Spirited Away at 20: How Hayao Miyazaki's masterpiece united animation lovers worldwide

There’s a moment early on in Spirited Away that sticks with me after countless viewings and many years. Plucky ponytailed 10-year-old protagonist Chihiro breaks down by a river after losing her parents—and the human world she recognizes—in a bathhouse for the spirits. “It’s just a dream, a stupid dream,” Chihiro chides herself as she begins to cry. “Go away, disappear! Disappear!” When she looks down, she gasps in a moment of clarity her own ability to self-actualize: her fingertips begin dissolving into nothing.

“It plays into very strong fears that we all have of abandonment, of getting lost, of not knowing what we’re doing or what to do next,” Dr. Susan Napier, author of Miyazakiworld: A Life In Art and a professor at Tufts University, says of the film’s opening sequence. “I think it’s absolutely a global story.”

Spirited Away, which marked the 20th anniversary of its U.S. wide release on September 20, remains a touchstone in animated storytelling. The meticulous, dreamlike film saw a record-breaking 2001 premiere in Japan, but international appreciation for director Hayao Miyazaki made the already-ascendant director a star. Dr. Shiro Yoshioka, a professor at Newcastle University and one of the first doctoral candidates to complete a PhD on Miyazaki, describes Spirited Away (along with its predecessor, 1997’s gritty environmentalist film Princess Mononoke) as the “height” of Miyazaki’s career.

“He established his position as [Japan’s] filmmaker, as it were, and also a public intellectual,” Yoshioka explains. “The global success of the film added more significance to his status within Japan, further separating him and his films from other anime and their creators.”

Spirited to the states

The American appetite to consume and learn from Miyazaki’s luminous work is enormous–it’s also one that likely wouldn’t exist without Spirited Away’s mainstream U.S. rollout. It’s hard to overstate the role played by Disney-Pixar maven John Lasseter’s role in the film’s distribution and reception in the U.S. market. Lasseter first met Miyazaki in 1981, when Miyazaki was an animator with Tokyo’s TMS and Lasseter was an up-and-coming executive who was growing tired of Disney’s monotonous kid-friendliness. Miyazaki showed Lasseter’s team part of Miyazaki’s first feature, The Castle Of Cagliostro– Lasseter has said he was “blown away” by what he saw.

“It had a very strong effect on me because I felt that this was the first animated feature film I had seen that had a vision to entertain for all ages,” Lasseter said during a 2014 speech at the Tokyo Film Festival. “It made me feel that I was not alone in the world.”

Lasseter played a key role in bringing Spirited Away to a U.S. wide release in 2002 (Lasseter left Disney in 2018 amidst allegations of sexual misconduct.) At the time, Miyazaki was wary of foreign distribution for his films, after the U.S. release of Nausicaä: Valley Of The Wind saw the distributor cut 22 minutes from the original and advertised the film as Warriors Of The Wind. Following that snafu, Miyazaki’s producer sent then-Miramax head Harvey Weinstein (who handled Princess Mononoke’s release several years later) a katana alongside the words “no cuts.”

Acknowledging “blood, pain, dread, and death”

Although Miyazaki had gained recognition both in Japan and stateside with Princess Mononoke, Yoshioka explains that that film gained less traction due to an art-house heavy rollout. Spirited Away, with extra eyes trained on its wide release and a sweeping Oscars campaign, reached an international audience that was previously unprecedented for anime. Before Spirited Away, Miyazaki was a cult auteur with a dedicated Japanese fan base—afterwards, per Yoshioka, Miyazaki was elevated in the international ranks alongside older Japanese masters like Akira Kurosawa. Spirited Away was the first non-English language film to win Best Animated Feature, and remains the only hand-drawn film to do so. Miyazaki was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 2014.

“Miyazaki’s luminescent, gorgeously realized world is relatively safe for children (good beats out evil and love conquers all, though it’s more important that honesty, courage, and personal integrity are always eventually rewarded), but it also acknowledges blood, pain, dread, and death in ways that other animated films wouldn’t dare,” Tasha Robinson wrote in her 2001 review of the film for The A.V. Club.

