Weirdhouse Cinema: Spirited Away

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss Hayao Miyazaki's 2001 fantasy classic "Spirited Away."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob.

Speaker 3 (00:13):
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
Hayao 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 not only

(00:34):
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 basically every.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
Way absolutely I mean this is 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

(01:18):
and sat in the living room 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.

(01:40):
It's our second Miyazaki film, following NAUSICAA, 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 part that was one that

(02:00):
had Seth as a co host, and then we did
two thousand and one's Jason X in two thousand and fours,
the Chronicles of Riddick. What a selection, you know, 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

(02:20):
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 just takes
one of those films.

Speaker 3 (02:32):
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

(02:53):
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

(03:15):
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

(03:36):
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 2 (03:51):
Absolutely yeah, I don't think it's very controversial to say
it absolutely deserved. That Oscar over the movie Ice Age.

Speaker 3 (04:01):
And that's never seen that so I can't compare.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
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 film. Most 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,

(04:24):
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 in Japan

(04:45):
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, just

(05:07):
give those tickets in advance.

Speaker 3 (05:10):
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,

(05:32):
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 plot. It is worth it, definitely to

(05:52):
just go in knowing nothing and experience it for yourself.

Speaker 2 (05:56):
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 know,
you don't 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

(06:17):
go ahead and throw 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 here.

Speaker 3 (06:29):
Honey, don't take a short cut, you always get us
lost from master filmmaker Hyao Miyazaki.

Speaker 4 (06:37):
What is it?

Speaker 3 (06:39):
Come on, let's go in. I want to see what's
on the other side.

Speaker 1 (06:41):
Will hey, you.

Speaker 2 (06:48):
Shouldn't be here, Get out.

Speaker 3 (06:49):
Of here. Now leave before it gets dark. You've got
to get across the river.

Speaker 1 (06:54):
Go.

Speaker 3 (06:54):
I'll distract him.

Speaker 2 (07:07):
Don't be afraid.

Speaker 3 (07:08):
I'm master Haku.

Speaker 2 (07:11):
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. I own this one on

(07:32):
DVD from back 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 Minyazaki films are on there. But if you
reside or are traveling internationally, you might find them streaming
elsewhere like Netflix, you know, crossover international boundary, and then

(07:57):
suddenly Netflix may have your studio Ghibli films. Just see
what's up when you're there.

Speaker 3 (08:01):
I guess Google Results falsely told me I could stream
them on Netflix. Oh it's not the case.

Speaker 2 (08:07):
Nope, 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. I see

(08:29):
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.

(08:52):
All right, Let's talk about at 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,

(09:13):
at the top, we have 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,

(09:36):
towering figure not only 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

(09:59):
as much 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 (10:14):
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 2 (10:24):
If there's not a direct flight element, there is a
scene that, like, like, I think captures a feeling of flight.
You know, in fact, at Ghiblie Park there, you know,
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 of

(10:46):
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,

(11:08):
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

(11:30):
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 the
Ghibli park experience as.

Speaker 3 (11:43):
Well, correct me if I'm wrong. But you're you're a
bit of a model airplane enthusiast yourself, aren't you? Or
are you not?

Speaker 2 (11:51):
My dad was, I'm 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 a 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. But yeah, I like painting little dudes.

Speaker 3 (12:14):
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 it's
just it feels like somebody's life's work. You know that
they thought about this immensely, and immense consideration went into

(12:37):
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 and 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

(12:59):
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

(13:20):
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

(13:41):
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 Bathhouse is in
many ways supposed to reflect the studio in which the
movie itself was made.

Speaker 2 (14:00):
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 what are we going to do about this
sudden change in our circumstances. Yeah, so I can see that.

Speaker 3 (14:24):
There's another thing that comes up on that same frequency,
which is that Miyazaki had some tendency to uh to
sort of insert an avatar of himself or 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

(14:45):
of the movie. Is he the witch Hubaba 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?

Speaker 4 (14:58):
You know?

Speaker 3 (14:58):
Who knows, but they're there. I don't know. I thought
this was funny, the question of like, who is Miyazaki
in this movie?

