Spirited Away

Today's pair is held together by one specific thread.

Yesterday's film was Modern Times: a man swallowed by an assembly line. The first of today's two films is the other side of that same thing — a child whose name is taken away by her employer. Yubaba files "Chihiro Ogino" away in a contract and hands the girl back a single character of it: "Sen". Lose the name and you become the job.

Today's second film, Black Girl, is the same motif in live action: in Paris, Diouana is called "the maid"; she cannot read or write, and even her letters home are written for her by her employers. Somebody else authors her life.

So today's pair is not an arbitrary grab. One film turns "your name is taken from you" into a fairy tale; the other films it in black and white in 65 minutes. Thirty-five years apart, one in Tokyo and one in Dakar.

The second reason is structural, and it has been overdue for a while. The archive now holds fourteen films, from Metropolis (1927) to Parasite (2019), spanning nine decades and a dozen countries or territories — and yet it contains no animated feature at all, and nothing from sub-Saharan Africa. Those are the two most conspicuous holes left, and today closes both.

A third reason concerns the year 2001. Around then, mainstream animation worldwide was converting wholesale to 3D. That year Miyazaki delivered a 124-minute feature drawn mainly by hand, borrowing digital tools only for isolated shots — and it went on to take the Golden Bear at Berlin and to become the first non-English animated film ever to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Nothing of comparable scale has happened in that category since.

千寻十岁。父母在搬家路上开错了路，把车停在一座看起来废弃的主题公园门口。父亲说这是泡沫经济时代留下的烂尾游乐园。

往里走，是一条空无一人的商业街，摊子上摆着刚做好的食物，摊主不在。父母坐下来吃。千寻不吃，她往街的深处走。

等她回来，父母已经变成了猪。

天开始黑。街灯亮起来，河涨上来，一艘船靠岸，船上下来的是日本神道里的各种神灵——他们是来洗澡的。这个地方是一座澡堂，属于一个叫汤婆婆的女巫。

一个少年把她藏起来，告诉她这里的规矩：没有工作的人会被变成动物。她去要工作，汤婆婆把她的名字收走，只留下一个字。从这一刻起，她叫「千」。

接下来是她在澡堂里的日子：锅炉房、大浴池、被分配给她的小玲、来洗澡的客人——包括一个被所有人当成「腐烂神」的、臭得让人无法靠近的客人；还有一个不说话的、戴着面具的影子，一直站在雨里。

她必须在这里活下来，也必须记住自己原来叫什么。

（这里不再往下说。）

A film made for one ten-year-old girl

Miyazaki was born in Tokyo in 1941. Before Spirited Away he had made films for very young children (My Neighbor Totoro, 1988) and for teenagers (Kiki's Delivery Service, 1989) — but never one for a ten-year-old girl.

That gap had a specific origin. A friend of his, Seiji Okuda, who was an associate producer on the film, had a ten-year-old daughter who came to Miyazaki's mountain house each summer. He decided to make a film for that age. Looking for material he read girls' manga magazines — Nakayoshi, Ribon — and concluded they contained nothing but crushes and romance. That was not what he wanted. He wanted a heroine girls could look up to, not a pretty girl. He initially found Chihiro a plain character, and only later came to think she "would grow into a fascinating woman".

Hand-drawn, with digital tools only where they were needed

Production began in February 2000. By Miyazaki's original script the film would have run over three hours; compressing the running time was the hardest problem of the production.

As on Princess Mononoke, Ghibli used computer animation (Softimage 3D and similar), but sparingly — the technology was there to support the story rather than to perform. Every character remained primarily hand-drawn. In 2001 that was a decision taken against the direction of the whole industry, and the result is a 124-minute feature that carries almost no sense of compromise.

The name is the engine of the film

The Japanese title is Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi. Kamikakushi literally means "hidden by the gods" — in Japanese folklore not a disappearance but a form of social death; to come back from it is a social resurrection.

The entire mechanism of the film therefore rests on names. Yubaba files Chihiro's name away in a contract and leaves her one character of it, "Sen". Haku has forgotten his own name entirely, because the Kohaku River was filled in and built over with apartments. The climax is not a fight but an act of recollection — the real action of this film is remembering. That is why it is a coming-of-age film rather than an adventure.

