Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: Spirited Away

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss Hayao Miyazaki's 2001 fantasy classic "Spirited Away."
(originally published 11/8/2024)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, Welcome to Weird House Cinema rewind. This is Rob
Lamb and today we are re airing our episode from
just last year. This published eleven eight, twenty twenty four.
It is our discussion of Miyazaki's two thousand and one
fantasy classic Spirited Away.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production
of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (00:39):
This is Rob Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. And
today on Weird House we're going to be talking about
the two thousand and one Japanese animated fantasy film Spirited Away,
directed by Hiau Miyazaki. This week, I really wanted to
talk about a weird movie with a good soul, and
I can hardly think of a better example. This is

(01:00):
not only one of my favorite films we've covered on
Weird House Cinema, this has got to be one of
my favorite films of all time. I just came back
to it for the first time in many years this week,
and I knew I was going to love it on rewatch,
but I think I was not prepared still for just
how lovely and exciting and wonderful this movie is. And

(01:23):
basically every way.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
Absolutely. I mean, this is one of the all time greats.
This is a film I've seen multiple times over the years,
and yesterday, late in the afternoon, I asked my family's like, hey,
I've got to watch Spirit It Away again for work.
Who wants to watch it with me? And they were
both on board, my wife and my son. So we
all just sat in and sat in the living room

(01:46):
and watched the film all the way through again. And
it's one of those films where every time you watch it, yeah,
you make new discoveries. You find yourself re examining the
things you love about it and discovering new things to
love about it as well. And for a weird House
cinema purposes here, this film is also notable for in
a couple of ways. It's our second Miyazaki film, following NAUSICAA,

(02:09):
and it's only the fourth film out of Let's see
what have we done? We've done I believe one hundred
and eighty one pictures on Weird House Cinema and this
is the only fourth time we've looked at a film
from the two thousands, the early two thousands, the decade,
the others being the year two thousand Psycho Beach Party.
That was one that had Seth as a co host,
and then we did two thousand and one's Jason X

(02:31):
in two thousand and fours, the Chronicles of Riddick.

Speaker 3 (02:34):
What a selection, you know.

Speaker 1 (02:36):
It is interesting how those other films I just mentioned,
those are all very much in each film's own way,
an artifact of the time. Spirited Away is a film
that stands outside of time, though it does not feel
like something that exists just within the year two thousand
and one. It exists in all years, you know. It

(02:56):
just takes one of those films.

Speaker 3 (02:58):
Yes, apart from the implied technology that we see on
display in some of the animation shots, this could have
been made any time in the history of color animated cinema.
It could have been from the seventies, It could have
been from this year. It really is out of time
in that way. Well, I don't know if it could
be from the seventies. We see some cars and technology

(03:19):
and stuff at the very beginning that, or maybe a
little beyond that. But really it is an out of
time kind of film. So sometimes on weird House Cinema
we like to pull out obscure gems from a dusty,
forgotten shelf on the video store. That obviously is not
the case here. Many of you probably know of this
movie already. Spirited Away was a big hit both in

(03:41):
Japan and internationally. You know, it was a box office success.
It won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature at the
seventy fifth Academy Awards. Usually I don't pay a huge
amount of attention to award ceremonies, but in this case,
I'm glad to see the accolades going to something. I
think it is absolutely deserved, both as a story and

(04:03):
as an achievement in technical filmmaking. Spirited Away is just perfect.
It's the kind of object you just want to take
with you everywhere. It feels so weird and so wise
and so interesting and has such a good heart.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
Absolutely yeah, I don't think it's very controversial to say
it absolutely deserved that Oscar over the movie Ice Age.

Speaker 3 (04:27):
And I've never seen that, so I can't compare.

Speaker 1 (04:29):
But not even any shame, you know, directed at the
makers of Ice Age. I'm sure the people who made
Ice Age are probably like, yeah, I mean yeah, Spirited
Away is a better films. Most films are not as
good as Spirited Away, it's just on its own level.
So yeah, this is easily one of my favorite Miyazaki
films as well. It really has no faults in my opinion,

(04:51):
and to your point, has just such a pure heart.
I love all of Miyazaki's films and a number of
the films that I've seen in the studio Ghibli family
as well that he did not actually helm as a director,
But this one's a real gem. I hadn't watched it
in a few years. It's been very much on my
mind though, since my family and I visited Ghibli Park

(05:11):
in Japan earlier this year, which is a location loaded
with recreations and exhibits related to this and other films
from the Ghibli canon. I highly recommend that experience for
Ghibli fans if you happen to find yourself in Japan
and can set aside a day in Nagoya which will
get you close enough to take the train to the park,

(05:34):
just give those tickets in advance.

Speaker 3 (05:37):
Now, there are so many fascinating ways that Spirited Away
stands out. I think maybe we'll save a lot of
those observations for the later part of the episode, where
we're just talking through the plot, and we can bring
things up as they come up in the story. I
will say upfront that, of course, in this episode we
are going to talk about the plot from the beginning
to the end. And you know, we often give spoiler warnings,

(05:58):
especially for films where it feels like the surprises are
very exciting to experience firsthand. This case, I would really
emphasize if you've never seen Spirited Away and you want to,
this is one where I would say, please please watch
the movie before you listen to this and hear us
explain the whole lot. It is worth it, definitely to

(06:19):
just go in knowing nothing and experience it for yourself.

Speaker 1 (06:22):
And if you have no experience with Miyazaki films, if
you have little or no experience with the Japanese animated
pictures or TV in general, I still think that Spirited
Away is a wonderful starting place for you. You don't
need to know anything else before you go into this
picture other than you just need to be on board
for the journey. All right, Let's go ahead and throw

(06:44):
in just a little bit of trailer audio, probably not
the whole trailer here, but maybe just a taste so
you can get some idea of the audio involved.

Speaker 2 (06:52):
Here, Honey, don't take a short cut. You always get us.

Speaker 1 (06:58):
Lost from master filmmaker Ao Miyazaki.

Speaker 3 (07:04):
What is it? Come on, let's go in. I want
to see what's on the other side. Will you go?

Speaker 2 (07:09):
Hey, you.

Speaker 1 (07:14):
Shouldn't be here.

Speaker 3 (07:15):
Get out of here, now, leave before it gets dark.
You've got to get across the river. Go I'll distract him.

Speaker 1 (07:33):
Don't be afraid. I'm master Haku. I just want to
help you, all right. Well, if you want to go
watch Spirited Away again or for the first time before
you proceed with this episode, we encourage you to do so.
It is available wherever you get your studio Ghibli Films.

(07:57):
I own this one on DVD from in the day,
but we ended up watching it on Max Streaming, which
as of this recording anyway, streams a number of Ghibli
films in the States, maybe all the major ones, but
like you know, certainly all the major Mimyazaki films are
on there. But if you reside or are traveling internationally,
you might find them streaming elsewhere like Netflix, you know,

(08:20):
crossover international boundary, and then suddenly Netflix may have your
studio Ghibli Films. Just see what's up when you're there.

Speaker 3 (08:27):
I guess Google Results falsely told me I could stream
them on Netflix. Oh it's not the case.

Speaker 1 (08:33):
No, no, not unless you I think maybe if you
go to Mexico you can, but or at least at
one point that was the case. Anyway, the Shop Factory,
DVD and Blu Ray releases for this film are all
pretty excellent, So if you want to go physical media,
definitely go that direction. But also, Miyazaki films are periodically
re released on the big screen pretty much every summer.

(08:55):
I see some opportunities to see a Miyazaki film on
the big screen, and I haven't done it for one
of any of the classic films yet, but I have
gotten to see at least two or three of his
films when they were initially released in theaters. And it's
always a grand time. All right, Let's talk about at

(09:20):
least some of the people involved here, As is always
the case with any film, but especially the big animated
picture like this, So many people's work went into making it.
We cannot list everybody. We're gonna list, you know, we're
going to talk briefly about the director. You know, we'll
hit the music and we'll hit some of the vocal
talent involved here. But yeah, at the top we have

(09:40):
Io Miyazaki, director, writer, story and storyboard artist born nineteen
forty one, the legendary Japanese animator and filmmaker. We previously
went into a lot of detail on him in our
Nasca episode, and we'll talk a good bit more about
him as we proceed here, but I'd largely say, well,
you know, for our purposes here, refer back to that
previous episode, but suffice to say, towering figure not only

(10:04):
in the realm of Japanese animation, but global animation filmmaking.
He's one of the great living storytellers, and every single
one of his films deserves a look and speaks to
a universal audience on themes of childhood, environmentalism, the anti
war movement, cross generational conflict, and so many other themes
that should resonate with all of us today as much

(10:26):
as any other day throughout his decades of filmmaking. Plus,
if you like Miyazaki, love fantastic creatures, feelings of wonder
and discovery, and of course action packed flight sequences, then
his work is absolutely for you.

Speaker 3 (10:41):
He did love flying. All of his movies I can
think of. Is there a single one I've seen that
doesn't have a major flight element. I think they all do.

