Spirited Away

Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away was the biggest hit in Japanese box office history for almost twenty years, became the first non-English language animation to win an Oscar for Best Animated Feature, and, above all, was the film that first brought Western audiences so close to the magic of Studio Ghibli. Ten-year-old Chihiro is trapped in a parallel dimension where spirits, ghosts, and mysterious creatures reign supreme, while her parents have been transformed into pigs in an eerie, abandoned amusement park. In Spirited Away, the distinction between the visible and the invisible, the body and the spirit, the tangible and the intangible is almost as if it never existed, freeing contact with the uncanny and the otherworldly from any inherently malevolent dimension. Somehow, this explosion of colors and rhythms initiates us into a process of maturation that is associated with self-knowledge and improvement rather than didactic rules and forced atonement for past mistakes. In this way, even the most repulsive monster may conceal infinite beauty within itself, having fallen victim to human greed and indifference. In Miyazaki’s world, what scares you makes you stronger: because it teaches you how to love even your innermost fears.