The bathhouse, Shinto, and a widely repeated mistake about the setting

The bathhouse is where the gods come to bathe. Miyazaki cited summer solstice rituals in which villagers summon the local deities and invite them to bathe. He said that in his grandparents' generation people believed gods were everywhere — in trees, rivers, insects, wells, in anything at all; his own generation did not, but he liked the idea that we should treat everything with care, because a god might be there.

Confirmed visual references include the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum in Koganei, the Notoya Ryokan in Yamagata, and Dōgo Onsen.

One correction is worth making here: it is often claimed that the bathhouse was modelled on Jiufen in Taiwan. Miyazaki explicitly denied it. Producer Toshio Suzuki, for his part, pointed to European influences including The Snow Queen and The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep.

The river god, Haku, and an environmentalism that is simply drawn

The guest everyone takes for a "stink spirit" turns out to be a river god. Chihiro pulls a bicycle, tyres and heaps of rubbish out of it before it comes clean. Haku has lost his name because the Kohaku River was filled in and apartments built on it.

None of this is an interpretation imposed by critics; it is on the screen. Miyazaki never turns it into a slogan — he turns it into a concrete action: a small girl grabs a rope and pulls.

"Becoming a pig" has a source

Why do the parents turn into pigs for eating? Miyazaki's explanation is blunt: during Japan's bubble economy of the 1980s, some people "became pigs" — and those people are still saying "we're in a recession, we can't eat enough."

Yubaba wears Western dress and lives among European furnishings; the bathhouse sits inside an abandoned theme park. These are not incidental design choices. They point at the influence of Western capitalism on Japan from the Meiji period onward.

Hisaishi, and a song that existed before the film

The score is by Miyazaki's long-time collaborator Joe Hisaishi, who also conducted it, performed by the New Japan Philharmonic. The cue "One Summer's Day" was later given lyrics by Hisaishi as "Inochi no Namae" (The Name of Life), sung by Ayaka Hirahara.

The ending song, "Itsumo Nando Demo", was written and sung by the Osaka composer and harpist Youmi Kimura, with lyrics by her friend Wakako Kaku. It had originally been written for an unproduced Miyazaki project, Rin the Chimney Painter. On the Japanese DVD extras Miyazaki said the song was in fact what set Spirited Away going — a film started by a song written for a different film.

Where it stood, and the award he did not collect

It opened in Japan on 20 July 2001. It took ¥31.68 billion at the Japanese box office, spent eleven consecutive weeks at number one, drew more admissions than Titanic, and held the all-time Japanese record for nineteen years, until Demon Slayer: Mugen Train passed it in 2020. Its Japanese television premiere on 24 January 2003 drew a 46.9% rating, the highest film broadcast in that network's history.

At the 52nd Berlin International Film Festival in 2002 it won the Golden Bear, shared with Bloody Sunday. At the 75th Academy Awards in 2003 it won Best Animated Feature — a category created only in 2002, whose first winner was Shrek. Spirited Away was the first non-English animated film to win it, and the first hand-drawn film to win it.

Miyazaki did not attend. In 2009, at San Diego Comic-Con, he explained why: "The reason I wasn't here for the Academy Award was because I didn't want to visit a country that was bombing Iraq." His producer had not allowed him to say so at the time. In Tokyo he issued a handwritten statement saying that because of what was happening in the world he could not rejoice over the prize from the heart. He collected an Academy Honorary Award in person in 2014.

Its standing

BBC's 2016 poll of critics, "The 21st Century's 100 Greatest Films", placed it 4th — the highest-ranked animation on that list. Sight & Sound's 2022 Greatest Films of All Time poll placed it 75th, one of only two animated films on the list (the other being Miyazaki's own My Neighbor Totoro). The New York Times ranked it 2nd in its 2017 list of the best films of the 21st century. Rotten Tomatoes records 96% from 221 reviews; Metacritic 96. Roger Ebert gave it four stars and called it one of the best films of its year.

What came after

A stage adaptation written and directed by John Caird opened in Tokyo on 28 February 2022, produced by Toho with Ghibli's support, with Kanna Hashimoto and Mone Kamishiraishi sharing the role of Chihiro. It transferred to the London Coliseum from April 2024. In 2024 Billie Eilish released a song, "Chihiro", inspired by the film.