Speaker 1 (10:50):
If there's not a direct flight element, there is a
scene that like I think captures a feeling of flight,
you know. Yeah. In fact, at Gibli Park there, you know,
it's it's a full blown sort of theme park, and
it is a theme park. It's not as ride centric
as you know, something like six Flags. There's not six
Flags over Miyazaki or anything, but it has a number

(11:12):
of attractions. And there's one little corner that has a
scale model shop because Miyazaki of course famously a fan
of scale model building, especially when it comes to airplanes
and tanks of the World War II era. And so
you go into this little store as tiny and I'm like,
one wall it's you know, you know, Japanese made classic

(11:35):
you know, World War two model kits, and then on
the other wall it's model kits of various robots, planes
and vehicles from Miyazaki movies. And it's it's really really nice.
It made me feel really good to go in there.
I bought something and then really cracked my head hard
as I was coming back out. I like having to
stoop through the doorframe because it, and and I thought

(11:56):
of that as we watched this film, because there are
several scenes where our main character cracks her head on
something or she's going through a little doorway, and I
was like, yep, that's that was for me the Ghibli
Park experience as well.

Speaker 3 (12:09):
Correct me if I'm wrong. But you're a bit of
a model airplane enthusiast yourself, aren't you? Or are you not?

Speaker 1 (12:17):
My dad was, I've always been. That was his level
of scale modeling. He did a lot of planes and
tanks of the World War two era. I'm more of
like maybe a fantasy tank, Like I'll do some Star
Wars tanks here and there, or maybe I'll be tempted
to pick up a Warhammer tank or something, but mostly
it's like fantasy figures, dungeons and dragons and so forth.

(12:37):
But yeah, I like painting little little dudes.

Speaker 3 (12:40):
So I was looking a bit into the production process
behind Spirited Away, and one thing that really surprised me is,
I don't know, the final product of this movie feels
incredibly tight and polished and perfected. It is like there,
It's just it feels like somebody's life's work, you know
that they thought about this immensely and immense consideration went

(13:03):
into making it a perfect project. But I was reading
a bit in a book by a scholar named Susan
Napier called Miyazaki World, a Life in Art from Yale
University Press twenty eighteen that actually, behind the scenes, there
was a good bit of chaos that led to this movie.
So before this movie came out, Miyazaki had released the

(13:25):
very successful film called Princess Mononoke, which maybe one day
we'll talk about on the podcast in its own episode.
But after this, Miyazaki apparently quit the studio, quit Studio
Ghibli in January of nineteen ninety eight. But then he
had a successor, somebody who, in Napier's words, was deemed

(13:46):
Miyazaki's heir apparent, named Yoshifumi Kondo, who died suddenly less
than a week after Miyazaki left the studio, And so
Miyazaki was then brought back in. And so Napier writes,
quote Spirited Away was thus born out of some turmoil
in the studio, which the movie sometimes chaotic structure seems

(14:07):
to reflect. And there are other parts in this book
that mention many people involved, saying that the chaotic kind
of frantic running about. Atmosphere of the bath House is
in many ways supposed to reflect the studio in which
the movie itself was made.

Speaker 1 (14:26):
Oh wow, okay, I can imagine that, you know, because
the bath House, the onsen here is it is home
to a lot of chaos, but there's a lot of
very strategically minded management of that chaos. You know, we see,
we see a lot of effort going in to figure
out what are we going to do about this sudden

(14:46):
change in our circumstances. Yeah, so I can see that.

Speaker 3 (14:50):
There's another thing that comes up on that same frequency,
which is that Miyazaki had some tendency to sort of
insert an avatar of himself for some kind of self
parody into his films, And so there's question over who
he was really thinking of or who should be thought
of as the Miyazaki parallel within the Bathhouse of the movie.

(15:12):
Is he the witch Yubaba running everything with you know,
with the kind of iron fist and with these these
chaotic enchantments, or is he Kamaji the boiler man? Or
is he you know, is he the stink spirit? You know?
Who knows? But they're they're I don't know. I thought
this was funny. The question of like, who is Miyazaki
in this movie?

Speaker 1 (15:31):
I feel like he's Kamaji. I've also seen I've seen
reference to interviews where people have asked him, Hey, are
you no face in this? And I think when he's
been asked about like what no face is or what
no face represents, He's always like, no faces, no face. Yes,
some people are like no face, but I wasn't thinking
of anyone in particular. You mentioned Condo by the way,

(15:53):
he had directed the highly successful nineteen ninety five film
Whisper of the Heart that was his first and sadly
only feature film as a director. That one is also
readily available wherever you get your Ghibli films. It's a
sweet film with some fantastic elements to it, but it
is not in its entirety like an escape into a
fantasy realm. It has a great like sort of fantasy

(16:15):
sequence in it, but it's a sweet film. I recommend
it now. When we talked about NAUSICAA previously, that was
the case where we had the Japanese vocal talent and
then two different waves of English language vocal talent coming
along and doing the dub. In this case, we really
only have for the consideration of English speaking audiences, we

(16:39):
really only have the two. We have the original Japanese
cast and then we have the Disney produced English language cast.
And not going to go through all of these here,
but I wanted to touch on some of them. I
have never watched a Miyazaki film with its original Japanese
language track. I was tempted to do it on this one,
and I might have done it if the family, a

(17:00):
whole family wasn't coming on the journey with me. And
then I was like, well, we should just do the dub.
We all love the dub and it's a really well
done English I can't speak to the translation specifically, but
it's a really there's some really great vocal performances in it.
And for my taste, if I'm watching a Miyazaki film,
I want to be able to take in all of
the sites, and that works a little better for me

(17:22):
if I'm not reading.

Speaker 3 (17:24):
You don't want your visual attention divided reading the subtitles.

Speaker 1 (17:27):
Yeah, yeah, But I do want to acknowledge that this
is an area where Miyazaki fans definitely all have their
own preferences. Just talking about like English only fans here.
I know, some prefer the subtitles, some prefer a dub.
It's just going to vary depending on what your tastes are,
So at some point I really need to dig in,
probably with something like NAUSICAA and do subtitles so I

(17:50):
can absorb it that way as well.

Speaker 3 (17:52):
I also watched this movie with the dub, and I
don't know. I see the appeal in general. I see
the appeal of both approaches, but in this case, the
experience of watching it with the dub is so nice.
I can't really imagine it being improved.

Speaker 1 (18:06):
Who knows, all right, So we're just going to take
it through a few of the main characters here to
discuss the vocal talent. First of all, we have our
ten year old protagonist. This is Shahiro, who also ends
up going by the name of Sin later on in
the picture, voiced in the original Japanese version by Rumihiraji
born nineteen eighty seven, who also voiced the mom in

(18:28):
two thousand and eight Sponio in the original Japanese language version.
Now in the English dub of Spirited Away, Chihiro is
voiced by Devey Chase born nineteen ninety I don't believe
Chase is currently active in show business, but she has
some pretty cool credits, both in animation and live action.
In addition to voicing Chihiro, she also voiced Lelo in

(18:49):
the two thousand and two Disney film Lelo and Stitch.
In live action, she played Samantha Darko in both of
the Donnie Darko films That's two thousand and one and
two thousand and nine, and she played Samara in two
thousand and two's The Ring, in addition to being a
cast member on HBO's Big Love.

Speaker 3 (19:07):
That's the American remake of The Ring.

Speaker 1 (19:09):
Where yes, yes, she's definitely creepy in that quite yes.

Speaker 3 (19:16):
She actually she does have some lines and they're like
watching these old videotapes of her where she's like she's like,
I won't stop hurting people or something.

Speaker 1 (19:25):
Yeah, yeah, kind of in some ways, Yeah, a very
dark reflection of the character. We have here, all right,
we also have the character Haku. Haku was voiced by
May you Know in the original. This actor was born
nineteen eighty eight, voiced here by Jason Marsden born nineteen

(19:45):
seventy five, who has done a fair amount of live
action in vocal performing over the years, and produced and
directed as well. His TV credits include the likes of
Boy Meets World, Tales from the Crypt, and Star Trek
The Next Generation. But I also have to mention that
he played Tommy in nineteen eighty nine's Robot Jocks hold
first feature film role. Wow, do you remember Tommy? I

(20:09):
did not remember Tommy.

Speaker 3 (20:11):
No idea, no idea who Tommy was.

Speaker 1 (20:14):
Was there a child in Robot Jocks at all? I
guess there apparently was. Apparently was that there was a
twelve year old boy in it, and that's Tommy played
by Jason Marsden. Here. I'd have to go back and
watch it too know exactly which role this was or
Hallie factored into the plot.

Speaker 3 (20:29):
That is a heck of a one degree connection spirited
away to Robot Jocks.

