While these characters are in line with shifting cultural attitudes towards gender equality, they also owe a direct line of thanks to Studio Ghibli’s humble hand-drawn animations of years past. Only recently has Disney caught on with films like Frozen and Brave, both of which feature intrepid young girls facing great odds with wit and determination. And though the distribution deals with Disney would ultimately be struck, allowing Spirited Away to gain huge popularity in the US as well as Japan, it would take Disney over a decade to follow the example set by the film. The world that springs from each meticulously drawn frame is populated by characters and a narrative that deals honestly with themes of childhood, nature and innocence without patronizing or seeming overwrought. Consequently, Spirited Away deals with an intrepid little girl named Chihiro who must rescue her parents from a witch’s spell by taking up work in her otherworldly bathhouse for spirits of all shapes, sizes and dispositions. Miyazaki set out to write a story in which the girl is the heroine for her bravery and ingenuity, and the setting of the film is a strange and surreal dimension that breaks with the mundane. The inspiration for Spirited Away came from a desire to make a film for the young daughters of a family friend - a film that departed from the typical subject matter directed at 10 year-old girls. While this approach is certainly at odds with the highly compartmentalized production process of most feature films, it reflects the deeply personal and honest character of Miyazaki’s filmmaking. Animation and production for Spirited Away and other Studio Ghibli films would begin before the script was at all finished, allowing the details of the story to unfold organically alongside the storyboard and artwork. Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock.Įven more antithetical to Hollywood’s standard operating procedure was Miyazaki’s unorthodox approach to scripting. It’s no wonder that critics have repeatedly lauded the engrossing visual style that runs through Miyazaki’s catalog.

Authenticity, as well as attention to detail, are central tenets of the Miyazaki style for one of Studio Ghibli’s early films, 1997’s Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki personally drew or made revisions on over 80,000 individual frames. However, in order to access the work of Studio Ghibli, any Western distributor would have to reckon with Miyazaki’s unorthodox creative process.įirst and foremost, Miyazaki and his collaborators at Studio Ghibli are purists with regard to animation Spirited Away was only the second of his films to incorporate computer generated images, doing so only in an extremely limited way. The diverse cast of spirits and sprites in Spirited Away that embody everything from chunks of coal to toads runs parallel with the beliefs of Shinto, an ancient religion originating in Japan, that all things derived from the natural world contain their own spirits known as kami.Īfter Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki set about producing Spirited Away in 2000 with a tentative partnership with Disney for American distribution rights. Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock.ĭespite their near-universal appeal, Miyazaki’s works draw considerable inspiration from Japanese tradition and the country’s unique cultural roots. And though Miyazaki’s family survived the war unharmed, the dilemma of pacifism and the conflict between man and nature would prove to be recurring themes in Miyazaki’s films, nearly all of which feature children who straddle the line between the spirit world and that of adult reality.

Growing up in WWII-era Tokyo, Miyazaki’s childhood was marked by destructive bombing campaigns towards the end of the war. One of the hallmarks of Miyazaki’s work is the treatment of fantasy and childhood with reverence and an emotional earnestness that’s often missing from the ‘for kids’ genre. Photo by Picture Perfect/REX/Shutterstock. Since the enormous success of Spirited Away (it trumped Titanic as the highest grossing film of all time in Japan and became the first Japanese hand-drawn film to win an Academy Award in the US) Miyazaki has become a household name in the United States, not to mention a national icon in Japan, thanks to a string of whimsical but weighty films.

While Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli are responsible for over a dozen acclaimed films since the studio’s debut 1986 film Castle in the Sky, the 2001 film Spirited Away is rightly regarded as one of the most important films of the early-2000’s for its role in introducing Hayao Miyazaki to American audiences.

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