Spirited Away

Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2001) follows ten-year-old Chihiro Ogino as her parents, Akio and Yūko, move to a new town. After taking a wrong turn, the family enters an abandoned-looking theme-park complex. Chihiro’s parents greedily eat food set out at an empty restaurant and are transformed into pigs. As night falls, the site becomes a bathhouse and marketplace for spirits, leaving Chihiro trapped in a supernatural realm. Haku, a mysterious boy who can assume dragon form, tells her she must obtain work from the bathhouse’s formidable proprietor, Yubaba, to survive and free her parents and return to the human world. Yubaba takes Chihiro’s name, renaming her Sen, a device that makes her forget her identity. Working under the supervision of Kamaji, the boiler-room operator, and Lin, a bathhouse worker, Chihiro confronts demanding guests and learns resilience. One celebrated sequence has her assist in cleansing a foul-smelling “stink spirit,” which proves to be a polluted river spirit. The grateful spirit gives her a medicinal dumpling. She later uses part of it to help Haku, who has been injured after stealing a golden seal from Zeniba, Yubaba’s twin sister. The remaining portion helps the lonely No-Face, whose uncontrolled appetite badly disrupts the bathhouse. No-Face initially responds to Chihiro’s kindness but becomes monstrous after consuming workers and offering gold. Chihiro leads him by train across flooded tracks to Zeniba’s cottage, where he becomes calmer and eventually stays with her. Haku reveals that he is the spirit of the Kohaku River and recalls that Chihiro once fell into that river as a small child and was carried safely to shore. This recognition restores his memory of his true name. In the climax, Yubaba orders Chihiro to identify her parents among a group of pigs. Chihiro correctly says that none of them is indeed her parent. This test releases her from Yubaba’s contract and allows her parents to regain human form. Chihiro and her family leave the spirit world, although her parents apparently remember nothing of their ordeal. Miyazaki wrote and directed the film, which Studio Ghibli produced. Its Japanese title, Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, is commonly rendered as Sen and Chihiro’s Spiriting Away. Joe Hisaishi composed the score, and Rumi Hiiragi voiced Chihiro in the Japanese version. The film won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 75th Academy Awards, becoming the first hand-drawn and first non-English-language film to win that category.