Speaker 1 (20:34):
By the way, speaking of Robot Jocks, I want to
take it just a second to include a call out
to longtime listener Matt who designed a mech based combat
card game called Iron Future. He sent me a copy
to try out with my son a couple of months back,
and to be clear, did not ask me to mention
it on the podcast or anything. But it is a
really fun casual combat card game for two players, and

(20:58):
I'm happy to mention it. So if that sounds like
fun to you as well, go check it out at
ironfuturegame dot com. All right, up next, we have the
character Yubaba, voiced in the original by Mari Natsuki born
nineteen fifty two, a singer, dancer, and actress. In the
English dub, she is voiced by Susan Plachette, who lived
nineteen thirty seven through two thousand and eight, best known

(21:20):
for her role as Emily Hartley on the original The
Bob Newhart Show. Her other credits include nineteen sixty threes
The Birds and nineteen sixty eight's The Power.

Speaker 3 (21:29):
Plashette is very good in the English dub.

Speaker 1 (21:33):
Now we mentioned Kamaji earlier, we'll get into him. He's
the boiler Master. That's kind of this. Oh, he's a
wonderfully strange being in his own right, voiced in the
original by Bunto Sugawara, who lived nineteen thirty three through
twenty fourteen. This actor also appeared in the Battles Without

(21:53):
Honor and Humanity film series and two thousand and five's
The Great Yukai War. I've seen that one, and in
the English dub, David Ogden Stiers does the voice. He
lived nineteen forty two through twenty eighteen, an actor best
known for his role as Charles Winchester. I think it's
major Charles Winchester on TV's Mash and he also did

(22:15):
some vocal work on Leelo and Stitch. We also have
the character Lynn that is pivotal to the plot, voiced
by Hume Tomai in the original She was born nineteen
seventy seven, and then in the English dub, voice by
Broadway TV and film actress Susan Egan. Her credits include
Disney's Hercules. I believe she sings one of the key

(22:37):
songs in that one. She was on Steven Universe. Oh,
and she also provided some vocal talents for the English
dub of Porco Rosso.

Speaker 3 (22:45):
Oh nice, that's the one with the pig fighter pilot. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (22:48):
Yeah, lots of flying action in that one. So that's
essentially it for the actors. But I will note that
the English dub also features the voices of Paul Iding.
This is a guy who you may not recognize the name,
but if you ever played any of those Metal Gear
Solid games like I did, he was the colonel that
was talking in your headphone the whole time and sometimes saying,

(23:09):
I don't know, Snake, I think you've been playing video
games a little too long, and you should maybe go
outside and run around a bit. I forget which one
that was, but if you played long enough, he would
give you that life advice.

Speaker 3 (23:20):
So you'd be like crawling around at the feet of
an enemy soldier and he'd suddenly like, Snake, watch out for.

Speaker 1 (23:26):
Yeah, or indeed he would be like Snake, go touch
some grass, which was probably some good advice.

Speaker 3 (23:33):
I've never finished a Metal Gear Solid game, but I
started playing Metal Gear Solid two years ago, and I
remember thinking, like, I am getting so many calls on
this radio. I cannot believe the volume of calls. It
was almost like spam at this point.

Speaker 1 (23:50):
It really was. I also don't think I ever finished
one of them, but I always really enjoyed them before
it got too hard. Let's see. Oh yeah, Roger Bumpus
is in this. If you don't recognize his name, he's
the voice of Squidward SpongeBob SquarePants. Lauren Hawley does one
of the voices, and Michael Chiklis provides the voice of

(24:13):
Tahiro's father, so really performance wise, a great overall English
language cast here, and of course once more, we have
Joe Hisashi providing the music. Born nineteen fifty Japanese composer,
musician noted for his work with Studio Ghibli and Miyazaki
in particular, he has scored I believe, all but one
of Miyazaki's films, and that one was nineteen seventy Nine's

(24:36):
a Loop in the third. So to just go he
just goes with Miyazaki pictures. I mean it can find
no fault there.

Speaker 3 (24:44):
Miyazaki loves themes of wind, not just flying, but of
like breezes, blowing and wind lifting like moving objects. And
this score sounds like a wind. It's in like the
exciting parts, it sounds like a rushing win and in
the contemplative parts it sounds like a gentle breeze. I
don't know how to explain that in sonic terms, but

(25:05):
that is what it makes me feel.

Speaker 1 (25:07):
Yeah, and this is a film where we definitely have
some flying sequences, but we also have some scenes that
are not quite flying sequences that have the feel of flight,
the feel of surging through the air or being pulled
towards the object of your trajectory.

Speaker 3 (25:24):
Yeah, there's some high speed, low altitude flight.

Speaker 1 (25:27):
Yeah yeah, yeah, I'm off and inside.

Speaker 3 (25:38):
All right, are we ready to talk about the plot?

Speaker 1 (25:41):
Let's do it.

Speaker 3 (25:42):
Okay, last warning once again, this is one where I
really really strongly recommend if you've never seen it before,
and you do plan on seeing it at some point
in your life, go ahead and watch it before we
talk about it. Please. So the story begins with a
road trip. Our protagonist is the ten year old and
she and her parents are moving to a new house

(26:04):
in a town out in the country, far away from
their old life. And chi Hero is sulking because she
has had to leave behind her school and her friends.
But her parents are trying to They're trying to put
on a happy face about it. You get the sense
that maybe her mother is not one hundred percent thrilled
about the move, but she's telling her, you know, moving

(26:25):
somewhere new can be fun, it's an adventure, so they're
trying to help her along with her attitude. But che
Hero does not believe this. She spends her time in
the car focused largely on a goodbye letter from her
best friend at school. So they're driving through the country,
they're passing by things that they pass by a building,
they're like, oh, look, that's your new school, and she's

(26:45):
just like, yak, don't. And so they're on their way
to the new house to meet the movers and get
settled in. But on the way, che Hero's father takes
a wrong turn somewhere and they're going up these winding
mountain roads, and at some point they find themselves driving
down an unpaved road through a deep, dark forest, and

(27:07):
along the way they see shrines, these little tiny box
like houses in a sort of piled in a jumble,
and she heroes like, what are those? And her mother
tells her some people believe that spirits live there, and
they also while they're driving through the forest, they see
these round stone statues of these spirit beings or kami

(27:28):
that seem to be living in the forest. She looks
out and to be clear, they're not animated or anything,
or they're not alive or anything. At this point, it's
a totally mundane atmosphere. But as they drive through the forest,
the feeling of something kind of mysterious starts to mount
and the road ends at a tunnel, just a wall

(27:48):
and a tunnel, and ch Hero's father parks the car,
gets out and wants to explore to see where the
tunnel leads. So I would say Chihiro at this point
is both annoyed and afraid. She doesn't want to be here,
She doesn't want to be moving. She is frightened by
the idea of going into this tunnel, like just not
interested at any level. But her parents walk into the tunnel,

(28:09):
and she's also afraid to be left behind at the car,
so she runs after them.

Speaker 1 (28:13):
This is kind of an interesting turnaround if you compare
it to My neighbor Totoro, in which May and sask
are very adventurous and really want to get in there
and explore the mysteries. You know, to Hero is a
lot more reserved.

Speaker 3 (28:32):
Yes, yes, and you know that actually brought up a
point that I wanted to talk about. In a lot
of stories, like fantasy stories with child protagonists about children
escaping to or encountering a world of spirits and the imagination,
the young protagonist is presented either as somebody with an
adventurous spirit or like a day dreamer, a creative personality

(28:55):
who does not fit in with their peers and wants
to seek reft huge in a different world of the imagination.
Think of time bandits or the never ending Story, et cetera,
et cetera, very common dynamic. I think this seems to
me to not be the case at all with Chihiro,
and I still think she's a wonderful character, but a
different kind than this other familiar type of childhood fantasy protagonist.

(29:20):
She is initially not presented as a dreamer who wishes
to escape from the humdrum life of in her social environment.
She's shown feeling frustration with her parents, but she explicitly
misses her school and her friends, and there's no indication
that she's dissatisfied with living in the mundane world. So
it's a different kind of character and a different kind

(29:40):
of relationship between that character and the fantasy that's about
to unfold. Chihro is not looking for a magical adventure. Instead,
she is forced to adapt when the adventure is unavoidable.

Speaker 1 (29:53):
Yeah. Yeah, she's dealing with more than enough already. She
doesn't really want to take a potentially gary side trip
into the other.

Speaker 3 (30:02):
World anyway, so she follows her parents into the tunnel
and they emerge in what seems like at first, the
waiting area of a long abandoned train station. There are
these benches and it just seems like disused and nobody's around,
and that's kind of odd. And then they come out
the other side into the open again and find weird

(30:24):
empty buildings and vendor stalls, a courtyard with a clock tower,
all nestled in a landscape of these gorgeous green rolling hills,
and the father concludes, I know what this is. This
is an abandoned amusement park. He says. They built places
like this. I think, he says, in the early nineties,
but then there was an economic recession and they all

(30:46):
went out of business, and they've found one that nobody
goes to anymore. It's just empty.