Speaker 2 (15:04):
I feel like he's Kamaji. I've also seen I've seen
in 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.

Speaker 3 (15:19):
No face.

Speaker 2 (15:19):
Yes, some people are like no face, but I wasn't
thinking of anyone in particular. You mentioned Condo, by the way,
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

(15:43):
is not in its entirety like an escape into a
fantasy realm. It has a great sort of fantasy sequence
in it, but it's a sweet film. I recommend it now.
When we talked about Nausica 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

(16:04):
doing the dub. In this case, we really only have,
for you know, the consideration of of English speaking audiences,
we 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

(16:29):
Japanese language track. I was tempted to do it on
this one, and I might have done it if the
whole family wasn't coming on the journey with me. And
then I was like, well, like, we should just do
the dub. We all love the dub, and it's it's
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

(16:50):
I'm watching a Miyazaki film, I want to be able
to take in all of the sites and and that
works a little better for me. If I'm not reading, you.

Speaker 3 (16:58):
Don't want your visual attention to vice I did reading
the subtitles.

Speaker 2 (17:01):
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 Naska and do subtitles, so I

(17:23):
can absorb.

Speaker 3 (17:24):
It that way as well. 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, like the experience of watching it
with the dub is so nice, I can't really imagine
it being improved. But who knows.

Speaker 2 (17:41):
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 Rumihiaji borneteen twenty seven,
who also voiced the mom in two thousand and Eight'sponio.

(18:03):
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 Chehiro,
she also voiced Lelo in the two thousand and two

(18:24):
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 (18:41):
That's the American remake of The Ring where.

Speaker 2 (18:43):
Yes, yes, wow, she's definitely creepy in that quite yes,
she actually she does have some lines and they're like
watching these.

Speaker 3 (18:52):
Old videotapes of her where she's like she's like, I
won't stop hurting people or something.

Speaker 2 (18:58):
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 me,
you know, in the original This actor was born nineteen
eighty eight, voiced here by Jason Marsden born nineteen seventy five,

(19:20):
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 the first feature
film role. Wow, do you remember Tommy? I did not

(19:43):
remember Tommy. No idea, no idea who Tommy was. 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. No exactly which role this was or Hallie
factored into the plot.

Speaker 3 (20:03):
That is a heck of a one degree connection spirited
away to robot Jocks.

Speaker 2 (20:08):
By the way, speaking of Robot Jocks, I want to
take you 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

(20:32):
I'm happy to mention it here. 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 Ubaba, 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 Plachett, who
lived nineteen thirty seven through two thousand and eight, best

(20:53):
known for her role as Emily Hartley on the original
The Bob Newhart Show. Her other credits include nineteen sixty three,
He's the Birds in nineteen sixty eight's The Power.

Speaker 3 (21:03):
Plachette is very good. In the English dub.

Speaker 2 (21:07):
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 Bunta Sugawara, who lived nineteen thirty three through
twenty fourteen. This actor also appeared in the Battles Without

(21:27):
Honor and Humanity film series and two thousand and five
is 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

(21:48):
did some vocal work on Lelo and Stitch. We also
have the character Lynn that is pivotal to the plot,
voiced by Yum Tamai in the original. She was born
nineteen seventy 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

(22:10):
songs in that one. She was on Steven Universe. Oh,
and she also provided some vocal talents for the English
dub of Porco Roso.

Speaker 3 (22:18):
Oh nice, that's the one with the pig fighter pilot. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:22):
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 I don't know, Snake, I think you've been playing

(22:44):
video games a little too long and you should maybe
go outside. And run around a bit. I forget which
one that was. If you played long enough, he would
give you that life advice, so.

Speaker 3 (22:54):
You'd be like crawling around at the feet of an
enemy soldier and he'd suddenly like snake, watch out for yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:01):
Or indeed he would be like snake, go touch some grass,
which was probably some good advice.

Speaker 3 (23:07):
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 2 (23:24):
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 Chicklis provides the voice of

(23:46):
Tahiro's father. So really, performance wise, a great overall English
language cast here. And of course, once more, we have
Joe Hasashi 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,

(24:08):
and that one was nineteen seventy nine's Loop in the Third.
So to just go, he just goes with Miyazaki pictures.
I mean, it can find no fault there.

