Miyazaki’s preoccupation with nature and frustration at man’s relentless destruction of it were concentrated in his previous film, Princess Mononoke.
As time goes by, she makes the transition from student to teacher, showing Yubaba’s giant baby and the childlike spirit No-Face how to be better people. And like those earlier stories, as in life, Chihiro learns that adults don’t have all the answers (Yubaba’s benevolent twin sister Zeniba only nudges Chihiro towards her goal). The sign over the door may as well read “Welcome To Adulthood”.
Separated from her family during the move to a new town, she finds herself in Yubaba’s bath house, a mysterious place full of terrifying, complex grown-ups and weird concepts, where hard work equals reward and survival. Lesson-learning and cold, hard realisation. Everything Miyazaki cares about, and everything he was a master of, is woven into Spirited Away in exactly the right proportions, making it both the ideal introduction to his work and the definitive Miyazaki masterpiece.Īs in Alice’s adventures in Wonderland or Dorothy’s Oz-based shenanigans before her, Spirited Away’s Chihiro undergoes an odyssey filled with enormous change, There are countless reasons for Spirited Away’s global success, some more prosaic than others – it was the first Miyazaki to get an English language dub from the Pixar team, who treated it like one of their own – but placing it in the context of the rest of its director’s output reveals that it’s the perfect summation of all the themes about which he was most passionate. Objectively speaking, though, Spirited Away is the most successful: it remains the highest-grossing film of all time in Japan (unsurprisingly, Miyazaki owns four places in that particular top 10), has made more money than any of his other films, and is the only one to pick up an Oscar (Best Animated Feature, 2002). It’s impossible to pick the “best” entry from his filmography, not just because such an endeavour is based entirely on subjective criteria, but because they’re all wonderful in their own way. With a CV containing just 11 features as director, Hayao Miyazaki’s career is the very definition of quality over quantity. This article was originally published in 2015. With Studio Ghibli films now available on Netflix UK, we delve into our review archives to look back at what makes them so magical.