Speaker 1 (30:50):
You know, I mentioned cross generational conflict. I think tension
would have been a better word choice for me, and
I feel like we get a reference to that here
a bit. You know, we're mentioning this big economic shift,
real life economic shift in Japan, and here we do
see very different attitudes between the parents and the child,

(31:11):
you know, and we'll see some more of this here
as well, where her dad especially is like, hey, let's
just check it in there's no reason not to go
in and try this out. Let's do it. And she's
a lot more reserved. She's a good kid, she's a
rule follower, she has different expectations about how things might
turn out.

Speaker 3 (31:28):
That's right. So Chihiro's parents start exploring this other world
at the opposite end of the tunnel, and Chihiro has
to follow them. And I want to say that I
think there is an absolutely enchanting feeling of gradually moving
from the mundane to the strange in the first few
minutes of the film, passing through a literal tunnel, and

(31:50):
yet the transition is subtle, there's nothing explicitly magical. Yet
it's just a strange environment that you wouldn't expect to
find here. What's going on and the kind of tension
that it creates is so pleasing. I don't know if
I even have the vocabulary for this, but you know,
they're just there are different ways that a situation in

(32:13):
a movie or in a story generally can be unexplained
or mysterious, and for some reason, some of those mysteries
or unexplained situations are more pleasing than others. And this
is like a ten out of ten it's just something
is unusual. I don't know what's going on, and it
feels the best it can.

Speaker 1 (32:31):
The pacing is also just so terrific here. I've seen,
and I imagine we've watched for weird how cinema films
where the initial real world portion of the film before
we descend into the other world is either too fast
or it's too slow. Either the movie just really wants
to ram you in there, or we're just waiting, we're

(32:52):
just begging for the movie to get to the fantasy.
And in here, I feel like Minazaki manages just the
right pace where we learn everything we need to know
about the real world circumstances and where the characters fit
in there, but really waste no time at all transitioning
us into that other world at just the right pace.

Speaker 3 (33:14):
Yeah. So the characters are wandering around the streets of
this seemingly empty village. They're going through these vendor stalls again,
they're all empty, but Shahiro's father smells something. He smells food,
and everybody's hungry, so they follow the smell and they
come across a tent full of delicious looking foods in
hot steamer baskets and serving platters lined up for the taking.

(33:37):
Once again, they do a great job here of making
animated food really look delicious. I was watching this and
I was like, y, give me some of that.

Speaker 1 (33:46):
Yeah. When we went to Ghibli Park, they had a
whole section built out. It was just devoted to the
presentation of food in Miyazaki films, with examples of just
how much tension goes into the presentation of the food,
and also some like I think they had some models
and some you know, physical representations of what the food

(34:07):
would look like in real life. And I was talking
about this with my wife and she said, oh, yeah,
there are people on Instagram whose whole thing is just
cooking up little recipes that look like food from a
Miyazaki film.

Speaker 3 (34:20):
That's funny, and it's especially funny given what actually happens
when you eat his food. So Chi hero's father calls
out to the vendor, but nobody answers the food sitting there.
It's steaming hot, it looks really good, but there's nobody here.
Kitchen looks empty. So father and mother are very hungry
and they just say, you know what, we can just

(34:41):
dig in because we can pay the person who runs
the stall whenever they come back. Surely they'll be back
in a minute.

Speaker 1 (34:47):
It's like, Daddy's got a credit card. Don't worry, dig in, honey,
grab some soup bunts.

Speaker 3 (34:51):
Yes, And so they just start shoveling the food, but
Chihiro doesn't trust it. Mom and dad are eating, but
she something feels wrong to her. She's kind of afraid,
and she thinks we're not supposed to do this, so
she doesn't eat the food and wanders off on her own.
Now she sees a number of things. She goes up
this big stone staircase and see some kind of landmarks,

(35:15):
interesting looking buildings, but eventually comes across the bathhouse, the
central location of the rest of the movie, which is
an enormous complex, almost like a castle, which will we
will later learn is a hospitality service that is a
Japanese style bathhouse, but instead of serving human clients, it

(35:36):
is for kami. It is for the spirits.

Speaker 1 (35:39):
And this is where we really begin to ramp up
the tension, and the tension does not release for I mean,
it doesn't let up for a very long.

Speaker 3 (35:48):
Time, that's right. So we don't know yet that it's
a bathhouse for spirits. It's just this giant building. It's
reached by crossing a bridge over a deep ravine with
a river below. I think. Chihiro, I believe, just wanders
out onto the bridge, but then suddenly realizes there's somebody
standing there next to her, and she meets a boy
named Haku, who appears human. But Haku introduces sudden urgency.

(36:13):
He's like, Chehro, you should not be here. You need
to leave immediately. The sun is about to set, and
you've got to get back where you came from before dark.
So Chihiro runs back to meet her parents at the
food vendorstall, but discovers in a horrifying revelation that they
are not her parents anymore. They have been magically transformed

(36:34):
into pigs, presumably by eating cursed food. They no longer
seem to recognize her or know who they are. They're
just hogs at the trough, now disgustingly smashing through serving
dishes and piles of food and rooting around in the mess.

Speaker 1 (36:49):
And then a frog starts slapping them around with a
fly swatter. Yes, it's legitimately terrifying, to the point that
we tried to show our son this movie when he
was a little too young for it. I guess we'd forgotten,
you know, we'd watched it as adults, we had not
really watched it as children. You know, it's in mind.

(37:11):
So when we initially showed it to him, this was
the point where he just could not take it. He's like,
I can't watch this, you know, and got upset, and
we're like, okay, we'll have to come back to this
one later. So bear that in mind with this picture.
It's tremendous. It's definitely four kids of a certain age.
But if your kid's you know, super young, then you
know it's it's more time for my neighbor Totoro, which

(37:33):
is terrific for all ages as well, but definitely has
a little kids in mind.

Speaker 3 (37:38):
Yeah. So Chihiro runs away in terror and tries to
escape back in the direction she came from, but discovers
now that her way home is blocked. A field that
they had crossed in order to reach the village is
now flooded with water. It's a river now, and she
watches as a ferry crosses the water, glowing with lamplight,

(37:59):
and as the fairy reaches her side of the new river,
sort of the landing the disembarking ramp comes down, and
weird spirit beings begin to unload and file into the village,
all toward the bathhouse. So we don't see all of
their forms yet. I think I think a lot of
these spirits are at this point sort of covered in

(38:20):
masks and cloaks, so we don't see exactly what they are.
But che Hero is frightened and despairing, especially when she
discovers that she is beginning to turn transparent she can
like look through her own hands and arms. But she
does get some help. Hakou reappears and it tells her, hey,

(38:40):
you need to eat this small piece of food. He
promises it will not turn her into a pig, and
he explains that she's got to eat some food from
this world or she's going to vanish. So Haku is
not only helpful to che Hero, but he somehow seems
to know her. He knows her name without her telling
him about her parents, and he explains that he has

(39:03):
known her from a long time ago, but we don't
know how, and in fact, it seems maybe he doesn't
know how he knows her. But there is also a
form of danger established here, so time is of the
there's no time to really hash everything out. Haku hides
Chihiro from the gaze of a giant, magical bird with
a human face, which is circling menacingly over the head

(39:26):
as if looking for her, and Haku tells Chehro that
she is in danger. If they find her, it's not
going to be good for her. So the only way
she can protect herself and save her parents potentially is
to get a job at the bathhouse. They will, he says,
They're going to try to turn you away, but you
cannot take no for an answer. You have to go

(39:48):
ask for a job and don't leave until you get one.

Speaker 1 (39:51):
Yeah. Again, the tension is just is just so excellent
here and already, like the first challenge to j hero
is is one of inner strength, like this is. I
think it's one of the great things about this film.
This is not a film where our hero engages in
physical battles with monsters and fantasy creatures. Her challenges are

(40:12):
largely one of will and inner strength and challenges to
her moral compass. Yeah, and she is a rock. You know,
when we first meet her, she seems maybe you know,
she's moody and maybe a little self obsessed or you know,
but not in ways that are inappropriate for a ten
year old child. But as the movie enrolls here we
really get to see how strong she really is.

Speaker 3 (40:35):
We discover it as she discovers it about herself.

Speaker 4 (40:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (40:48):
So the place that Haku sends to Hero to ask
for a job is the boiler room. Which everything in
this movie is great, but this is one of my
favorite parts of the whole film. So he sends her
down this very dangerous looking staircase along the side of
the bathhouse, hanging over the ravine. There is some slapstick

(41:12):
here as well.

Speaker 1 (41:13):
And it's yeah, and it's so well executed. This is
this is one of the things that I really noticed
on this rewatch is that you have, you know, this
great built up tension and that allows some excellent space
for humor. There are numerous parts in the film that
are just tremendously funny, and this is one of those
moments where she's, you know, she's trying to be really

(41:33):
careful and then she gets scared and just runs down
the side of the building and like smacks into a wall,
very slapstick style, but you know, it's all the more
humorous for being the punctuation on the end of all
of this built up tension.

