On Saturday March 18, 2006 at 10:30pm Eastern Standard Time I was 11 years old, sitting in my playroom, and staring slack-jawed at the television screen as the credits for Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away were rolling. There are times in a person’s life when a piece of art leaves a truly lasting mark on them and ends up deciding the course of their future.
I was in middle school at the time, seventh grade to be exact. Like most girls that age, I was awkward, overwhelmed, and a little lost. I wasn’t completely sure of my identity, or even where and how to start finding it. My body was beginning to change and be all weird; though that wouldn’t begin in earnest for another two years or so. I had a few friends, but many of them were left over from elementary school. I could feel them gradually beginning to go their own separate ways, further ahead in their journey of self-discovery than I was.
My favorite things to do at that age included drawing, reading—Harry Potter being a continual favorite—and watching movies and TV. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but all my favorite movies and TV shows were either aimed at boys my age, had only one girl in the main cast, and only featured women and girls in stereotypical ensemble supporting roles. Inevitably, romance was the end-goal of their story, and the shows were often, if not always, specifically designed to sell a toy. While I loved and still love those films and shows, they aren’t bad or intentionally harmful by any means; they provided me countless hours of entertainment, escape, and wonder, I didn’t know that I could be the hero or be in control of my own story, my own life, and that I was more than a statistic on a toy company’s profit margin report. Because I wasn’t seeing myself being represented in the media I was consuming. That is, until Saturday March 18, 2006.
Spirited Away is essentially Hayao Miyazaki’s take on the Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Our protagonist, Chihiro, is ten years old and moving to a new town with her family. As you might expect, she is not happy about this, and makes her displeasure known—repeatedly. On the way to their new home, they take a wrong turn and stumble across what appears to be an abandoned amusement park, complete with a small outdoor market and an old bath house at the center. When her parents are magically transformed into pigs before her eyes, Chihiro is horrified to find out that the park isn’t an abandoned theme park at all; it’s an entrance to a spirit realm—a thriving village controlled by the evil witch Yubaba, who runs the luxurious bath house and inn at the center of town. Now, because Chihiro’s parents ate Yubaba’s food without payment, they and Chihiro are now Yubaba's prisoners; they will remain pigs until Chihiro has worked off their debt in the bathhouse. Only then will her parents be freed and Chihiro be allowed return home with her family. Along the way, we the audience see Chihiro transform from a smart, but bratty ten-year-old girl, to Yubaba’s pawn Sen, literally one of a thousand (sen means 1,000 in Japanese) as her name suggests. Through a series of multiple trials and challenges to not only save her parents, but also the life of her new friend, Haku, she changes back again into Chihiro—but this time she’s wiser, more mature, and confident in herself and her abilities. It’s a story about finding your identity in the face of adversity and discovering that you’ve always had the power within you to do great things. And you didn’t need to get your period for the first time or realize that boys are cute to come to this realization.
In fact, romance in the conventional sense is barely mentioned at all over the course of the movie. And when it is talked about, it’s always in the platonic sense: in terms of familial love, or the love between best friends or siblings. Not only is Chihiro a female protagonist, she’s a female protagonist with agency. She has control over her story; she’s the one driving the plot forward to its natural conclusion, she’s the knight in shining armor that rescues the “princess”, in this case, a boy named Haku, and wins the day.
As an 11-year-old girl in the beginnings of puberty watching this movie for the first time, to say I was stunned is an understatement. Here was a movie that wasn’t trying to sell me a toy, talk down to me just because I was a kid, or show me the same packaged stories I was already seeing everywhere else. Here was a movie that said, “It’s okay if you’re not ready to think about romance yet”, which looking back, I certainly wasn’t. Here was movie that told me that I wasn’t alone in my struggles, and that I had complete control over the discovery of my identity; I didn’t have to and shouldn’t have to wait for a boy or something else to decide for me.
A few weeks after the movie aired on television, the packet that described all the after-school programs that were offered by my middle school was sent home. Immediately I joined the Anime Club, and found friends who stayed with me through high school and continue to this day. Spirited Away, and the influence of the Anime Club, also kick started my passion for art and one can still see the influence of anime and Miyazaki on my artistic style in the strong lines, dynamic movement, and cinematic compositions of my art today.
It’s not every day that a person interacts with a piece of art that changes them forever, but when it does happen, the results can be nothing short of extraordinary. Spirited Away is an almost perfect movie in every sense of the phrase, as evidenced by the fact that it won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2003. This movie changed my life, and if I were to meet Mr. Miyazaki today, the first thing I would tell him is thank you, thank you so much for the gift you gave me when I needed it most.
Revised May 31, 2017