This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Hayao Miyazaki wrote and directed Spirited Away for Studio Ghibli, produced by Toshio Suzuki, and the film opened in Japan on July 20, 2001, running two hours and four minutes. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, the first hand drawn and the first non English language film to do so, a result the scholar Susan Napier has said proved to American audiences that animation could be a real art form rather than childish entertainment aimed only at the young.
Napier's own scholarly reading, published in the Journal of Japanese Studies, treats the film's premise less as fantasy for its own sake than as a story about cultural recovery under pressure from globalization. Its title alludes to kamikakushi, being hidden away by the gods, a folk concept for a person's unexplained disappearance that Miyazaki reworks into a passage between childhood and adulthood: Yubaba strips Chihiro of her name and keeps her trapped in the spirit world until she wins it back through work, memory and care for others, most pointedly her care for the river spirit Haku, who has himself forgotten his own name and true identity as a once real river paved over during Japan's development. Recovering a name, in Napier's reading, stands for recovering a cultural memory that a rapidly modernizing Japan risks losing outright.
Critical reception on release was close to unanimous. Roger Ebert gave the film four stars, and Steven Spielberg said publicly that it might surpass what Disney itself was making at the time, a notable concession from inside the American animation industry the film's own success went on to unsettle.