Speaker 3 (41:48):
Yeah, that's right. But she finally makes it down to
the boiler room. So it's a room deep underneath the
bathhouse where a multi armed monster man named Camagie operates
a vast furnace powered by coal to heat water for
the baths and then mixes potions and herbal infusions into

(42:09):
the water before it is piped up into you know,
piped up through a sort of thing inside the wall
to reach the baths for the guests. Rob, do you
have any descriptive thoughts Aboutkamaji. He's wonderful character.

Speaker 1 (42:23):
Oh, yeah, he's awesome. You know. He has this big,
bushy what I would think of is like an anime
style mustache, you know, some of this kind of facial
hair that you really only see in animation. But then yeah,
multiple limbs, what they each have I think three fingers,
you know, and he's just constantly when he's working, he's
constantly in motion, fetching little tags, fetching ingredients for the water,

(42:50):
occasionally reaching back and getting what I assume is a
picture of tea and drinking directly from the spout.

Speaker 3 (42:56):
It just puts the spout in his mouth.

Speaker 1 (42:59):
When he has little black sunglasses over his eyes.

Speaker 3 (43:03):
Yeah, he does, you know, except for the sunglasses. In
a way, he kind of reminds me of lord Yupa
with the big bushy mustache.

Speaker 1 (43:10):
Yeah yeah, yeah, the facial hair for sure. And you know,
kind of the role here, like he's the you know,
rough around the edges character that it is going to
end up being, you know, very very benevolent and very
helpful to our protagonist.

Speaker 3 (43:27):
But he is not working alone down here, because so
while he's cranking all the levers and operating the furnace
and then also grinding up the spices and the herbs
for the infusions of the bathwater, also down below him
there are these little black creatures, the soot sprites, that
are carrying coal and tossing it into the oven. And

(43:51):
these soot sprites are so cute. And I noticed from
a there's a note in the Napier book that these
are actually a recurring character type. They're a little monster
that was invented for my neighbor Totoro, and they're showing
up again here.

Speaker 1 (44:07):
That's right. Yeah, Yeah, they're in the house that the
family moves to in the country. In my neighbor Toto.
But here they have.

Speaker 3 (44:14):
A job that's right, though it's funny. So they're enchanted
pieces of soot, and it's so wonderfully animated the way
they approach the sort of the mouth of the furnace
and they throw the coal in, and then these gusts
of hot air that come out of the mouth of
the furnace whenever it opens just sort of blow them

(44:34):
back off of this ledge to where they came from
so that they can retrieve another piece of coal and
walk forward again. But as I said, the scene is
so cute. One of these little sprites picks up a
piece of coal that's too heavy and drops it on itself,
and she hero picks up the piece of coal from
on top of the sprite and she struggles with it

(44:54):
at first it's heavy, but Kamaji is like, well you
picked it up, you know, carry on with what you started.
So she takes it to the mouth of the furnace
manages to throw it in, and when the soot sprites
see her do that, they all drop their cold pieces
on themselves. It's so good, yeah, but they they start

(45:15):
gathering around her feet like they think she's some kind
of goddess. You know they they they like pile up
on her shoes and it's it's adorable. But anyway, chi
Hero is persistent about asking for a job, so Kamaji
is like, okay, And so we meet another character named Lynn,

(45:36):
who is a bathhouse worker who is cynical and brusque
with Chee Hero at first, but later softens and becomes
her main mentor and help her within the bathhouse. But
when Lynn comes in to deliver some food to Kamachi,
Kamachi is like, hey, you know, this girl here is
asking for a job. You should take her up to

(45:56):
you Baba. Now you Baba is the big boss of
this establishment, the witch who lives at the top floor
of the bathhouse for spirits, and so Lynn is not
excited about this mission at first, but she does try
to help is she takes to Hero up in a
series of elevator rides. One great weird encounter is with

(46:17):
this gigantic thing called the Radish Spirit, which gets onto
it sort of like wanders around after them and gets
on an elevator with them, but they and as we
go up, we get to see the different levels of
the bathhouse with its many strange clients, the spirits and
the creatures and so forth. But they make their way
up to the top floor before we get to you, Baba,

(46:38):
anything you want to talk about on the way, rob.

Speaker 1 (46:40):
Oh, I mean the bath house or the Hansen Here
is such a fabulous world, and perhaps it reads as
slightly more fabulous if you're not familiar with like Japanese
bathhouse traditions or various other international bathhouse traditions. But even
if you are, like, it's just stuffed with such a
why crew. I mean, it's staffed in large part by

(47:02):
magical beings, and then it caters to an even wider
range of creature spirits, yo kai and deities. I just
have so many favorites that keep reappearing. They're the duckling spirits,
the yes O Tori sama, and they make me smile
every time we even just get a quick glimpse of
them in the background.

Speaker 3 (47:22):
I would almost say that the many different characters we
meet at the bath house are like on a sliding
scale of uncanny Valley similarity to humans, Like Lynn just
looks like a human, right, but you have other things
that look vaguely human, but their proportions are weird. And
then you have other things like the ducks that are

(47:43):
like ducks but with kind of human faces, and then
you've got just like you've got the no face and
stuff that's not very human at all. But I like, Oh,
so in the middle, you've got these frog men who
are sort of all of the administrator roles within the
bath house, and they are would you say, they are
uniformly portrayed as kind of kind of mean and greedy,

(48:05):
but I don't know, in the end, they kind of
are won over by Chia hero spunk.

Speaker 1 (48:09):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You mentioned the Radish Spirit already or
Oshiro Sama. This one is apparently based on a folkloric
household spirit and here in the film takes the form
of a great walrus like Radish man with I believe
it's supposed to be like a bowl on his head,
for that's the way I've always read it. But yeah,

(48:30):
A big fan of this guy, and when my family
and I visited Ghibli Park, I had to grab a
photo with this absolute superstar. Included a photograph here for you, Joe,
if you want to see me standing next to the
Radish Spirit.

Speaker 3 (48:42):
Wait, is that a statue or somebody in a costume?

Speaker 1 (48:45):
Neither it is the real Radish Spirit, and I'll put
I'll make sure I put this one on our Instagram.
If you want to see this photo, I'll put it
up at STBYM podcast on Instagram. Nice. Oh, but let's see. Yeah.
I just love all the spirits that we see here,
but Radish Spirit is my favorite.

Speaker 3 (49:04):
So from here we go on to meet you Baba,
who is a powerful and frightening witch who runs the establishment.
She's portrayed as treacherous and envious and greedy. She collects
jewels and examines her riches with great relish, but she
also shows flashes of a softer, or at least more
comical side in the fact that she dotes upon her son,

(49:27):
who is a giant, destructive baby named bo Oh.

Speaker 1 (49:31):
I love this baby, you know, I was just talking
to my wife about this. It's like this week especially,
I just want to be this character. I want to
be a giant baby that crawls under a mountain of
pillows and then you know, refuses to leave. Yeah. But yeah,
it's just such a weird cruise she's got because you
got the baby, You've got the three heads rolling around.

Speaker 3 (49:52):
What's the deal with the heads? The bouncing green heads
that look kind of look oh, I don't know, like
any masks a little bit.

Speaker 1 (50:00):
Yeah, I've digged it, dug into it a little bit,
and I could not find a clear answer on what
exactly they are other than because I mean, I think
in this film you do see a mix of Miyazaki
drawling on Japanese folklore and legend, drawing on international folklore
and legend, but also just coming up with wild ideas.
So I'm I'm still unclear exactly where the heads fall

(50:24):
in here. But then you also have her strange harpie
like familiar. Who else do we have? We have somebody
else here in the mix too, right? Oh wait, we
have another character that's coming into bed.

Speaker 3 (50:35):
Yes, we'll come back to Are you thinking of the
foot lamp?

Speaker 1 (50:38):
Oh, yes, there's a foot lamp too. Yes, it's you
never know what's going to show up in this picture.

Speaker 3 (50:44):
But the footlamp doesn't work for you, Boba.

Speaker 1 (50:46):
They show up later independent independent contractor.

Speaker 3 (50:51):
So Chihiro's like, hey, I'm here for a job, and
Ubaba threatens. Chahiro tries to refuse her request, but it
turns out that this, this terrifying witch actually is bound
by some rules of her own. She is bound by
a magical oath she took at some point that she
must give a job to anyone who asks, so chi Hero,

(51:12):
through her persistence, forces her to offer her a contract,
and che Hero signs the contract to work for you Baba.
So now chi Hero is protected against you Baba's whims
to an extent, though Ubaba can still be a pretty
nasty boss to work for. Except it gets even worse. Whoops.
When chi Hero signs her name on the page of

(51:33):
this magical contract, the witch lifts away the writing form
most her signatures, so like the writing magically comes up
off the page and Ubaba is able to steal chi
Hero's name, telling her that now she will be known
only as Sen And we will later learn that Eubaba

(51:54):
does this to everyone who works for her, she steals
their name. So she did the same thing to Ha,
who we don't know what his original name was, at
least not until later. But now Haku serves as you
Baba's second in command and sort of her her commando.
Her like Special Missions Guy, Haku has forgotten what his

(52:15):
real name was, and it turns out if you forget
your original name, you can never escape you Baba's spell,
and there there is a day I think they're shown
the next morning going out and Sin is talking to
Haku and she's forgotten what her name was, but Haku
helps her. He can remind her because he knows her name,

(52:35):
and also she can keep it in mind because Haku
returns her belongings to her, which includes the note from
her friend at school which she was reading in the
car earlier that says Chihiro on it. So she keeps
the notes dashed away in secret. And I like something
about this little detail that's like, you know, part she's
able to keep something of the place where she came from.

