Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away drops a ten-year-old girl into a bathhouse for the gods and makes her work her way out. The film runs 125 minutes and spends every one of them on the job.
A Wrong Turn Past the Tunnel
Chihiro Ogino is moving to a new home in the countryside when her parents take an unexpected road. They stop at a tunnel and walk through to what looks like an abandoned resort town. Her father insists on exploring. Chihiro protests. Nobody listens.
Inside, they find a restaurant stocked with food and no one serving it. Her parents eat. Chihiro wanders off and finds an enormous bathhouse, where a boy named Haku tells her to cross the riverbed before sunset. The light goes. The river floods. Her parents are pigs.
That is the setup, and it is one of the cleanest in animation. No prophecy, no chosen one. A kid makes a mistake and pays for it.
Yubaba Takes the Second Kanji
Haku sends Chihiro to Kamaji, the boiler-man, a yōkai spirit who runs the bathhouse furnaces. Kamaji passes her to Lin, a worker, who brings her to Yubaba, the witch who owns the place and turned Chihiro’s parents into pigs.
Yubaba tries to frighten her away. Chihiro holds. She gets a work contract.
When Chihiro signs her name (千尋), Yubaba takes away the second kanji and renames her Sen (千). The mechanic that follows is the film’s engine: Yubaba controls people by taking their names. Haku lost his the same way. If Chihiro forgets hers completely, she never leaves the spirit world.
No-Face Pays in Gold
The bathhouse workers mock Chihiro. She invites a silent creature called No-Face inside, taking him for a customer. Her first real customer is the spirit of a polluted river, and cleaning him takes everything she has. He gives her a magic emetic dumpling as thanks.
Meanwhile No-Face hands out gold and demands food from the bathhouse workers. When Chihiro refuses the gold and goes looking for Haku, No-Face angrily swallows.
A Cast Built on Voices
Rumi Hiiragi voices Chihiro. Miyu Irino is Haku. Mari Natsuki plays both Yubaba and Zeniba, which is a genuine feat — the twin sisters are nothing alike. Takashi Naito and Yasuko Sawaguchi are the parents, Ryunosuke Kamiki is Boh, Yumi Tamai is Rin.
Miyazaki wrote the screenplay after deciding the film would be based on the ten-year-old daughter of his friend Seiji Okuda, the associate producer, who came to visit his house each summer. Two personal projects Miyazaki was developing had been rejected. This one got made instead.
What the Gold Actually Buys
The bathhouse is a workplace, and Spirited Away never pretends otherwise. Chihiro scrubs, hauls, and sleeps in a bunk. The gold No-Face throws around buys attention and nothing else, and the workers who chase it get eaten.
The film’s judgment on greed is not subtle, but it is not wrong either.
Why the Name Carries the Whole Film
Strip the fantasy and the plot is about a girl holding onto who she is while an institution tries to rename her. Yubaba’s contract is the villain, not Yubaba. Every spirit Chihiro helps — the river, No-Face, Haku — she helps because she still remembers how.
The Order I’d Put Them In
The strongest stretches of Miyazaki’s film, ranked by what they do:
- The tunnel and the flooded river — the turn lands in minutes and never explains itself.
- The name theft — one kanji, and the stakes are set for the rest of the runtime.
- The river spirit cleaning — the film’s best argument that work is the answer.
- No-Face at the bathhouse — strong, but it resolves faster than it builds.
The Dubbing, the Budget, and the Release
The English dub exists because Pixar animator John Lasseter, a fan and friend of Miyazaki, convinced Walt Disney Studios to buy the North American distribution rights and served as executive producer. Lasseter hired Kirk Wise as director and Donald W. Ernst as producer, while Cindy and Donald Hewitt wrote the English dialogue to match the characters’ original Japanese lip movements.
Spirited Away cost US$19 million. It was produced by Toshio Suzuki, animated by Studio Ghibli, and distributed by Toho. It was released in Japan on 20 July 2001.
8.6 out of ten is about right. The middle section drifts, and No-Face’s rampage, in this viewer’s judgment, resolves faster than it builds. But the tunnel, the name, the pigpen — those stay. This is the Miyazaki film to hand a skeptic first.
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