The Door to the Other World

Spirited Away is a 2001 animated film directed by the highly regarded anime master Mr. Hayao Miyazaki, also the founder of Studio Ghibli. It discloses the story of a young girl Chihiro and her unexpected veer into a mysterious spiritual world, where she ventures through both wonders and apprehensions, learning lessons about friendship, true identity and gratitude. Despite that the film debuted with little marketing, it was quickly endorsed worldwide after its release and started screening the theaters of America on 20 September 2002. Its box office hit $276 million dollars globally and became the highest grossing anime film of its time. Spirited Away was one of the most successful Japanese anime films proven by its financial profits, but I would also like to argue that it is a remarkably influential piece of art on the western world from both aesthetic and technological aspects. It proves that the boundaries of art cannot be limited by culture and language, serving as a bridge for the global audience to further understand the eastern culture, just as in the movie young Chihiro crossed into a whole new world once she set foot over a bridge.

Chihiro and Haku passing the bridge to the spirit world

What makes Spirited Away a Masterpiece

One of Spirited Away ‘s biggest contributing aspects to its success is the aesthetic and quality appeal of the film. Japanese animation has long been known for an eloquently detailed art style, but it would still surprise some that in Spirited Away every single frame was drawn by hand.

Even in the early 2000s, Japan already had been a leading country in the animated film industry. Many artists turned to the experimentation with computer-generated animation, but Mr. Miyazaki insisted on his own vision. Back in 2001, rendering animation was far more difficult than nowadays, but even then, Mr. Miyazaki persisted on drawing all characters by hand. He believed that was the traditional and fundamental way of creating anime. The frames, drawn mostly by him, were then scanned into the computer system, digitally painted, and then put together to make it look like an animation.

A documentary made diving into the production of  Spirited Away, especially the English adaptation

       

  

  

   

This took an enormously long time and effort to complete, and in the DVD commentary of Spirited Away, it is shown that Mr. Miyazaki often would focus on details even as small as a few seconds, spending hours to make sure it looked just the way he wanted. As Glen Keane, the supervising animator for the English translation of Spirited Away said, “he’s an auteur, so you really have one man’s vision communicated up on the screen”.

Also during the commentary, Mr.Miyazaki revealed that he wanted the films to have more frames than traditional animation, meaning that every per second, there were probably more than 24 sketches drawn out for that specific moment. Every single person who watches the film will find different things that they liked or noticed, and I think it’s because Mr. Miyazaki stuck exactly to his vision, it’s why the audience was able to resonate so well.


“Do everything by hand, even when using the computer.” 

——Hayao Miyazaki

  • Drafts of  Hayao Miyazaki

Getting into the actual aesthetic appeals of the film, as said in the Pudovkin-Arnheim-Eisenstein-Theory, the goal of cinema should be to achieve naturalism, generally that films should reflect realistically and “correspond respectively to philisophical mechanism, idealism, and dialectical materialism”.

Although Spirited Away is a completely fabricated fantasy all made out of Mr.Miyazaki’s imagination, it is oddly believable because there are such little moments in the movies where the characters act so humane in a natural that the audience subconsciously accepts it like we would watching other humans act.

For example, one of my favorite little details that reflect this perfectly is when Chihiro is coming back from the spirit world and retrieving her clothes and shoes. When she puts her shoes on, she doesn’t just slip it on and go, she pulls the back of her sneakers and puts her tip of the toe on the ground to make sure the shoe is snug, and then she runs off in a rush. Little moments like this are the ‘magic’ of Mr. Miyazaki’s films, as many people in the behind-the-scenes interviews say.

Aside from just artwork, Mr. Miyazaki had the ability to be conscious of every little detail, ranging from the way Chihiro’s hair spiked up when she was scared to the natural movements of the limb when one is in motion, and the brilliance to bring it all out naturally in the film.

Chihiro puts on her shoes

Another point one would notice if they watched the film many times, is that spirited Away hardly has any still background scenes.

In animation and even mangas(the term for Japanese comics), background scenes are often drawn separately from the characters so that it can be easily rendered or changed in the future. However, no matter if it was the scene on the bridge where Chihiro crossed to the bathhouse, or when she was racing down the pebble-side roads of the town, or just working in the halls, none of the characters around her were still. They were all also engaged in their world, doing the things they would have done at that moment. Because animation films are quite expensive in their own way, many directors choose to use low-budget techniques such as leaving the characters in the background unmoving.

Although Mr. Miyazaki is often painted as some prodigy of the anime world, it’s more that he is willing to put in more effort to create that authentic yet natural atmosphere in his films, and refuses to denounce the quality of his art for easier pathways and profits.

Why this was a True Challenge

In animation, the dialogue and the sound effects also contribute to a great part to whether the viewer finds it believable or not. Especially in Japan where the anime industry is so big, voice acting is a very highly-respected yet also arduous job. The voice actor must be able to fully communicate the emotions of a character, and the artists, listening to recordings of the script, must sync the characters lip movements and facial expressions into their sketches for each frame.

The additional sound effects, such as the steaming water of the bathhouse and the whistle of the ghost train, often needed to be recorded in studio live, and in the end, Mr. Miyazaki always had the task to make sure everything was in place, fit the timing, and ready to go.