(52:57):
It's not one of these story stories about going to
another world or a fantasy world that is a rejection
of the mundane world or the world you came from.
An important part of her surviving this whole experience is
her note from her friend that reminds her of her name.

Speaker 1 (53:15):
Yeah. Yeah, it's a very sweet, sweet moment. I think
it's one of the great things about Spirited Away is
you have these big scenes that definitely stick with you,
you know, fantastic sequences, and then these very small moments
that have oversized heart to them.

Speaker 3 (53:37):
So Sen understands that she must now become an ideal
worker in you Baba's bathhouse or she has no hope
of ever escaping and rescuing her parents from their magical transformation.
It's sort of not established exactly how she will save them,
but in order to have any chance of saving them,
she's got to do a good job at work. And

(53:58):
in the background there is this looming threat that they could,
at some point in pig form, be turned into bacon,
and it is mentioned by the frog men sometimes. Now
Sen has help from Kamaji and especially from Lynn in
learning how to do everything at the bathhouse, but most
of the people who work there, again, this odd collection

(54:20):
of kind of serving ladies and frog like men, are
mean and unhelpful to her, and they mock her and
give her difficult jobs out of spite. Now there is
a scene I wanted to talk about because it establishes
an important sort of b plot that runs for a
while and then becomes an a plot. And it's the
scene where she first meets No Face. I think we've

(54:42):
seen No Face already at one point where while she
was while Haku was sneaking her into the bath house, earlier,
like the scene where she has to hold her breath
and go across the bridge. I believe no face is
just standing there, hovering on the bridge and watching her.
But at some point we have an actual encounter. While
Sin is working. She at one point opens a kind

(55:03):
of sliding door to a garden outside and she sees
this strange creature unlike any of the others really standing
outside the bathhouse in the rain. It is shadowy, dark,
It's a kind of translucent mound with a white mask
for a face, and Sin, being polite, leaves the door
open and invites the creature to come in out of

(55:25):
the rain, and it does. More will come of this,
But then we get to one of the big turning
points in the movie, which is that Sin is working.
She's trying to help out with all the tasks at
the bathhouse, and suddenly the bathhouse receives an extremely difficult client,
which is the Stink Spirit. Rob how would you introduce

(55:46):
the stink Spirit scene?

Speaker 1 (55:48):
Oh, just you know, they see him and eventually smell
him coming from a ways off. Just this blob, this
sludge monster that's I think has some you know, you
can compare it to various other sort of pollution based
blob creatures from from from other cinematic visions, perhaps even

(56:12):
to one of Godzilla's adversaries. Who is that We talked
about this one on Weird House.

Speaker 3 (56:18):
Oh hold on a second, Oh JJ just chimed in
to remind us that it's Hetera. That's the song we watched,
isn't it. It's the smog Monster.

Speaker 1 (56:26):
Yeah, so some hetero vibes here to this again, just
this sludgy blob creature that is slowly making it stinky
way to the bathhouse and they're just all like in tear, like, oh,
we've got to we've got to get the we've got
to get the big tub ready for this guy.

Speaker 3 (56:42):
Right, And it's hilarious the way they're all like trying
to turn him away as he's like he's coming across
the bridge into the bathhouse and all these frogmen are
in front of him being like we're closed and we're closed,
but he just kind of slimes his way in. Yeah,
and they, of course they're trying to give che Hero

(57:03):
all of the worst jobs, so yeah, they're like, you've
got to wash him. Fortunately, chi Hero has a little
bit of magical help, so in order to wash this
filthy beast. Sin has to get special water with the
use of bath tokens, which are normally handed out by
the Frogman, boss of the main staff. And these bath

(57:26):
tokens are, I guess, a kind of like internal currency.
You've got to use them and get them with permission
and then use them, send them down to Camachi and
he'll send up your powerful herbal infusions of hot bathwater
to clean off all the filth. So the foreman, who
is holding on to all these tries to refuse to
help che Hero. He's like, you can't have any bath tokens.

(57:47):
But then the no Face creature whom Sin earlier invited
into the building, witnesses this interaction, and then he steals
a bath token for her, and then later shows up
with lots of bath tokens, tons of them for Sin,
more than she needed. And so Sin is able to
use these that she got from the no Face to
clean up the stink spirit. And while she's cleaning it

(58:10):
up and dousing it with all of this urban fuse
hot water, she discovers there is quote a thorn in
its side, which looks strangely like a man made object,
and so she starts pulling on it and realizes that
it is not a thorn, it is the handle of
a bicycle, handlebar of a bicycle, and so they start

(58:33):
pulling on it. Youbaba realizes what's going on, and she
organizes all of the people in the bathhouse together to
like pull on everything together, and it ends up all
coming out like a giant hairball clag out of a drain,
except it's just trash, revealing that this was not a
stink spirit after all, but a river spirit, the dragon

(58:56):
shaped spirit of a river that had been choked with
pollution and garbage. It's full of old bicycles, tires out
takeout containers, toilets, just pieces of machinery, pieces of construction,
you know, building stuff, and just household trash, forming a
mountain that comes out of the side of it and

(59:18):
then leaves behind the clean water spirit in its wake.

Speaker 1 (59:22):
Oh yeah, and I've read that Nyazaki was inspired in
this part based on a river cleanup he was involved
in where they found a bicycle and some stuff. But oh,
I mean, it's everything about the sequence is tremendous, All
of the big fantasy elements like wading through the sludge
and all. But I have to say, I was really
impressed this on this viewing, with the sequence where we

(59:43):
see Sin's hands underwater trying to tie the knot around
the bicycle handle so they can all pull it out,
and like it slips twice before it who is it
that helps her?

Speaker 3 (59:58):
Well?

Speaker 1 (59:59):
It help yeah, But eventually on the third try not
is a success. But there's something about the way that
they just so realistically animate that rope slipping and not
quite nodding. You can just feel it in your bones,
like it is one hundred percent real. And I mean
those kind of touches are I think essential in live

(01:00:21):
action filmmaking as well, you know, because they allow us
to connect with it with what's happening on the screen
in a real way. But you know, all the more
important in a film of animated fantasy ground us with
those little moments that we can feel and then overwhelm
us with those visions of the fantastic.

Speaker 3 (01:00:38):
It's actually full of excellent little physical tactle details like
that zooming in farther than you would expect a movie
of this kind, too, to show little ways that you know,
maybe your foot doesn't catch on the stair right the
first time, and you take another step or yeah, yeah,
the hand to trying to grasp something and needing to

(01:00:59):
Readjust there's a lot of that in this film.

Speaker 1 (01:01:02):
Yeah. One thing you see in a lot of Miyazaki
films is a lot of attention paid to how children move,
how young people move, and we definitely see that with Shahro,
like the way that she moves around a little awkwardly
at times. She's always bumping her head and falling down
and you know, dramatic fashion, and it's just so well executed.

Speaker 3 (01:01:22):
So Sen did good here, She did a real good job.
She's doing great at work. But next we come to
Haku the Dragon and the scene of sin versus Ubaba's creatures.
So there's a scene eventually where Sen sees a white
dragon flying out over the water as she's looking out
the window over the side of the bathhouse, and she

(01:01:45):
realizes that the dragon is Haku. Haku has been a
boy before this, but now she sees him in dragon form,
and Haku is in trouble. He's being attacked by a
swarm of these enchanted paper birds, and a greatly injured
Haku crashes into Eubaba's residence in the in the upper
part of the bathhouse, and Sen rushes to help him.

(01:02:08):
Somewhere here along the way, I think she eavesdrops and
learns that Ubaba sent him out on a special mission,
and this mission is how he became injured. Ubaba expects
Haku will die, and she doesn't seem all that bothered
about it.

Speaker 1 (01:02:22):
Yeah, She's like, I'll hope you that Sin.

Speaker 3 (01:02:26):
It happens. So Sen sneaks into Eubaba's apartment to help Haku,
but ends up meeting Bo, the Giant Baby, Ebaba's son,
and we learn when we actually hear Bo talking and
interacting with Chihiro or with Sen. Here, there's clearly some

(01:02:46):
kind of unhealthy lock on Bo's maturation, both magical and psychological,
Like the way he talks and his body don't really
like match upright, and he's kind of paranoid, Like he's
a paranoid pathological brat. There's a lot of play with
me now where I will crush.

