Film Review: Spirited Away

Restoring & Making History in Japanese Animation.

A Critique of Andrew Osmonds Film Analysis of Spirited Away,

from Director Hayao Miyazaki.

The film classic Spirited Away (2001), directed by veteran anime filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, has been notably commended to be Japan’s most successful film, and to be among the top-grossing foreign language films ever released. The film follows a young girl named Chihiro who is trapped in a spiritual world because of a family road trip where her father makes a wrong turn. Her adventures cover mostly her time at the bathhouse where she has to been contracted to work so she isn't turned into an animal by Yubaba, the witch boss of the bathhouse, and in turn will have to work until she is able to save her parents (who have been turned into pigs). If she is unable to fulfill her mission, she’ll turn into an animal as well and have to stay in the spiritual world forever. As BFI film critic, Andrew Osmond, states in his analysis of the animated film Spirited Away, “for more than five decades, feature-film animation was dominated by the output of the Disney studio” (107), but rather this Miyazaki film disrupted the ongoing Disney era. The film brought elements of the development of a heroine, fantastical bewilderment, a refreshment of historical Japanese themes, and literal name meanings: all in which highly influence the fantasy and catch the attention of a worldwide audience. Miyazaki’s goal for most of his films protagonists is to represent all kinds of girls that seemed real and attainable, yet mythic in nature in order to promote the escape of female stereotypes and superficial ideals. How Miyazaki does this fantastical element for his heroines is by having a “peculiar intensity on their protagonists’ engagement with the world. His characters are defined by their surroundings, not the other way around” (16). Within Spirited Away in particular, his focus was to grip the viewer into the imaginary and unpredictable space of dreams and nightmares alike, having the audience never knowing if the young heroine (Chihiro) will wake up.

Osmond uncovers that Miyazaki typically illustrates stories with young heroines for his films, which has brought a more ‘feminism’ theme to how he writes films. Miyazaki has pointed out that “one expects things of a hero, while the female can surprise” (20); adding surprising elements of heroines, and not heroes, draws the attention of a bewildered-wanting audience during the cluttered, 21st-century competition of animated films. Like most of Miyazaki’s animated classics, Spirited Away was set up in modern Japan, but came with an Alice in Wonderland (1951) influenced twist since it develops a story around female protagonists that are/will be strong-willed by the conclusion of the film. As Osmond opens up in his critic beginning chapter, he describes the similarity of the girls, “the child (Chihiro) has the grave, determined expression of a weathered adventurer in a children’s story” (7); both the main character of the animation, Chihiro, and of Alice in Wonderland, Alice, have an unstoppable force that brings the characters to an alternate fantastical reality with no understanding at first of how to get back to reality. Though the two may have left footprints all around the spiritual wasteland, the two both became a more involved heroine for others, and most importantly: themselves. Chihiro is a selfish, sulky dependent that learns to become a socially skilled and self-confident independent through her fantastical journey by engaging with her surroundings and people alike. In the beginning shot of Spirited Away, Chihiro lacks luster in her eyes and looks rather bored with her surroundings. Her father ends up going on the wrong path and getting them stranded, but he wants to make up for it by being a strong-willed father, dragging Chihiro and her mother through a mysterious tunnel and into the spirit world. As if her world was already flipped upside down when they started to move houses, when Chihiro and her family came upon these spiritual grounds her parents became pigs, presumably as punishment for their selfishness and greed. Thus, this moment began her process of becoming the heroine, rather than continuing to act childish, because “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” (19). The most important element of being a child is having an overwhelming sense of curiosity, but in this position Chihiro uses her curious behavior as a strength to push things through in order to save her parents, not as a weakness to be scared of future outcomes.