Speaker 3 (24:17):
Miyazaki loves themes of wind, not just flying, but of
like breezes, blowing and wind lifting and moving objects. And
this score sounds like a wind. It's like the exciting parts,
it sounds like a rushing wind. In the contemplative parts,
it sounds like a gentle breeze. I don't know how
to explain that in sonic terms, but that is what

(24:40):
it makes me feel.

Speaker 2 (24:41):
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 (24:58):
Yeah, there's some high speed, lowel to flight.

Speaker 2 (25:00):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I'm off and inside.

Speaker 3 (25:12):
All right, are we ready to talk about the plot.
Let's do it. 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

(25:33):
year old chi Hero, and she and her parents are
moving to a new house 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

(25:55):
one hundred percent thrilled about the move, but she's telling her,
you know, moving somewhere new can be fun and 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

(26:16):
pass by a building, they're like, oh, look, that's your
new school, and she's 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,

(26:39):
dark forest, and 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

(27:01):
or comi 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

(27:21):
a wall and a tunnel, and she 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

(27:42):
walk into the tunnel, and she's also afraid to be
left behind at the car, so she runs after them.

Speaker 2 (27:47):
This is kind of an interesting turnaround if you compare
it to My neighbor Totoro, in which May and SASKI
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 (28:06):
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

(28:29):
who does not fit in with their peers and wants
to wants to seek refuge 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 chi Hero, and I still think she's a wonderful character,
but a different kind than this other familiar type of

(28:52):
childhood fantasy protagonist. She is initially not presented as a
dreamer who wishes to escape from the humdrum life of
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

(29:13):
a different kind of relationship between that character and the
fantasy that's about to unfold. Shihiro is not looking for
a magical adventure. Instead, she is forced to adapt when
the adventure is unavoidable. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (29:27):
Yeah, she's dealing with more than enough already. She doesn't
really want to take a potentially scary side trip into
the other.

Speaker 3 (29:36):
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

(29:58):
weird empty buildings in 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

(30:19):
and they all went out of business, and they've found
one that nobody goes to anymore. It's just empty.

Speaker 2 (30:24):
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,

(30:44):
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 and expectations about how things
might turn out.

Speaker 3 (31:02):
That's right. So Chihiro's parents start exploring this other world
at the opposite end of the tunnel, and che Hero
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,

(31:24):
and 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

(31:47):
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 2 (32:04):
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

(32:26):
just begging for the movie to get to the fantasy.
And 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 (32:47):
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.

(33:11):
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 2 (33:19):
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 attention 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

(33:41):
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 (33:54):
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

(34:15):
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 2 (34:20):
Yeah, it's like, Daddy's got a credit card. Don't worry,
dig in, honey, grab some soup bunts.

Speaker 3 (34:24):
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 sees sees some kind of landmarks,

(34:49):
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

(35:10):
is for kami. It is for the spirits.

Speaker 2 (35:13):
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 (35:21):
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.

(35:46):
He's like, che hero, 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 vendors doll, but discovers in a horrifying
revelation that they are not her parents anymore. They have
been magically transformed into pigs, presumably by eating cursed food.

(36:12):
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 2 (36:23):
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've watched it as adults, we had not
really watched it as children. You know, it's in mind.

(36:45):
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 were kids of a certain age.
But if your if your kid's you know, super young,
then you know it's it's more time for my neighbor totoro,

(37:07):
which is terrific for all ages as well, but definitely
has a little kids in mind.

Speaker 3 (37:12):
Yeah. So Chihiro runs away in terror and tries to
escape back in the direction she 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,

(37:32):
and as the ferry 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, uh, I think a lot
of these spirits are at this point sort of covered

(37:53):
in masks and cloaks, so we don't we don't see
exactly what they are. But Chihiro is frightened and despairing,
especially when she discovers that she is beginning to turn
transparent her she can look through her own hands and arms.
But she does get some help. Haku reappears and tells her, hey,

(38:14):
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 Chehro, but he somehow seems to
know her. He knows her name without her telling him,
he knows about her parents, and he explains that he

(38:36):
has 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

(39:00):
head 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

(39:22):
to go ask for a job and don't leave until
you get one. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:25):
Again, the tension is just is just so excellent here
and already, like the first challenge to hero 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 largely one of

(39:47):
will and inner strength and challenges to her moral compass.