Speaker 1 (01:03:04):
You, yeah, or I will break your arm and yeah,
that's like the big baby is terrifying here.

Speaker 3 (01:03:09):
Yeah. So Sin gets away from Bo temporarily, and while
trying to help Haku, Sin meets a witch who looks
exactly like you Baba. But here is a big reveal.
This is not you Baba, this is u Baba's twin
sister Zeniba. Who uh. They're at odds, you know, they
don't get along. And it turns out that you Baba

(01:03:30):
sent Haku to steal a special magical item from her sister,
to steal it from Zeneba. It was a golden seal,
and unfortunately for Haku, this magical golden seal was cursed,
and she says the fact that Haku stole it is
what is now killing him. Now. While in e Baba's house,
Zeneba happens to just play some pranks, including transforming you

(01:03:54):
Baba's son Bo the Giant Baby into a mouse, transforming
the weird to jump the three green jumping heads into
a fake version of Bo the Baby, so now there's
the thing that looks like the baby but is actually
these three heads, and transforming you Baba's demon bird Minion
into a fly.

Speaker 1 (01:04:13):
Yes.

Speaker 3 (01:04:15):
Now, at some point here, Zeniba gets gets banished by
having her little paper avatar damaged. But the but Sen
and Haku end up falling through a pit in the
floor and crashing down into Camagi's domain in the boiler room,
where Sen decides to give Haku half of Oh did
I did I even mention that the river spirit gave

(01:04:36):
Sen a magic dumpling in reward for helping him?

Speaker 1 (01:04:40):
Oh yeah, yeah, this becomes important because.

Speaker 3 (01:04:44):
So she has this important magic dumpling. She gives half
of it to Haku and closes his mouth over it,
forces him to eat it, and this makes Haku vomit
up the cursed golden seal, but also this kind of
horrible mud slug, the physical embodiment of the curse sin
then stomps on. Meanwhile, there's some trouble in the bath

(01:05:04):
house because remember that no face monster. It is getting
up to no good. It has started going around offering
things to people, like it can make stuff appear in
its hands that looks like gold, Like it just got
a big pile of gold in its hand. It's like,
you want some. It actually doesn't talk at first in
its natural form. All it really seems to say is

(01:05:26):
like uh uh huh, And it'll offer gold to people
and the people are like, yeah, yeah, give me that gold.
But then I don't know. It starts eating people like
it eats a frog guy, eats a frog guys and
as it's offering gold to the other workers in the bathhouse.
They're all frantically saying like, oh, yeah, let's feed this

(01:05:47):
guy as much as we can. He's giving us tips.
We want tips, So they're all fighting for the tips
from the whale, the big customer. And along the way
it gets more and more destructive as it gets bigger
and bigger and some more workers.

Speaker 1 (01:06:01):
Yeah, there's some strong horror vibes to a lot of this, because, yeah,
we have this shape shifting monster that keeps eating servants
and in doing so, like stealing their voice or even
aspects of their personality. Yes, because otherwise, Yeah, no Face
just makes these little kind of like this kind of sounds.

(01:06:21):
I was no Face for Halloween one year, so I
got to like do those noises whilst we were out
triggered treating this year, I was how by the way from.

Speaker 3 (01:06:30):
How you know, I was wondering why the no Face
seems the most interested in Sin, because it's like asking
for her, you know, It's like, I don't want any
of you want. I want Sin bring Sin to me.
And it seems that maybe it's because she's the one
who led it into the bathhouse, but also it seems
that she's unique in that she's the only person who's

(01:06:53):
not interested in the gold that it makes. It keeps
making the gold and trying to give it to people,
and they're all like, gimme, gimme, gimmy, and it wants
to give gold to sin, but she's just not interested.
She's just like, no, thanks, thank you, but I don't
want any.

Speaker 1 (01:07:06):
Yeah, she's incorruptible when it comes to these temptations. And yeah,
No Face is very fascinating because on one hand, you know,
very much a hungry ghost sort of a scenario, like
it's you know, its natural form is one of kind
of hollowness and is very transparent, just has this mask
that seems to you know, serve as its face. But
then as it eats, we see its mouth more, we

(01:07:28):
see its great lolling tongue. So it's, you know, it's
a creature of vast appetite, but it's not just food
at once. And I've seen Miyazaki discuss this in some
translated interviews where he's talking about like it also it
needs to absorb other people, like certainly in the sense
that it's eating people, but also like, is in No

(01:07:48):
Face truly has no face, no identity, and it must
take identity from others. So it's it's it's a weird
monster to try and unravel.

Speaker 3 (01:08:00):
Right, and it just keeps becoming more and more threatening.
Eventually Sin comes to it to try to fix what's
going on, but by this point it's just a rampaging monster.
It's trying to eat everything. It's threatening her also, and
so Sin ends up feeding this monster the other half
of the river Spirit's dumpling, causing it to start vomiting

(01:08:20):
up evil black sludge and shrinking in size. Was this
part of your costume, Rob.

Speaker 1 (01:08:26):
No, luckily not. But it is such a fantastic sequence.
There's a lot of rampaging through the onsen here. Love it,
love it? Yeah?

Speaker 4 (01:08:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:08:35):
So it's running all over the place, chasing Sin, smashing
everything everywhere it goes, and it keeps chasing her, but
she tries to lead it outside, where strangely, I mean,
it's losing mass as it goes because it keeps vomiting,
and it does vomit up some of the people to
it ate, or the frogmen and stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:08:52):
Yeah, they're all okay, everybody's fine.

Speaker 3 (01:08:54):
But as it gets outside, she leads it outside where
for some reason it seems to calm down and kind
of lose its violent temper. And we never get a
full explanation of this, but Sen into it, something about it.
She's like, it's not bad. The bathhouse makes it crazy,
and so it raises the interesting idea that this is

(01:09:16):
not a monster in not a monster in principle. It's
not a monster in its own world. It only becomes
a monster when it enters a place it does not belong.

Speaker 1 (01:09:27):
That's right, Like it's a There are no bad spirits.
There are just spirits that are misaligned. There are spirits
out of place or that you know, something has happened
to set them on the wrong course, such as we
saw with the River Spirit earlier. So yeah, it's another
part of the great heart of this picture. No evil spirits,

(01:09:47):
just misaligned spirits.

Speaker 3 (01:09:50):
So we start leading up to the climax where Sen
realizes that she needs to she needs to take a
train to a place called swamp Boy, and there's a
reason for this. She thinks that she can help things
if she takes the golden seal that Hakus stole back
to Zeniba and apologize for the theft. If she does that,

(01:10:11):
she thinks things can be patched over, and to do this,
she's going to have to take a train. We see
a train coming and going throughout the world of Spirited Away.
It's beautiful and strange in that the place it cuts
through is flooded with water, so it's just a train
on top of the water. And she's told, I think,
by Kamaji that she'll have to go to a place

(01:10:31):
called swamp Bottom, where's Aniba lives. So after she leads
the No Face monster outside, this is the next place
she's going to go. She's been given a series of
tickets for the train as a gift by Camaji. And
it's interesting the way that the train is kind of
looked on with envy by the other bathhouse workers, Like

(01:10:51):
there's this idea among many of them that if they
had enough money one day, they would buy a ticket
on the train and go somewhere far away. Again. It
kind of inversion of the escape to a fantasy world plot.
The workers here they dream of going elsewhere on the train.
Sin Actually she doesn't go by herself. She is followed

(01:11:12):
by a retinue. She's followed by No Face reverted to
its original non threatening form, and by the mouse form
of bo the giant baby, remember, was transformed by Zeneba
into a little mouse, and the fly form of you
Baba's evil bird. So I like that all of her

(01:11:33):
companions on this journey are beings that in some other
form were monstrous, dangerous and mint her harm. But now
they're informs which are none of those things and seem
mainly motivated by curiosity about sin and about what she's
going to do.

Speaker 1 (01:11:51):
Yeah, that's true. That's true. Oh and by the way,
that the train they're on, there was a build out
of this at Ghibli Park, And I also have a
photo here that I'll show you, Joe, where you can
see me and my son sitting on either side of
No Face on the train and you can see through
the windows there you see the flooded landscape that it's traversing.

Speaker 3 (01:12:11):
It's gorgeous and it is just like in the movie
where Yeah, she sits on the train and No Face
just sits down next to her on the red cushion bench.

Speaker 1 (01:12:19):
M Yeah, very you know, meek and and peaceful.

Speaker 3 (01:12:23):
Now, one thing about this journey that the characters have
discussed is that there is no guarantee of return because
the ticket gifted by Camaji is to take the train
to this place, but it's a one way trip. How
will they get back, that's unclear, But they eventually get
to Swamp Bottom and they get off the train under
the platform. She's still being followed by her formerly monstrous companions,

(01:12:47):
and there's a wonderful encounter on the way to the
witch Zinniba's house, which is the foot lamp. How would
you describe this rob.

