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

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, 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

The Edo-Tokyo Architectural Museum

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 … 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

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.

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 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.

The first appearance of No Face

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 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 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 voice-cast in the Japanese version had prior animation experience. Ironically, Miyazaki’s early films had used some of the best voice-talents 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 thirteen-year-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 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).

The Japanese actors Bunta Sugawara (right, voicing Kamaji) and Rumi Hiiragi (left, voicing Chihiro)

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.

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.