Speaker 3 (39:53):
Yeah, and she is a rock. You know.

Speaker 2 (39:55):
When we first meet her, she seems maybe, you know,
she's moody and maybe a little self obsessed, you know,
but not in ways that are inappropriate for a ten
year old child. But as the movie unrolls here we
really get to see how strong she really is.

Speaker 3 (40:09):
We discover it as she discovers it about herself.

Speaker 4 (40:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (40:22):
So the place that Haku sendsch 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 here as well.

Speaker 2 (40:46):
And it's yeah, and it's so well executed. 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 careful and then

(41:07):
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 (41:22):
Yeah, that's right. But she finally makes it down to
the boiler room. So it's a room deep underneath the
bath house. Where a multi armed monster man named Kamagi
operates a vast furnace powered by coal to heat water
for the baths and then mixes potions and herbal infusions

(41:43):
into 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 a wonderful character.

Speaker 2 (41:57):
Oh yeah, he's awesome.

Speaker 4 (41:58):
You know.

Speaker 2 (41:58):
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 you 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,

(42:20):
fetching ingredients for the water, occasionally reaching back and getting
what I assume is a picture of tea and drinking
directly from the spout.

Speaker 3 (42:30):
It just puts the spout in his mouth.

Speaker 2 (42:33):
When he has little black sunglasses over his eyes.

Speaker 3 (42:37):
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 2 (42:44):
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 (43:00):
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

(43:25):
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 Todoro, and they're showing
up again here, that's right.

Speaker 2 (43:41):
Yeah, yeah, they're in the house that the family moves
to in the country in my neighbor Toto.

Speaker 3 (43:47):
But here they have 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 back off of this ledge to where

(44:10):
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 at first. It's heavy, but Kamaji

(44:32):
is like, well, you picked it up, so 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 start gathering around her feet like they think
she's some kind of goddess, you know, they like pile

(44:55):
up on her shoes and it's it's adorable. But anyway,
a Chehro is persistent about asking for a job, so
Kamaji is like okay, And so we meet another character
named Lynn, who is a bathhouse worker who is cynical
and brusque with Chee Hero at first, but later softens

(45:16):
and becomes her main mentor and helper 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
you Baba. Now you Baba is the big boss of
this establishment, the witch who lives at the top floor

(45:38):
of the bathhouse for spirits, and so Lynn is not
excited about this mission at first, but she she does
try to help is she takes che Hero up in
a series of elevator rides. One great weird encounter is
with this gigantic thing called the Radish Spirit, which gets
onto sort of like wanders around after them and gets
on an elevator with them, and as we go up

(46:01):
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 Ubaba. Anything
you want to talk about on the way.

Speaker 2 (46:14):
Rob 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 wild crew. I mean, it's staffed in large part

(46:35):
by magical beings, and then it caters to an even
wider range of creatures spirits, yo kai and deities. I
just have so many favorites that keep reappearing. They're the ducklings, spirits,
the yes Oi sama, and they make me smile every
time we even just get a quick glimpse of them
in the background.

Speaker 3 (46:56):
I would almost say that the many different characters needed
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 like ducks

(47:17):
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, but I

(47:39):
don't know. In the end, they kind of are won
over by Chia heroespunk.

Speaker 2 (47:43):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You mentioned the Radish Spirit already or
Oshiro Sama. This one is apparently based on a folkloreic
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,
but that's the way I've always read it. But yeah,

(48:04):
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
Ratish Spirit.

Speaker 3 (48:16):
Wait, is that a statue or somebody in a costume? Neither?

Speaker 2 (48:19):
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.

Speaker 3 (48:30):
Nice.

Speaker 2 (48:31):
Oh, but let's see. Yeah, I just love all the
spirits that we see here, but Ratish spirit is my favorite.

Speaker 3 (48:38):
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,

(49:01):
who is a giant, destructive baby named bo Oh.

