frame-rates 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.
The lugubrious Chihiro
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 fire-breathing 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 white-haired 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, 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 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.