Some movies come into your life exactly when you need them to. Spirited Away was that movie for me. I can still remember the exact date I watched it — April 30, 2015. Hard to believe that it’s been almost 11 years since that fateful day. At the time, there was an internet conspiracy theory that the end of the world or the collapse of civilization was to fall on that date. Paranoid 14-year-old me treated such predictions with great import. I calmed myself down by telling myself “Nothing will happen that day. You will wake up, watch Spirited Away, go to bed, and wake up the next day. The world will not end.’”
The world didn’t end on April 30, 2014, but in a sense, it did. The world I knew vanished that day, and I was introduced to one that was brighter, colder, less comfortable and more colorful than what I had known before. Spirited Away is one of those movies that changes you and your world once you watch it. You go on the same transformative journey as its protagonist.
I had never seen Spirited Away up to that point because of its lofty reputation. To tweenage me, watching it was as daunting as the prospect of reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace, an equally canonical and essential work. Do I even need to explain what Spirited Away is about? It is widely considered to be the magnum opus (though there’s plenty of competition) of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, whose aggressively whimsical fables of the human condition have enchanted generations of audiences with their fabulous imagery and emotional depth. Even saying that feels trite at this point. Spirited Away was the first Ghibli film I ever saw. At roughly the same age as its protagonist Chihiro and in the same stage of development, its arrival in my life came like a thunderclap.
Chihiro (Rumi Hiiragi in the film’s original Japanese voice cast, which will be the version shown at the Coolidge) is a bratty girl on a road trip to her family’s new home. Miyazaki’s protagonists are often young people in transitional stages of their lives, who get swept into mystical realms full of bizarre creatures whose stories teach them difficult lessons about life. Spirited Away is a fairy tale in the vein of The Nutcracker, Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz, in which a girl unsure of her place in the world is separated from her family and whisked into a world where nothing makes sense and yet everything matters. Chihiro is no exception. Her parents are seduced by a mysterious banquet of food that transforms them into pigs. Chihiro herself is put to work in a magic bathhouse serving a menagerie of creatures inspired by Japanese folklore. Chihiro loses her name, and thus her identity, to Yubaba (Mari Natsuki), the grotesque witch who runs the bathhouse. Beyond the dizzying heights of imagination that are on display in Spirited Away, it is, at its core, an ancient and familiar story: A young person being forced to go at it alone in an unfamiliar place and, in the process, discover who they are. It is a story that has defined just about every hero of mythology and pop culture (paging Joseph Campbell…) and a story that every one of us shares. But it has never been told quite this ravishingly.
I first watched Spirited Away on a boxy CRT on wheels, the kind your teacher would push into class to show you Bill Nye and Magic School Bus tapes. I watched it in a cozy classroom, filled with old books, jigsaw puzzles, and board games, located inside the mental health wing of the hospital in my hometown. I can still hear the constant false fire alarms, and smell the steamy aroma of hospital food fermenting under sterile metal cloches. When I was a freshman in high school, I had become overwhelmed by the stress of being a teenager. There were times in the middle of physics class that I would daydream of jumping out the window and running away from everything. I would refuse to go to school. I hated myself, felt ashamed of the way I looked and talked and tried and failed to fit in with my classmates. Faking a smile each day eventually became intolerable. I felt like I didn’t deserve the life I had, that I shouldn’t be alive at all. I can still remember the first hospitalization. Those weird grippy socks that clacked on the floor like tap shoes. Being wheeled through a labyrinth of fluorescent-lit hallways The cheesy Technicolor weepie about a boy and his dog playing on the TV. Luckily, no such tripe graced the TV at the inpatient adolescent mental health program where I spent the rest of ninth grade. I have debated whether to share this story, but my time in the hospital was nothing to be ashamed of. It was a part of my life, and many others’ lives. Half of my day was spent in a facsimile of school, the other half in therapy, and at lunch, we’d watch kid’s movies. Sometimes they were winners (Ratatouille) and sometimes not (Hop, the execrable 2011 film where Russell Brand plays a rock-n-roll Easter Bunny and David Hasselhoff plays himself)
On April 30, the movie was Spirited Away. It was a transcendent experience. On that little boxy TV I witnessed something that reverberated far beyond the hospital walls. A level of beauty and lushness that had been sorely lacking in my shallow, status-obsessed adolescence. If movies like this were out there, were even possible, then life was worth living after all. Spirited Away was part of my therapy. Such a singular creative vision that only Miyazaki could conjure, but so resonant to me on a deeply personal level. I remember Chihiro’s journey, the soot spiders, the bathing of the sludge monster, Yubaba’s decadent palace filled with toys for her colossal baby, the train that glides on the water. These images are still as vivid to me as the stories I heard from the teens in the program, who became some of the most important friends I ever had. The nicknames we had for each other, the games we liked to play, the inside jokes, how we bonded over our shared troubles and vented about what we had to endure, either from the outside world or from ourselves. We bonded over watching Chihiro’s saga, too. It was one of the most crucial parts of my life, and Spirited Away, oddly enough, was what tied it all together. I remember one girl who had short hair dyed a reddish orange. She talked about how she would sometimes run away from home and sit by the train tracks to contemplate things. She was a gifted singer and artist. On one sunny spring day, she found a caterpillar that had crawled in from the tree branch beside the large window of our classroom. It became our class pet. She named it No-Face.
Spirited Away
2001
dir. Hayao Miyazaki
125 min.
Screens Wednesday, 5/6, 4:00 & 9:30 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre
Part of the repertory series: Ghibliotheque