That review feels quite prescient now, given a recent push in children’s media to depict “realistic” content for and featuring kids. The request holds merit, but hasn’t always exemplified a “vision to entertain for all ages.” These desires reveal a hyper-realistic vision for media that sanitizes the confusion Spirited Away captures so well. In the same breath that the sorceress Yubaba feels like a doting grandmother, she transforms into a terrifying overlord–Chihiro’s mother and father change on a dime from distracted parents to possessed, slobbering boars. The film makes its young protagonist’s fears both inherently fantastical and jarringly real–exactly how most fear feels at 10. Suffice it to say every fictional elementary school doesn’t need a shooting threat to affectingly depict dread, anxiety, or uncertainty.

A “more complex and amorphous” world

Two decades on, animation has been largely devalued at major streamers like HBO Max (ironically, one of the streaming hubs where Studio Ghibli’s body of English-dubbed work lives today.) But back then, Miyazaki’s animators were known to spend roughly one month crafting a single minute of their hand-drawn imagery. Today, CGI animators on big family friendly blockbusters describe a far stricter timeline.

Napier laments how this leads to a more “straightforward, formulaic” approach, citing Pixar’s Inside Out as a more sanitized version of Miyazaki’s creation. “It’s very, very cut and dry,” Napier says, “whereas the world became more complex and amorphous in Spirited Away.”

It’s no small coincidence that, as the landscape thins for painstaking animation like Miyazaki’s, appreciation for his masterpiece grows. Yoshioka asserts that Miyazaki’s own career saw a gradual decline in the wake of Spirited Away—with the eyes of a global public on him, his own vision became clouded. Although he’s been teasing a return for years, Miyazaki hasn’t released a new film since 2013’s highly personal The Wind Rises.

“Because of growing fame and pressure he felt as a creator that he has to engage with political, social and environmental issues around the world, he seems to continue to meander as to what to depict and how,” Yoshioka says.

Although Yoshioka himself doesn’t watch the English dub of Spirited Away, Napier cites a central difference between the dub and the original, which she says speaks to American filmmaking’s struggle to “trust the audience.” U.S. viewers’ desire for sentimental spoon-feeding becomes apparent in the final moments of the film (and brings to mind that infamous katana.) In the English dub, Chihiro assures her dad she “can handle” her new school, neatly tying up an early storyline about her desire not to move. In the original, the family drives off without a word—what Chihiro can and can’t handle now isn’t the purpose of her journey. As the viewer, to not know is to imagine. “One thing I really like about Miyazaki is he doesn’t give us simplistic answers,” Napier says.

New realms, classic journeys

As both an audience member and researcher, Yoshioka says he sees Spirited Away’s central message as one of cultural and personal identity. “We as people consist not just of what we know or remember,” he explains, “but are actually a composite of all sorts of things, that even include what we don’t remember or even have never experienced.”

Napier echoes this, and emphasizes the film’s increased profundity given the extreme cultural shake-ups of the past decade. She specifically highlights the COVID-19 pandemic as a metaphorical “new realm” we’ve all been “spirited away” to, where anyone who has navigated a Zoom work meeting can understand (at least in miniature) Chihiro’s plight. “Are we not all aware of how … our basic visions of ourselves and our history have been invaded in the last 20 to 30 years by modernity itself?” Napier muses. “What used to be secure is now shaking a little bit.”

Whether presented through a spiritual bildungsroman or turbulent global events, Spirited Away’s message resonates: history lives with, and through, us. Even when the known world threatens to disappear and take us with it, like Chihiro we maneuver through the madness and get to work alongside the soot sprites. To shape something out of the unwavering confusion around us, as Chihiro does, is simply to be alive. Americans seem more desperate now than ever to tie up humanity’s mysteries with a shiny bow, either sanitizing reality or overemphasizing its horrors. Miyazaki’s singular aesthetic urges us to see our lives differently: in ambiguity, in liminality, and in spirit.