SPIRITED AWAY: THE MAKING OF A MASTERPIECE
THE MAKING OF A MASTERPIECE
Spirited Away THE MAKING OF A MASTERPIECE
A film by Hayao Miyazaki
Content
1 2
Preface Hayao Miyazaki Studio Ghibli Inspiration
Music
2 6 12
Joe Hisaishi Yumi Kimura
16 18
34 5
Characters
Places
Chihiro & Sen Haku Yubaba & Zeniba No Face
Abandoned Town Bathhouse Train Ride Zeniba’s House
22 26 30 34
Impact
40 44 48 52
Animation Themes Screenplay
60 70 80
3
Characters This chapter features concept art and digital renderings of character designs, as well as analyses of the growth and depth of the main characters. Because the film is at heart, a study of character development, the audience’s understanding of the protagonist and her interactions with the people around her is essential. This includes their appearances well as aspects of the narrative plot. Some commentary is provided by Ghibli supervising animator Masashi Ando and art director Yoji Takeshige, as well as meditations and reviews from several cinematic experts.
Chihiro
&
Sen
Chihiro is very much a reluctant heroine, introverted, timid, and somewhat passive. A typical ten-year-old girl, she is spoiled and overprotected. Beneath Chihiro’s childish behavior, however, is a well of maturity and wisdom that she isn’t yet aware of. Spirited Away is about her journey, not only from the human world to the spirit realm and back, but of her growth to independence. Chihiro and her parents are introduced to the audience in the midst of familial conflict: they are moving to a new town and she is unwilling to acknowledge that her world is changing drastically. She is self-centered and suspicious of change because she has never had to face issues outside of her comfortable environment. However, it is the obstacles she has to overcome once thrust into this strange spirit world that help Chihiro and the audience discover her worth. When she loses her old name and becomes Sen, her true self emerges. Through a combination of hard work, dedication, and versatility in the face of all the obstacles she must overcome, she becomes heroic and compassionate. These are traits she had within her all along; she merely needed to know how to access them. Her time spent in the spirit world gives her the strength to confront the real world. 22
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Chihiro makes her way through the garden Chihiro is uneasy about moving away Chihiro stubbornly refuses to enter the tunnel Sketches of Chihiro and Sen 23
Themes Coming of Age Entering the adult world is a substantial and jarring transition that everyone must go through. The film provides an extreme, accelerated metaphor of the independence people experience when encountering the hardships of growing up. The shock of entering the working world is a theme rarely dealt with at this age level. The loss of parents is a classic fairy tale device, rendering the heroine suddenly alone, without a safety net or protection, without help, advice warmth, and comfort. To rescue her parents and escape the spirit world is a daunting task for any child and gives the film its emotional power. Chihiro must face many other obstacles, including looking for work and finding a place to stay. Idleness is a luxury of childhood—Chihiro lies in the backseat while her parents drive, incapable of doing anything independently. When Chihiro becomes Sen and starts her job at the bathhouse, she works idly and ineffectively, having never worked a day in her life. Sen gradually learns to keep up: she works diligently and even undertakes the monumental task of washing the stink spirit until its true river spirit form emerges. Though hard work is not the only element of the spirit world that transforms Sen into a stronger, more capable person, it certainly helps her learn to deal with problems maturely. The film teaches that no endeaor will be truly successful without honest, persistent effort, also showing the downfall of receiving without giving anything in return. 70
Although the bathhouse is a community of workers, the greedy aspects of capitalism soon erupt when the possibility of gaining gold occurs. Both humans and spirits are destructively greedy, making them oblivious to what is truly important, preventing them from reaching their full potential as people and spirits. Another key aspect of the adult world is that nothing is black or white, which is difficult for children to understand. There is no true evil villain in the film; every character is a mix of good and bad traits and actions, revealed as Chihiro and the audience comes to know them. The twin sisters Yubaba and Zeniba represent two sides of the same person. Spirited Away’s blurred line between good and evil is a much more accurate reflection of the real world outside the film. In the end, evil is not vanquished but pushed aside as characters make choices that weaken bad influences. All of these things that Chihiro learns leads up to the penultimate and most important scene of the film: a train ride. The train ride is about the experience of the ride itself, not the landscape through which the train passes. One going on a journey alone for the first time is the mark of true independence, and in the film it signifies Chihro’s coming of age.
Environmentalism Like the rest of Miyazaki’s films, Spirited Away examines the consequences of actions that alter the natural world in destructive ways. It is a theme that permeates the characters, the setting, and their implications. The river spirits are sickly and covered in the grime of human pollution, or have been evicted of their homes. It’s only the combined effort of the workers pulling out the bicycle from the god that saves the old river spirit. It takes an effort, but he is eventually restored to his former glory. Similarly, saving the natural world could only be acheived with the entire human population. The greed of antagonists; their lust for personal fortune is at the cost of the environment. The abandoned amusement park at the beginning of the movie is only one of many, linked to the issue of land management. Chihiro’s father notes that many theme parks were built in Japan during the boom times, and they were abandoned when the economy tanked. As a result, unsightly, false landscapes dot the countryside. Self-pollution, a more personal aspect of environmentalism, occurs through No-Face’s and Chihiro’s parents’ over-consumption of food. Haku is even polluted by Yubaba’s slug. Environmentalism is a familiar motif in Miyazaki’s films, and critiquing the consequences of development and pollution through animated characters sheds new and unusual light on these issues. As for the visual impact of the environment’s magnitude in the film, it is represented by an expanding
sea that surrounds the bath house. It starts out like a river and ends up an ocean, representing the distance Chihiro feels between her old world and her new ones. (Not merely the divide between the bath house and the real world, but also between her new neighborhood and her old one.) Haku, himself, was once a river, and he becomes Chihiro’s first love. Nature, in this case, symbolizes the unknown, (which starts out as Chihiro’s biggest fear but she overcomes it) and the object of her innocent love. To call attention to distorting and destructive cultural traditions affecting humankind’s natural environment is a noble cause. His disillusionment with the modern world’s neglect of the earth is quite apparent in the majority of his films. He explores this in comparisons that are offered throughout between tradition, folklore, ritual, and the numerous elements of the past and the contemporary world with its credit cards, cars, abandoned theme parks and modern ways. Miyazaki claims that much of modern culture is thin and shallow and fake, and looked forward to an apocalyptic age when wild green grasses take over.
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