One Out of a Thousand: Miyazaki's Spirited Away
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Japanese animation has certainly become more mainstream the past few years, thanks partly to TV shows like Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh!, the omnipresent Dragon Ball Z, and the contemporary grandmother of them all, Sailor Moon. Much of this has resulted from the network and other cable channels following the Cartoon Network’s lead, with its afternoon Toonami line-up and evening Adult Swim block, which have frequently featured different anime series. As such, anime stereotypes are no longer localized solely in Hello Kitty merchandise, endless varieties of giant robots—or (it has to be said) nauseating porn best not even contemplated. Still, when Hayao Miyazaki’s film Spirited Away (2001) was released theatrically in the United States, having won multiple international film awards (it was later given the Best Animated Film Oscar), many critics didn’t know how to respond to it, besides noting its beautiful animation and its artistic excellence. While the movie is as visually captivating as its reviews suggested, now that it’s out on DVD, Spirited Away’s beguiling story, with its subtle, deftly evoked emotion, can be given the consideration and praise it deserves.
The film opens with cranky 10-year-old Chihiro squirming in the backseat of the family car. She and her parents are moving to a different town, and she isn’t very happy about it. Nearly at their new house, her father decides to take a “shortcut,” with predictable results: The family winds up at an old train station leading to an abandoned theme park. Despite Chihiro’s growing unease about their surroundings, her parents persist in exploring the area, eventually settling down to consume a delicious-looking meal that mysteriously appears in one of the restaurant stalls.
Giving up in disgust when her parents begin greedily gobbling down the food, Chihiro begins wandering through the park on her own, ultimately happening upon a bridge and a huge bathhouse. Here she meets Haku, a strange boy who warns her to leave before nightfall. Alarmed, Chihiro tries to find her parents, only to discover that they have metamorphosed into enormous pigs. The rapidly falling dusk both reveals the theme park’s true form—the bathhouse stands on an island surrounded by a wide river—and traps Chihiro and her parents in the Land of Spirits. Helped once again by Haku, Chihiro learns that the bathhouse serves and replenishes the spirits, and in order to avoid becoming a pig herself, she must find a job in this strange place that recasts the familiar into the compellingly—and sometimes disturbingly—strange.
It almost goes without saying that Spirited Away represents animation at its most gorgeous. Dramatic colors and painstaking frame-by-frame work bring the bathhouse and its surrounding fantastical landscape vividly to life; the audience becomes completely immersed in the spirit world as Chihiro does. Like Alice confronted with cheshire cats, white rabbits, and red queens, Chihiro accepts without much question this extraordinary world populated by a creatively diverse group of characters who visit and work in the bathhouse. Its inhabitants provide some of the film’s most delightful moments, such as Chihiro’s experience with charmingly bespelled “puffs” of coal dust in the bathhouse’s boiler room. Particularly amusing is her encounter with the huge daikon radish spirit, which looks like a cross between the Elephant Man and a sumo wrestler.
The landscape is also beautifully realized, as the water stretches out from the bathhouse to the horizon like a liquid prairie, sometimes bizarrely bisected by a one-way train rushing toward unknown, presumably equally surreal destinations. When Chihiro finally boards the train one evening, we catch glimpses of mysterious scenery through the train windows—neon signs flashing past too quickly to identify, a single house and tree on a remote island, 
the dark shadow of a little girl standing at a solitary train station—all to a solitary piano’s musical accompaniment. The whole effect is simultaneously melancholy and painful, evocative and beckoning, awakening us to—or making us aware of—that longing for home, for life to be safe even if only for a few moments, for everything to be put right.
And, accordingly, Chihiro wants desperately to restore her parents to their human form and return to the human world; in the process, she must summon her own courage, loyalty, and unselfishness to survive the various tests she faces and save those she loves. While subjected to the enmity of Ubaba, the shapeshifting witch who owns the bathhouse, Chihiro also struggles to acclimate herself to the hard work in the bathhouse, where humans—unwelcome in the spirit world—are identified by their stench: “I’m not a germ; I’m a human,” she tells Bou, Ubaba’s gigantic son. In these thematic aspects, similarities between Chihiro and Disney’s trademark cartoon protagonists are easily identified. (Disney is the U.S. distributor of Miyazaki’s films.) But while Chihiro’s Western counterparts spend most of their time discovering the necessary qualities within themselves—resulting in a quick denouement—for Chihiro, the strength and love she needs flow simply and naturally out of who she is. Miyazaki’s American audience may find his approach to characterization somewhat simplistic, but he handles it effectively, and the story’s potency loses nothing in the process.
Ultimately, the success of Chihiro’s quest rests not only her character traits but also on her very identity: She must remember who she is on the most basic level. As is nearly universal in world mythologies, names have great power in the Land of Spirits. After Chihiro signs Ubaba’s job contract, the witch magically removes all but one of the characters from Chihiro’s (“a thousand fathoms”) name and announces that she will go by “Sen” (“one of a thousand”) from now on. Haku warns “Sen” not to forget her real name, as this is how Ubaba controls the bathhouse servants. Though he claims to have known Chihiro since she was small, Haku cannot himself remember his own true name or how to get home, however much he longs to go back.
And that is one of the beauties of Spirited Away, and also one of the ways in which this film typifies the genre from which it comes—in most anime, you aren’t given all the answers, and the endings aren’t always neatly pieced together. Haku bids Chihiro farewell at the edge of the bridge leading to the bathhouse of the spirits, and though he promises she will see him again soon, we don’t know what his life will be like once she’s gone. 
We see Chihiro and her parents leaving the abandoned train station—now so overgrown with ivy as to be almost totally hidden—but we don’t see them arriving at their new house or Chihiro settling into her new school—though, as she tells her parents, she now thinks she’s up to handling these new challenges. The friends she made in the Land of the Spirits have been necessarily left behind, and the only comfort they can give her in the real world—now also as strange as it is familiar—is that of their memory. Despite the lack of closure, though, the story has a completeness. We come full circle with Chihiro, into and back out of the train station, with the plot picking up where it began. It is in our memory that the movie’s sense of affirmation and love lingers and resonates long after we leave the theater; the film shows us that all beauty—including Spirited Away itself—eventually ends, except for what we hold onto in our hearts.
See the Wikipedia entry on Hayao Miyazaki for a concise summary of life, his filmography, and related links. Also visit the best unofficial English-language fansite, Nausicaa.net, for more specific information on all of Miyazaki's films and his production house, Studio Ghibli.
An earlier version of this article originally appeared in Paste Magazine '03 (www.pastemagazine.com).
Posted by Shelley Wunder-Smith at May 9, 2005 1:20 AM