The girl is clingy and clumsy, tripping over nothing and holding tightly to her father’s shirt. She is stubborn, and doesn’t even want to spare a few moments to check out an intriguing abandoned tunnel at the end of an old forest road off the highway. Even as it leads to a windswept plain and an abandoned theme park, she demands that everyone turn around and get back to moving. She is holding a bouquet of flowers with a note saying “We will miss you Chihiro!”, and yet all we get out of her is that she can’t get to her new house too soon. In other words, no admirable qualities stand out, even when most character—or really most people in general—would at least spend time admiring their surroundings.
In some ways these character traits will never go away, even with the life-changing adventure that Chihiro is about to embark on in the bustling land of spirits, layered on top of that quiet cutaway world. At the end of Spirited Away we see a shot mirrored from the beginning, betraying her clinginess and controlling attitude. But does she not change? Her stubbornness is given meaning, and becomes an asset that keeps her alive and wins her the admiration of many in a strange land. Count how many times she trips at various parts of the movie. Director Hayao Miyazaki includes them at the beginning as a sort of artistic touch, selling us on the realism of the characters. But as time passes, while everyone else keeps their mannerisms and tendencies, she stops tripping. She stops slouching, and when she pesters someone again and again and again, she has conviction and reason driving her, not just an attitude issue. With only a short period of time as her guide (how short we never learn), Chihiro matures into Sen, a woman with courage and skills to survive in a world of spirits and monsters, and then she matures back into Chihiro, a girl with the heart and strength to change that world, and eventually leave it.
The world is small, mainly just a bath house, but it feels immense beyond belief, partly by how intimidating it is and partly by the great expanse that stretches out in all directions, one that we are given only tastes of, never a chance to fully explore. One thing that gives the world such depth and space is the shots where nothing of great importance is going on, ones where plot or character development could fill the void. The story that Miyazaki has to tell already fits well within the time constraints of the film, and so there are many times where we get to sit with the characters and admire the deep blue water, or navigate a dark forest with only one path, times where an ellipsis could have just as easily moved things along. Our favorite characters appear in the backdrop time and time again, even without needing a reason to be there. They came to enjoy the baths, or to work on them, or to see each other; what more reason is needed for them to pass by, even when the plot didn’t call for them?
The bathhouse is intricate, and each section represents a different part of Chihiro. The depths are ruled by Kamaji, the boiler man who proves his compassion time and time again. His scenes are some of the most subtly heartwarming, with him making seemingly small sacrifices to help Chihiro stay alive. In reality they are not small. In one scene he gives away a ticket, throwing all sorts of contraptions and objects out of his drawers to find it. From this we would think this ticket is an afterthought, just something he bought for no reason. We then learn that he has had it for 40 years, and we cannot help but feel he is giving away a long-lost dream. Chihiro comes here before anywhere else, looking for work only to be turned away. Kamaji does not appear in a positive light here, as we want our protagonist to survive. She then sees one of the “workers” (an adorable little soot ball) crushed beneath the block of coal he is supposed to be transporting. She picks it up and tosses it in the fire for him, discovering in the process that it is no easy task. This is where her compassion first shows, and she is repaid in kind by Kamaji, who puts himself at risk by paying off a worker to transport her safely upstairs. Her compassion shines through here, and nowhere else in the bathhouse is more tender to her.
The top floor is where Yubaaba, the owner of the bathhouse, resides. She herself is the supreme image of an evil, cackling witch, with a gigantic but stubby figure, and with odd features accentuated like her huge hook nose or perfectly rounded eyes. She waves her hands and a lamp will light, or a room will become clean. She zips and unzips Chihiro’s mouth at her own will, and when Chihiro signs her name on a paper, Yubaaba lifts the characters off the page, leaving only the word “Sen”. This becomes Chihiro’s new name, the name of a worker with nothing but a single character name left. And yet we see Yubaaba compromised as well, taking care of her baby with the tenderness of a mother, or held hostage by the rules of the world that she created herself. But mostly she loses to Chihiro’s diligence and persistent nagging. She helps Sen purely for the sake of money, then turns around and says “Drinks on the house tonight!” She only gives Chihiro a job because of “an oath”, but we never meet an authority above her, nor do we see any reason that she should be bound by the rules of her own bathhouse. If we had to guess, Chihiro defeats Yubaaba, and forces her to play along. Chihiro directly faces her fears on the top floor, finding reason first in clinging to life, and later in love, but never faltering or wavering.
