Chihiro

The first time I saw Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, I recognized it was a beautiful film. One only need to watch Chihiro crossing the creek and see the stream, the way it ripples and moves to understand Miyazaki’s great attention to detail. The visual splendor of Miyazaki’s work has been well-covered. What I didn’t realize until I sat down to watch it again was that it’s also a film about work, the ways in which it can be meaningful, but mostly the ways in which it can be menial, and to that end, it’s a subversive piece of storytelling. I suppose part of the reason I missed this on my two previous viewings is how enchanting the tests to which Chihiro is put are. Then again, perhaps I noticed because this is where my mind is now at thirty-six, a place my mind wasn’t when the film was first released in America in 2001.

The film begins with Chihiro sprawled across the backseat of her family’s car as they’re moving to a new town. Chihiro holds a rose she was given by her former classmates and looked sullen, roused only from her stupor as one of the petals falls off, signaling the rose’s eventual demise. She leaps up and shows her parents. It’s no wonder from the way you’ve been handling it, her mother comments. There’s an obvious divide here between the adult world accepting such things and the horrors they instill in children. And watching as adults, this simple exchange serves as a reminder to how much greater the sensitivities of childhood are. When the father decides to take a short-cut down a darkened path through the forest, Chihiro looks on with trepidation. A child with any sense or knowledge of fairy tales knows what a dark path in the woods means, but her parents are desensitized. They don’t see the same things in the world Chihiro sees, which is what makes her so adept at eventually navigating the world of Spirited Away.

At the end of the forest path, Chihiro and her parents encounter a tunnel that leads to an apparently abandoned amusement park. Again Chihiro’s parents are not at all suspicious. A lot of these places closed during the economic downturn in the early 90s, her father comments, which is the first allusion to economic troubles and work. The parents then stumble upon a booth full of food, and thinking nothing of it, they gorge, eventually transforming into pigs, which leaves Chihiro on her own to navigate the dreamscape this amusement park turns into after nightfall.

At once, we learn it’s bad to be a human here. As Chihiro’s guide Haku leads her into the building where most of Spirited Away‘s action takes place, he warns her to hold her breath so the other’s don’t detect that she’s a human. And why is it bad to be a human here? Well, in a fairy tale filled with all sorts of odd creatures, it may simply be because a type of xenophobia. But subsequent events prove it’s more than that. When Chihiro is revealed for what she is, Haku tells her to run and seek out Kamaji and beg for work. Kamaji, it turns out, is a six-armed man in the boiler room in the basement responsible for heating the baths at the spa above. And the reason working is so important is that it will mask her humanity, if not strip her of it entirely, and allow her to blend in.

As soon as she arrives, she sees small soot creatures carrying coal to the furnace, and as Chihiro asks Kamaji for a job, she shows them kindness. She takes a piece of coal and brings it to the burner, at which point they all drop their coal, and Kamaji chastens, “You can’t just take someone else’s job. If they don’t work, the spell wears off.” What happens then? If the spell wears off, are they free? Do they become human again? Of course, Chihiro does what Haku says and begs Kamaji to take her on. She recognizes that in order to survive this world, she has to work, even if the labor is menial and strips her of humanity. Yet she still hasn’t relinquished her full self. This does’t happen until she meets with Yubaba, the boss of the operation. Yubaba, a large witch-like woman, insists that Chihiro sign a contract for labor. In doing so, Chihiro must abandon her name, adopting instead the identity Sen, which Yubaba assigns her. Don’t forget your name, Haku cautions. Forget your name and you’ll be trapped here forever. Within this scene, we discover as well that Yubaba isn’t even the ultimate voice in the matter. Rather, behind a closed door living in the luxury of fluffy pillows and blankets is a gigantic crying baby who needs his needs met every second of the day and if they aren’t he’ll throw a temper tantrum. Perfect metaphor for a CEO if I’ve ever seen one.

Chihiro is provided with a uniform and the new name of Sen and taken under the wing of another worker, Lin, who is slightly older and more experienced. Anyone whose ever held a manual labor job will recognize Lin as the type who understand the nature of the work and looks out for her coworkers’ interests. She can pretend to be hard on the workers for show, but she takes care of Sen and helps her get by. Their job is working the mineral baths for paying customers. The place is thrown into a tizzy by the arrival of a Stink God. Before this happens, Sen is given an inordinate amount of water tickets by a mysterious figure dressed in white mask with black robes (referred to as No-Face). The workers are only given one ticket per shift, but the many he provides her with allow her to succeed in washing the Stink God clean. The God is layered in copious amounts of filth and needs a great deal of water, but once she washes him clean, she’s provided with a magic stone that proves important later when she needs to rescue a friend from death and stop No-Face’s rabid over-consumption.

When the Stink God dissolves and ascends, he leaves gold in his wake, and the workers dive for it and horde it. At least, most of them do. Sen/Chihiro ignores it. When No-Face returns, he uses gold to seduce the workers, and begins to consume them as he lures them close. The metaphor, while not subtle (and since this is a child’s fantasy, it doesn’t need to be), is that greed and the quest for monetary gain corrupts. As the story proceeds, Sen’s humanity and goodwill is tested. She has to save Haku from the wrath of Yubaba’s twin sister, Zeniba. Disguised as a dragon, he’s stolen Zeniba’s golden seal, a crime for which Yubaba’s paper shikigami have attacked and driven his near-lifeless form to Kamaji’s boiler room. Sen provides him with a piece of the Stink God’s stone which helps him heal and decides to seek Zeniba to ask forgiveness on Haku’s behalf. In the meantime, No-Face has grown engorged (a parallel to Chihiro’s gorging parents at the beginning) making a beast of himself, and it’s only when Chihiro (as Sen) confronts him and gives him the other piece of the Stink God’s stone that he spews forth all he’s consumed and joins her cause. In both cases, it’s the act of giving rather than taking, selflessness instead of greed, that redeems her friends.

In the end, it’s Chihiro’s ability to love that conquers the dehumanization of Yubaba’s world of bathhouse labor. At one point late in the film, Sen is trapped by Yubaba’s giant baby in his nursery. The baby has every conceivable luxury, but wants to play with Sen as if she were a doll. She suggests the baby needs to get outside. When he responds that he’ll get sick if he ventures out, she replies, “It’s staying in here that will get you sick.” As simple as it seems, this reminder to get outside, to get away from the grind and drudgery of labor and embrace our humanity, is necessary to maintain our identities. This message is coded within Spirited Away.  The film is beautiful to look at, but beyond the beauty of its images is a beauty in its message.