Miyazaki purposefully named his protagonist Chihiro for his animated films fantastical journey because of the very underlining of that name means: curiosity. While Andrew Osmond developed multiple key discoveries about the unlying meaning of each scene and character, I personally felt what wasn’t expressed enough in his film critic was Miyazaki’s naming choice for characters. In the first quarter of the film, Chihiro tells her name to her new spiritual guardian and friend, Haku, within the spirit world. Haku replies that she needs to hold onto her name’s significance and her friend's letter, because over time she will, in turn, forget her name, and will need to remember it throughout her journey if she wants to escape. A delicate promise that seems easy to do, but Chihiro has trouble remembering her name throughout her adventure in the alternate world, the impact sourcing from Yubaba’s magical ability of memory manipulation. For this aspect of the story, Miyazaki has delicately chosen names as a signifier of identity throughout the animated film Spirited Away. Chihiro's name literally means "a thousand" and "asking questions". In that case, when Yubaba, the witch boss of the bathhouse, uses her magical ability by “detaching three or four kanji characters and drawing them into her palm” (74). At this point, Yubaba has stripped the young girl from her original meaning; she's herself, but there's a part of her that's still missing. Chihiro’s new name is now Sen, meaning “a thousand”-- which is really the leftover character of her old name. Miyazaki also gave other characters' names a literal connotation; this strategy makes the film seem straight out of a children’s book because of its quick and easy understanding names for characters. The idea to give significance to a simple story factor, like a name, gives a particular magic interpretation to the story. Miyazaki was influenced by the symbolic nature of naming, hence modeled the belief that the “magic of a name is a fairy-tale trope” (74). He didn’t do this with just his female protagonists, but for the spirits and other people he wrote into his stories. There are many characters in Spirited Away that have literal meanings, for instance, Osmond calls to attention that Yubaba is a combination of meaningful Japanese words: hot water meaning ‘yu,’ and old woman meaning ‘baba’ (72).

In the BFI film analysis of Spirited Away, Osmond uncovers that Miyazaki has been known to use his own personal experience and history lessons as a framework for his films. He uses historical elements as a way to restore history for a new generation, and uses references to historical detail to make a bewildering experience. The Edo-Tokyo Architectural Museum was one of Miyazaki’s inspiration for the critically-acclaimed film for it has “preserved buildings from Tokyo’s past” (45) and sets the traditional Japanese atmosphere. The insight to use this building was for the opening of the film when Chihiro first comes into the beautiful, but mysterious ghost town. When Chihiro’s father comes to see the old-fashioned town, he calls it an old ‘theme park’, which Osmond says the term in Japan is described as a place that “encompasses everything from ramen museums to ersatz European villages” (59). The father’s dialogue includes a historical background of why the ‘theme park’ may be empty; Japan’s miracle bubble economy and following recession is referred to in the particular curious scene. Osmond, on the subject, quotes a direct line of Chihiro’s father saying “they built so many in the early 90s, but they went down with the economy” (59). All of the colorful buildings are drawn closely together and over-power one another with their individualistic style--an environment that encompasses the idea a festival has just finished and everyone’s asleep (though it is day, not night). Later, after becoming lost when her parents turn to pigs, Chihiro has to navigate the spirit world she gets trapped in by working in a bathhouse run by an overlord called Yubaba The bathhouse is the real foundation of the film Spirited Away as it’s presented as a ‘eerie supernatural funhouse’ (17) for spirits. Miyazaki uses the bathhouse as the main playground for Chihiro to discover her inner-most insecurities and strengths. The bathhouse is a nostalgic reminder of how, for hundreds of years, the social center engages a Japanese community to come together, which was Miyazaki’s focal point so that Chihiro could develop friendships closely with the spirits surrounding. Though, Miyazaki gave the Spirited Away bathhouse a “pseudo-Western” (70) design in order make it ambiguous for the audience on whether the world Chihiro was in was a “dream or reality...by putting in pieces of traditional design as colorful mosaic” (71). The bathhouses detail emanates a throwback of history; the design imposed a reminder of the pre-war decades when Japan became modernized and Westernised.

The direct point of Hayao Miyazaki’s film was to have a visually, symbolic story for both adults and children alike to fully indulge in its whimsical nature: is this a dream, or a nightmare? Throughout the film’s extravagant journey, fabulous characters, and culturally-celebrated vision, “Miyazaki’s deepest art is to draw poetry from both the adventure and nirvana of childhood” (110). For the opening scene, Osmond describes Miyazaki’s first appeal to have his audience ride along with the characters as they embark into a new world; “Both Japanese and foreign viewers will recognize that we’ve entered archetypal story territory: the mysterious path, the lure away from the normal and everyday into the thickets of fairy tale” (57). By having Chihiro’s oblivious father be actively already driving into the other world, implies to the audience that there is no “going back”. But when Chihiro is forced to work in the bathhouse, Miyazaki provides a sense of magical realism within the spiritual cities wall. He does this by being attentive in the production process to traditional Japanese/Westernising culture, thoroughly underlying spiritual, fantasy characters within the comprehensive, realistic storyline. Hayao Miyazaki’s film Spirited Away provided audiences, child or adult, to capture the making of history by introducing a developing, relatable heroine, and the restoring of history in Japanese culture and architecture.