The rest of the building is the bathhouse itself, where only labor and diligence are accepted. Between the elevators and the stairs, everything looks immense, as if it would take weeks to learn and years to clean. The baths are huge; looking up you can see the various floors and people at work. The people in the bathhouse can be cruel to Sen, and the work is not easy. She slips and falls when she is working at first. She acts unprofessional. Even if she is our protagonist, we see nothing that would earn her a meal at the end of the day. But people begin to look out for her, and to help her out. She finds a friend, Lin, who teaches her the basics. The ghost No-Face grows to like her, and steals the supplies needed for her to work properly. Kamaji, never seen from upstairs, sends her everything she needs at the critical juncture. Everything comes together when a Stink God appears, a mass of sludge and filth, ironically looking for a bath. Lin runs downstairs and tells Kamaji to keep sending the water. One of the tags that No-Face stole was for the best herbal formula in the place. When the bath starts, Sen finds a thorn in the god’s side (literally), and before long the whole bathhouse is pulling on it with all their might. Out comes a bicycle, an oil tank, a fishing line. There is a none-too-subtle environmental message at play here, with the powerful spirit of a river trapped within a collection of trash. But they free him, and Sen is honored for her courage; her place as a worker at the bathhouse is never challenged again.
Make no mistake though; not all the imagery is clean and pretty. There is mud, grime, chaos, and violence. The stink god is not an organized chaos, but rather a force trudging forward without dignity or precision, tainting everything and leaving a purple ooze in its wake, coming from its pores. In Yubaaba’s room there is a shaft that leads to a pit below the bathhouse, filled with dark ghosts who reach up away from the black void beneath. Outside the walls of the bathhouse is a gentler world, where she goes to escape the madness of this new world she has been thrust into. She first meets the boy Haku here, who as a high ranking official in the bathhouse will serve as her guide, both by instructing and aiding her, and by giving her a reason to act out, to go beyond her own comfort to help him and others around her. Their scenes are not always pretty either. Early on they run away from the bathhouse, with Haku guiding her through a series of pig farms and storage units, the underbelly of the spirit world. Later he bleeds violently in a movie where no other blood is seen. But she faces that ugliness and accepts it, only a few days after taking a long time crossing a tiny stream just to avoid getting her shoes wet. Haku and she spend time surrounded by flowers, talking about their happiness outside of the bathhouse. Inside the walls they are master and servant, while outside their love for one another grows. Ironically, all of this happening on the banks of the river back home also serves as a reminder: no matter how close she grows to this world, she has her parents waiting, her life back on the other side. This is not her place.
The attention put into all these scenes and characters is beautiful. Gods come in and out, giving a treat to the Japanese audiences and their knowledge of traditional folklore. At day we see bright blue skies and crystal clear water, while at night we see the glow of a city in the background, with traditional lanterns and stands creating a virtual paradise cut off from the rest of the world. For a cast of non-human characters, they all laugh with gaping mouths, dance back and forth with fans in their hands, and crack jokes about one another. As dangerous as the world is, we cannot help but feel invited in.
The music is excellent, flaring up heroically when the world we have seen grows slightly larger, and coming down to a simplistic but memorable piano line when we are just given a moment to gaze and relax. It rises and falls with the emotions on the screen. What a fantastic performance by Jo Hisaishi and the New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra. I have never remembered every line and every note of a soundtrack so well, known exactly where in the film a familiar piece will come in and where it will end. It is utterly inseparable from the events going on, and both work together to give a sense of wonder, danger, happiness, and amazement.
And really, these are the feelings that define the experience of Spirited Away. With only two hours, Miyazaki has painted the picture of a realm I cannot even begin to describe in this brief review. Our emotions don't get played, but rather are allowed to wash over us, to latch on to the characters and their simple struggle to exist in the world. We see spirits and think of them as our friends. The magic is never cryptic or convoluted, and mostly solve the problems that emotions like courage and love would solve in the world outside the tunnel. At the end, Chihiro receives a hair tie, one woven with the magic of her friends making it together. It never performs a single magical act, simply glinting in the sunlight. And yet more than any other magic in the story, this one endures and touches us, never leaving Chihiro even when her friends are far behind her. It is the magic of an experience that will always remain with her. If we're lucky, it will never leave us either.