Speaker 1 (01:12:55):
I mean, there's there's strong Yokai sensibilities to this thing's
design of hopping along on one leg. It reminds me
actually a lot of the lamp from the Pixar logo,
you know, the way it's kind of like hopping about
as if on one leg.

Speaker 3 (01:13:10):
Yeah, that's a good comparison. But eventually this our characters
here do make it to Zaneva's house, where there is
there is sort of a reconciliation and a discovery of information.
So what do we learn in this scene?

Speaker 1 (01:13:24):
Let's see, this is the scene where we learn a
little bit more about the slug right, Yeah, in the
inner workings of the curses that are in play here now.

Speaker 3 (01:13:32):
Actually, I'm trying to remember what it is in the scene.
Is it the case that we learned that Haku was
being controlled by Ubaba through the slug that she made
him barf up by giving him the dumpling, and he's
now free of that. Yes, But also Zeniba has as
a magical item for Sin as well. It's a magical
hair band, yes, yeah, And so there's that, and then

(01:13:58):
there's a reunion with the restored Haku, who in dragon
form is carrying Sin back to the bathhouse. Later, so
they've resolved like how she'll get home and hopefully rescue
her parents. But on the way there is a big revelation.
Remember there's been this mystery the whole time. How did
Haku know Chihiro from before? How did he already know

(01:14:20):
her name? And how was he familiar with her before
she arrived. She has a memory, and we've seen flashes
of this memory sort of dotted throughout the story of
her falling into the water, being underwater and seeing something,
seeing a kind of friendly face. We learned that once
as a child she fell into a river. It was

(01:14:40):
the Kohaku River, and I think she said, what was
she was trying to do? She was trying to reach
in from the bank for something.

Speaker 1 (01:14:48):
Yeah, yeah, I believe so, and then we get these
these sequences underwater. They are an interesting way kind of
a sign of things to come with Ponyo later on,
which is going to be very concerned with a lot
of underwater action and surging waters and so forth.

Speaker 3 (01:15:04):
So she fell into the water of the Coohaku River,
and she thought she would drown, but she didn't drown. Instead,
she was carried gently to the bank. And it turns
out that's where she knows Haku from. Haku was a spirit,
was a being in the river that helped her to
the bank, And Haku was originally like the stink spirit

(01:15:27):
from earlier, a river spirit, a dragon formed river spirit,
and his real name is the Cohaku River. Remembering his
real name, Haku can now potentially be free of Eubaba's magic.
Now when they get back, there's there's sort of an
epilogue where Ubaba says that Sin has to pass one
final test before she and her parents can go free.

(01:15:49):
And I like that at this point, Sin has completely
won over the people at the bathhouse, like they're all
like bad form, bad form. Sin's like, okay, I'll do
I'll do the test. And the test is there's a
lineup of pigs, and she's supposed to from this lineup
of pigs pick out, okay, which ones are your parents?
And Sin accepts the challenge and correctly guesses that none

(01:16:12):
of them are her parents. It was a trick, trick question,
but she outsmarts it, and thus the magic is broken.
Sin is chi hero once again, and she can return home.

Speaker 1 (01:16:23):
All of her coworkers celebrate. They are all you know again,
She's completely won them over, so they're cheering her on
the whole way. Yeah, just a sweet ending, though we're
not quite to the complete ending yet, but a sweet
resolve of what's.

Speaker 3 (01:16:38):
Going on in the fantasy realm here, that's right. So
she has her goodbyes with haku uh and she's told
that her parents will be restored back at the tunnel
where they first entered the spirit world. She goes back
to meet them, and indeed they are safe and sound again,
and she returns to the mundane world with her parents,
and now I think having a more balanced attitude a life.

(01:17:00):
I mean, it's kind of interesting that I don't know
unless I'm missing something. It's not a movie where the
character learned one specific moral like I thought X, But
it's actually the opposite. It's why she's just more mature
in many different ways, in ways that are hard to

(01:17:20):
pin down, rather than being like a single semantic lesson
of the plot. You know.

Speaker 1 (01:17:25):
Yeah, it's like in the real world something clicked, you know,
and there was this change in her, and then we
see that click expanded out into this fantasy adventure here, like,
you know, a change that may have you know, many
different working parts, but it is kind of hard to
really put your finger on, well that here is is

(01:17:47):
brought to us through the lens of fantasy. Yeah, so's
she's changed, but not in some like simplistic way where
it's like, oh, I realized that the magic being wasn't magic,
the magic was in me the whole time, or anything
like that, you know. Yeah, but she is she is
different now, she's a little more mature, and she is
she's ready for this to go through, with this change

(01:18:07):
that's occurring in her real life.

Speaker 3 (01:18:09):
But I also like that the return to the mundane
world is not and it was all a dream ending. Yeah,
you know, it's not like a reset on. You can
view everything that came before as purely metaphorical there if
you do view it as metaphorical. Part of the metaphor
is that something of the magic world is real and

(01:18:30):
follows you home, because when she she's changed by her
experiences and she goes back out of the tunnel and
she and her parents find the car again, and you
might think, if it was the more kind of it
was all a dream ending, everything would be just as
they left it, and they would just drive home. But
instead they get to the car and it's like covered
in leaves and brush, and her parents are like, wow,

(01:18:50):
it's all dusty inside. So clearly they've been gone a
long time. And not only that, but chi Hero has
has an artifact from the magic world with her, the
hairband that Zenebe gave her.

Speaker 1 (01:19:01):
As we were watching this, my wife did comment, She's like, oh, yeah,
there's no way mom and dad aren't fired from their
jobs at this point. Like it's then what weeks? Yeah again,
through all these changes to Hero perseveres and the ending
is super sweet. It's like victory is achieved not through
violence but through sheer strength of character, you know, And yeah,

(01:19:25):
it's it's just a nice ending. It's a film that
definitely has its has tension. It has a little bit
of fear. You know, it's it's it is, in its
own way, a roller coaster ride, but such a sweet
landing here at the close of the picture.

Speaker 3 (01:19:39):
I love the balance found in the narrative of movies
like this and like NAUSICAA where like it's a movie
that feels very moral but not moralizing, you know. Instead
there like there is a good sense of right and
wrong at the heart of it. But it's not preachy
or anything. It's it's just it's just kind of like
telling a story. In a similar sense there is. I

(01:20:02):
love the way, like you say that the characters are
able to to find victory without violence, mostly that they're
not fighters. They don't they don't use violence even really
in defense much. They Instead they try to find compromises
and solutions mentally and and and you know, find their

(01:20:22):
way around problems. And yet at the same time it
doesn't feel unrealistic about like ignoring the reality of threats.
It's just such a great storytelling sensibility and the perfect
art to match it.

Speaker 1 (01:20:36):
Yeah, I mean, in a way it's Miyazaki film like
this is it's like a it's like looking at a
zen garden or something. You know, It's like just like,
what is it telling you? What is the vibe that
it is delivering? What is the message? Well, like the
message is in the structure, you know, you kind of
look at it, contemplate it and absorb it. You know.
It's just yeah, so well executed, entertaining, but indeed does

(01:21:00):
give you a lot to think about afterwards, if you
want to go there, if you want to just enjoy
it as a ride, it delivers that as well. And
I think that's one of the reasons that a film
like this it achieves a real lasting place in your heart, because,
like a lot of great films, every time you see it,
it says something to you a little differently, like it

(01:21:22):
speaks to you at different ages and during different challenges
and in different celebrations as well. Yeah, just a great
picture overall.

Speaker 3 (01:21:32):
Well said.

Speaker 1 (01:21:33):
So that's what we have to say about Spirited Away.
But we'd love to hear what you have to say
about Spirited Away or other Miyazaki films. You can write
into us. We'd love to hear from you about this
as well as any other film we've talked about on
the show, or if you have recommendations for the future,
if you want to see a complete list of all
the films we've covered over the years. We have a

(01:21:53):
great list going over at letterbox dot com. This's L
E T T E R B O x D dot com.
I feel like most film fans know this website at
this point. I think I saw John Carpenter on Instagram
recently say what is a letterbox? So, like, you know,
it's like everybody is on some level aware of it
now and getting in on how fun it can be

(01:22:13):
a great way to organize your your two C lists
as well as lists of favorite films. Yeah, anyway, we're
on there as weird House again. If you're on Instagram,
look us up at st b ym podcast. We'll keep
you abreast of what's going on with Weird House Cinema
there as well.

Speaker 3 (01:22:30):
Also a great place to find funny reviews.

Speaker 1 (01:22:33):
Funny, some funny, some not funny, but there are some.
There are some some real hands on there and also
some real insightful reviews. You'll also find i think some
unofficial uploads of like famous film reviews. I'm not going
to name any names but because I don't want them
taken down because I really like reading them there. But
you'll find some some of those reviews there as well.

Speaker 3 (01:22:55):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:23:15):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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