The Lesson Behind

After analyzing the various elements in Spirited Away that made it visually and aesthetically appealing, the story itself also has great values to tell. StudioGhibli’s films are widely known to pass some messages to the mass media, and despite it often being put into the family-friendly or children’s category, SpiritedAway truly has a deep volume that still relatable in today’s world.

One of the most impactful scenes is where a mud god comes into the bathhouse, reeking of stink and oozing the whole bathhouse with disgusting excrements, Chihiro is pushed out and forced to help cleanse him. She finds that he has a thorn in him, and with the help of the whole bathhouse, outcomes not only flooding mud but all sorts of modern items such as bicycles and cans and bottles. The spirit then reveals himself to be a river god, now clean of mud and trash and gives Chihiro a reward in return. This is a very explicit depiction of pollution, and spinning it with fantasy elements, shows the audience in a different and more direct way how pollution affects the environment.

Chihiro and the people of the bathhouse pulling out pollution from the river god’s body.

Another theme that lasts through the movie is growing up, as Chihiro goes from a whiny scared girl to someone who is strong and learns to fight for herself and the ones she loves. The antagonist Yubaba tries to steal her name and force her to work unfairly in the bathhouse, but by the end, Chihiro manages not only to regain her own freedom but also help Haku, another river spirit who forgot his name due to pollution, break free fromYubaba’s control. The film reflects on coming-of-age lessons of young love, learning to be grateful, confronting fears, and not forgetting who we truly are.

Haku letting Chihiro go back to her side of the world

Spirited Away’s was nominated for Best Animated Feature for the Oscar Awards in 2002 and made its glorious win while it was up against some much-beloved films like Lilo and Stitch and Ice Age. It had also been the highest-grossing anime film of all time worldwide ($289,096,544) up until 2016, when another Japanese anime film Your Name, directed by the brilliantly talented Makoto Shinkai, came out and awed the world once again. That’s 15 solid years after the initial release of Spirited Away, and insanely long amount of time for a film to stay at the top of its throne.

And still, Spirited Away nowadays is widely loved and praised by critics and audiences both. Its success worldwide has proved that even if the audience is unfamiliar with the culture in a piece, something with great artistic value can still be greatly appreciated and loved by different people.

 

 

 

 

Spirited Away can also be said as the film changed the cultural perception of anime to some degree in the western world. Before, anime was still deemed a silly foreign genre generally mixed with cartoon and children’s shows, but Spirited Away made the large mass of people more willing to understand its uniqueness and beauty. Anime used to be stereotyped heavily and still to this day, has some negative connotation to some adults. The condescending term weeaboo, coins a certain type of people as fanatics of the Japanese culture, and are typically pale, problematic teenagers that spend most of their days locked up in their rooms watching low-quality cartoons, possibly also with posters of sexualized female characters plastered all over their wall and a body pillow in their hands. The term has now moved on to otaku nowadays, “a Japanese Slang term for people who become particularly loyal to fans of a subculture”, a more moderate form of that basically just means anime-lover.

Spirited Away was the first Japanese film since the 1900s to receive love and attention globally, and brought the world to see that Japanese anime was much more than the categorical stereotypes. It demonstrated the maturity and emotional depth an animated film could communicate with people, leading more viewers to seek out this special genre that they may never have, therefore opening up the anime market in the western entertainment industry. As of 2018 right now, entertainment companies worldwide have become increasingly aware of anime’s spiking popularity, and now you can even find anime series on Netflix, a phenomenon that definitely would not have occurred ten years ago. Still, at the mention of Studio Ghibli’s movies, people are much more familiar with that name and also have a good impression of the studio brand.

Collage of Mr. Miyazaki and all of his films

Conclusively, SpiriteThe Door to the Other World Away is arguably one of the most influential films of eastern culture on western mass media. It contributed greatly to anime’s increasing market and reputation, but it also reminds society that no boundaries can be placed upon man’s imagination nor the minds that resonate with it, and no matter if there was a precedent before or not, that any piece of art of high worth will find its way into the world, and pave way for more to come.

Bibliography Citing

Harrah, David. “Aesthetics of the Film: The Pudovkin-Arnheim-Eisenstein Theory.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 13, no. 2, 1954, pp. 163–174. JSTOR, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/425910.

Newitz, Annalee. “Magical Girls and Atomic BombSperm: Japanese Animation in America.” Film Quarterly, vol. 49, no.1, 1995, pp. 2–15. JSTOR, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1213488.

Carl Silvio. “Anime, Both Global and Local.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 29, no. 3, 2002, pp.489–491. JSTOR, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4241113.

AULÈNE, Mathieu G. “Studio Ghibli, A New Force in Animation.” INA Global, 4Apr. 2011, http://www.inaglobal.fr/en/cinema/article/studio-ghibli-new-force-animation.

“SpiritedAway (2002).” Box Office Mojo, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=spiritedaway.htm.

“Makingof Spirited Away – Part 1.” YouTube, YouTube, 27 Jan. 2011,youtu.be/ZJ7ymWBf7XE.