Spirited Away: Of Monsters and Men

“I’m not a storyteller. I’m a man who draws pictures”.

~Hayao Miyazaki

Studio Ghibli’s most acclaimed production Spirited Away is shy of a few days to its twenty-second anniversary and is often regarded as the Best Animation Film ever made. This 125-minute anime, directed by Hayao Miyazaki¹, follows a 10-year old girl, Chihiro, as she adventures in a magical land of witches, demons, and a slew of other creatures and masterfully combines storytelling with strong elements of magical realism. Let us dive deep and understand why Spirited Away or Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi — translated as “Sen and Chihiro’s Spiriting Away”, is such a big deal.

Miyazaki’s works are not simple enough to be interpreted in a straightforward manner but are layered structures that go deeper than a preliminary viewing can disclose. SA is replete with spirits and monsters but what do they really mean? I present here but one interpretation of all possible ones out there, the one that I find most justifiable.

An overview

“Don’t worry, you’ve got Daddy here. He’s got credit cards and cash.”

If you have watched SA, it is almost impossible not to make the comparison with Alice in Wonderland, penned from Carroll’s imagination, which tells the story of a little girl who tumbles down a hole into a fantasy world of magic and strange creatures and where she had a number of adventures. Just like Alice, Chihiro meets some helpful characters and some not so much. She makes friends with Haku, the evil witch Yubaba’s magical apprentice, and takes as friends Bo, the morphed mouse of Yubaba’s baby, the little bird, and of course, the river demon - No Face. Food plays an important role as it was greed initially that turned Chihiro’s parents into pigs as they shamelessly went on stuffing themselves up. The magical dumpling that Chihiro received as a gift from the river spirit eventually healed Haku from the clutches of the evil Yubaba’s slavery spell and defeated No Face. Words and their interpretations are dealt with in an engaging way, like all fantasy stories, for it was by taking away the original name of Haku, Yubaba had managed to hold him captive and used the same technique for Chihiro, when she tried to rename her Sen. Eventually, Chihiro breaks Yubaba’s spell by calling names (literally).

Tribute to folklore

SA comes with its own set of treats and rewards for inquisitive viewers. Miyazaki was clever enough to include copious amounts of his nation’s folklore, in part educating the world of his nation’s rich culture subconsciously. Spirits, called Kami, are venerated in Shinto folklore and are associated with nature who are said to live in a world of their own just like ours. In this magical mirror world, Kamis exist alongside other spirits and demons - like the river demon, No Face, who was an obvious fallout of the excessive environmental degradation for which humans are responsible. The intense hatred and unpopularity of humans in the demon’s lair is reasonable because humans do tend to destroy wherever they lay their hold. Miyazaki both laments this fact and criticises humans for it.

“You humans always make a mess of things. Like your parents who gobbled up the food of the spirits like pigs. They got what they deserved.”

Good & Evil

Another striking feature of the movie is how Miyazaki chose not to bottle up characters as either good or evil - a recurrent and uninspiring feature of most modern high fantasy tales. Under close inspection, every character in SA can be loved and hated at the same time and perhaps, it is this uncertainty that gives such appeal to the movie. It is because these characters model our world more closely with personalities lying in a spectrum of greys. One might think Yubaba is an evil witch who binds people to slavery by means of her treacherous contracts but then a softer, motherly side of Yubaba is revealed as she cares and takes care of Bo, the giant little boy. Haku, the dragon shape-shifter and apprentice to Yubaba, who saved Chihiro’s life is cast into a dark light as he is accused of theft by Zeniba, Yubaba’s twin witch-sister. No Face might appear as an evil river monster who devoured creatures who were greedy enough to be swayed by his gold bait. But once we understand that his habitation has been destroyed by human-made environmental damage, we look at him as an agitated homeless vagabond.

“You still haven’t noticed that something precious to you has been replaced.”

Brief(est) history of animation

Much can be said, and should be said, about the technique of hand-drawing each frame painstakingly instead of using computer-generated images as was prevalent in the United States. Traditional animation techniques involve multiple stages of production such as storyboarding, sketching, colouring, compiling, making the production tedious and costly. The adoption of CGI started in the 1980s and Toy Story became the first movie to be created wholly on a computer. CGI dominated American animation studios and marked the end of hand-drawn comics. Thus, people stood up and took notice when SA bagged an Academy Award, serving as “a wake-up call for a lot of people in the film business who had been disregarding Japanese animation for years”².

Technique and Philosophy

Most of Studio Ghibli’s productions are often criticised as being too “slow” and that might be the case where plot progresses casually and lazily and most shots are idle with little happening in them. In contrast to the popular method of overloading storylines with too much movement and actions, Miyazaki’s work takes a welcome break and allows the viewer to “breathe”. He himself describes these idyllic shots as “ma” or “emptiness”: “The people who make the movies are scared of silence, so they want to paper and plaster it over. They’re worried that the audience will get bored. But just because it’s 80% intense all the time, doesn’t mean the kids are going to bless you with their concentration. What really matters is the underlying emotions - that you never let go of those.” Do you remember the following iconic shot from the film? This is what Miyazaki is talking about.

SA is infamous for being a product of one of Miyazaki’s peculiar habits - of not storyboarding his script. In fact, SA is a scriptless movie with the story conceived alongside the storyboarding process. When asked by Midnight Eve, Miyazaki coyly replied, “I don’t have the story finished and ready when we start work on a film. It’s not me who makes the film. The film makes itself, and I have no choice but to follow.”

“Disney movies touch the heart, but Studio Ghibli films touch the soul.”

Chihiro, the kid who grew up

Miyazaki believes in giving her heroines centre-stage in his works. His female characters are strong and plot-drivers instead of being mere ornaments to decorate or augment a plotline. The same can be said for Chihiro, the 10-year old girl at the centre of SA. For the most part, the movie can be seen as a character development arc for the girl as she transforms from the pampered, self-centred, and spoiled child in the care of her parents, to a worker who understands the nuances and importance of toil and labour. Bo, the giant baby of Yubaba, also got to experience life from a different perspective outside the comfort of his baby citadel when he travels around perched on the shoulders of Chihiro as a mouse.

The adventure was a transformative experience for Chihiro and she grew up as a result of that. She learnt to be empathic and brave in the face of doubt and danger. Perhaps, that is the ultimate message of SA. Or perhaps, all these interpretations are bullshit and Miyazaki wanted to have fun.

REFERENCES

1. How Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki Reinvented Common Fairytale Tropes
2. On Hayao Miyazaki’s ‘Spirited Away’ and the Anxieties of Growing Up
3. Why ‘Spirited Away’ Is the Best Animated Film of All Time
4. Midnight Eye interview: Hayao Miyazaki
5. Project MUSE - Regaining Continuity with the Past: Spirited Away and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

FOOTNOTES

1: A new movie by Miyazaki, “How Do You Live?” is slated to release on 14th July this year.
2: Quoted by Dr. Jonathan Clements