Spirited Away: What Miyazaki's Greatest Film Is Actually About

"Spirited Away" was released in Japan in July 2001 and earned 30.8 billion yen at the Japanese box office — the highest-grossing film in Japanese history at the time, a record that stood for twenty years until "Demon Slayer: Mugen Train" surpassed it. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2003, the first non-English-language film to do so unshared. It is the work by which Hayao Miyazaki is known internationally, and it is genuinely strange: a film that resists the kind of summary that defines whether a pitch was successful, that operates on dream logic rather than causal logic, and that achieves its emotional effects through accumulation rather than through events that can be easily extracted from their context.

The premise: Chihiro, ten years old, accompanies her parents to what appears to be an abandoned theme park. Her parents eat food at an apparently unattended stall and are turned into pigs. Chihiro, stranded in a spirit world, must find work at a bathhouse for spirits and gods in order to survive and eventually free her parents. This summary makes the film sound stranger than it is to watch, because Miyazaki's visual world-building is so confident and so internally consistent that the spirit world feels like a place with rules — strange rules, but rules — rather than like the arbitrary strangeness of bad dream sequences.

The film is about work. More precisely, it is about the specific dignity and indignity of labor — about what it means to take a job you did not choose, to be told your name is not the name your parents gave you, to be required to prove yourself useful in conditions designed by others. Chihiro's transformation across the film is not from cowardice to bravery or from weakness to strength; it is from passivity to agency, from someone who is carried by circumstances to someone who works. The spirit world requires work, and the work is the mechanism of her survival, and her willingness to work — not heroically but persistently, showing up and doing the thing and doing it again — is what saves her.

The secondary characters are realized with a depth that most films reserve for protagonists. Lin, the bathhouse worker who helps Chihiro, is characterized through attitude and action rather than exposition — her toughness, her generosity, her specific form of protectiveness are all visible in behavior rather than stated in dialogue. Yubaba, the bathhouse owner, is one of animation's most effective antagonists precisely because she is not evil: she is a businessperson, operating within her world's economic logic, who happens to wield power over a child. Her twin, Zeniba, is the same person with a different relationship to that power, which is itself a statement about the role of circumstances in character.

No Face, the spirit who becomes fixated on Chihiro and offers her gold, is the film's most purely enigmatic creation: a being of need that amplifies everything around it, that becomes what the environment of the bathhouse produces when it has no self of its own. His arc, in which he follows Chihiro to Zeniba's house and finds something to occupy himself, is as quietly moving as anything in Miyazaki's filmography. He does not need to be explained to be understood; the film trusts the viewer to feel what he is rather than to parse him.