Speaker 2 (49:05):
I love this baby, you know. I was just talking
to my wife about this is 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 (49:26):
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 2 (49:34):
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

(49:58):
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 in a bed.

Speaker 3 (50:09):
Yes, we'll come back. Are you thinking of the foot lamp?

Speaker 2 (50:12):
Oh, yes, there's a foot lamp too. Yes it is.
You never know what's gonna show up in this picture.

Speaker 3 (50:18):
But the footlamp doesn't work for you, Baba.

Speaker 2 (50:20):
They show up later independent independent contractor.

Speaker 3 (50:24):
So che Hero's like, hey, I'm here for a job,
and Ubaba threatens. Chehiro 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 uh,

(50:45):
che Hero, through her persistence, forces her to offer her
a contract, and che Hero signs the contract to work
for you Baba. So now che Hero is protected against
you Baba's whims to an extent, though Ubaba and still
be a pretty nasty boss to work for. Except it
gets even worse. Whoops. When she Hero signs her name

(51:06):
on the page of this magical contract, the witch lifts
away the writing for 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 does this to everyone who works

(51:29):
for her, she steals their name. So she did the
same thing to Haku. We don't know what his original
name was, at least not until later, but now Haku
serves as Eubaba's second in command and sort of her
her commando, her like special Missions guy. Haku has forgotten
what his real name was, and it turns out if

(51:51):
you forget your original name, you can never escape Eubaba's spell.
And 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,
and also she can keep it in mind because Haku
returns her belongings to her, which includes the note from

(52:15):
her friend at school which she was reading in the
car earlier that says Chihiro w 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.
It's not one of these stories about going to another
world or a fantasy world that is a rejection of

(52:38):
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 2 (52:48):
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 (53:11):
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

(53:31):
in the background there is this looming threat that they could,
at some point in pig form, be turned into bacon,
and eton 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

(53:54):
of kind of serving ladies and frog like men, are
mean and unhelpful to her, and they mock her and
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

(54:15):
we've seen No Face already at one point where while
she was while Haku was sneaking her into the bathhouse 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. So
while Sin is working. She at one point opens a

(54:37):
kind 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 Sen being polite, leaves the door
open and invites the creature to come in out of

(54:59):
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 she's trying to help U with all the tasks
at the bathhouse, and suddenly the bath house receives an
extremely difficult client, which is the Stink Spirit. Rob How
would you introduce the Stink Spirit scene?

Speaker 2 (55:22):
Oh, just you know, they see him and eventually smell
him coming from a ways off. Just this 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 other cinematic visions, perhaps even

(55:46):
to one of Godzilla's adversaries, who is We talked about
this one on Weird House.

Speaker 4 (55:51):
Oh.

Speaker 3 (55:52):
Hold, on a second oh JJ, just chimed in to
remind us that it's hetero. That's the one we watched,
isn't it. It's the smog Monster.

Speaker 2 (56:00):
Yeah, so some hetero vibes here to this again, just
this sludgy blob creature that is slowly making its 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.

Speaker 3 (56:15):
Guy, right uh. And 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, yeh. But he just kind of slimes
his way in and and they, of course they're trying

(56:36):
to give che Hero all of the worst jobs. So yeah,
they're like, you've got to wash him. Fortunately, che Hero
has a little bit of magical help. So in order
to wash this 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.

(56:59):
And these bath tokens or 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 you hero. He's like, you can't

(57:20):
have any bath tokens. 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, just
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.

(57:42):
And while she's cleaning it 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,

(58:06):
and so they start pulling on it. Youbaba realizes what's
going on, and she organizes all of the people in
the bathouse together to like pull on everything together, and
it ends up all coming out like a giant hairball
clog out of a drain, except it's just trash, revealing
that this was not a stink spirit after all, but

(58:27):
a river spirit, the dragon 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

(58:51):
the side of it and then leaves behind the clean
water spirit in its wake.

Speaker 2 (58:56):
Oh yeah, And I've read that Niyazaki 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

(59:17):
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 is it who is
it that helps her? Well, they help her, but eventually
on the third try, the not is a success. But

(59:40):
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 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.

