Spirited Away (2001)

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Spirited Away follows ten year old Chihiro after her parents are turned into pigs and she is trapped in a spirit world centered on a bathhouse run by the witch Yubaba. Scholars James Boyd and Tetsuya Nishimura, writing in the Journal of Religion and Film, argue the film draws on Shrine Shinto and Japanese folk religion more heavily than any of Hayao Miyazaki's earlier work, and that its central image, a bathhouse where a great variety of kami come to be washed clean, embodies a genuinely Shinto insight: that things in the world become polluted through ordinary use and need periodic purification to recover their vitality.

The clearest single scene built on this idea is the arrival of a foul smelling, sludge covered visitor that the staff initially mistake for a low ranking, disgraceful spirit. Chihiro discovers, pulling a bicycle and household refuse out of its body, that it is in fact the kami of a river choked by human dumping, restored to its true, radiant form once the pollution clogging it is physically removed. Miyazaki has said in interviews that he grew up understanding kami as present everywhere, in trees, rivers, insects and wells, an older and more diffuse religious sensibility than the doctrinally organized Shinto of a shrine's official rites, and Boyd and Nishimura read the bathhouse itself as a stand in for this older, folk layer of the tradition, a place where forgotten or disrespected kami still come to be cared for.

The film never names its spirits as Shinto doctrine in so many words. It does not need to; the logic of pollution and purification that organizes nearly every encounter in the bathhouse is, on this scholarly reading, Shinto practice translated directly into image and plot rather than referenced from a distance.

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.