(01:00:01):
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 (01:00:12):
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 of trying to grasp something and needing to

(01:00:33):
readjust there's a lot of that in this film.

Speaker 2 (01:00:36):
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
your hero, 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 (01:00:56):
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 Eubaba'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

(01:01:18):
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 greatly injured. Hako
crashes into Eubaba's residence in the in the upper part

(01:01:38):
of the bathhouse, and Sen rushes to help him. 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 2 (01:01:56):
Yeah, she's like, I'll hop you that sane happens.

Speaker 3 (01:02:00):
So Sin 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 Sin. Here there's clearly some kind
of unhealthy lock on Bo's maturation, both magical and psychological,

(01:02:26):
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 2 (01:02:37):
You yeah, or I will break your arm. Yeah, that's
like the big baby is terrifying here.

Speaker 3 (01:02:43):
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 you Baba's twin sister, Zeniba,
who they're at odds. You know, they don't get along,
and it turns out that you Baba sent Haku to

(01:03:05):
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 you Baba's house, Zaneba
happens to just play some pranks, including transforming e Baba's

(01:03:29):
son Bo the Giant Baby into a mouse, transforming the
weird jump the three green jumping heads into a fake
version of Bo the baby, so now there's a thing
that looks like the baby but is actually these three heads,
and transforming you Baba's demon bird Minion into a fly.

Speaker 2 (01:03:47):
Yes.

Speaker 3 (01:03:49):
Now, At some point here, Zaniba gets gets banished by
having her little paper avatar damaged. But they but Sin
and Haku end up falling through a pit in the
floor or and crashing down into Camaggi's domain in the
boiler room, where Sen decides to give Haku half of
Oh did did I even mention that the river spirit

(01:04:10):
gave Sen a magic dumpling in reward for helping him?

Speaker 2 (01:04:14):
Oh yeah, yeah, this becomes important.

Speaker 3 (01:04:18):
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, which
Sin then stomps on. Meanwhile, there's some trouble in the
bath house because remember that no face monster. It is

(01:04:41):
getting up to no good. It has 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 like uh uh huh, And it'll offer gold

(01:05:04):
to people and the people are like, yeah, yeah, give
me that gold. But then yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:05:08):
It starts eating people like it eats a frog guy,
eats a frog guy, and as 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 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

(01:05:30):
and more destructive as it gets bigger and bigger and
eats some more workers. 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

(01:05:51):
of like it kind of sounds. 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 how.

Speaker 3 (01:06:06):
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 brings 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 not interested in

(01:06:27):
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, I thank you,
but I don't want any.

Speaker 2 (01:06:40):
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. Then

(01:07:00):
as it eats, we see its mouth more, we 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 Yazaki discuss this in some translated interviews
where he's talking about like it also needs to absorb
other people, like certainly in the sense that it's eating people,

(01:07:20):
but also like is in no face, truly has no face,
no identity, and it must take identity from others. So
it's it's it's it's a weird monster to try and unravel.

Speaker 3 (01:07:33):
That's 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 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 up evil black sludge and shrinking in size.

(01:07:58):
Was this part of your costume, Rob.

Speaker 2 (01:07:59):
No, luckily not. But it is such a fantastic sequence.
There's a lot of rampaging through the onsen here. Love it,
love it?

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

Speaker 3 (01:08:09):
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,
eight or the frogmen and stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:08:25):
Yeah, they're all okay, everybody's fine.

Speaker 3 (01:08:28):
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 sin into its 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

(01:08:49):
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 2 (01:09:01):
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,

(01:09:21):
just misaligned spirits.

Speaker 3 (01:09:23):
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 Bottom, and there's a
reason for this. She thinks that she can help things
if she takes the golden seal that Hakousto back to
Zeniba and apologize for the theft. If she does that,

(01:09:44):
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

(01:10:05):
a place called Swamp Bottom, where Zeniba 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 there's this idea among many of them that if

(01:10:27):
they had enough money one day, they would buy a
ticket on the train and go somewhere far away again
a 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 by a retinue. She's followed by No

(01:10:49):
Face reverted to its original non threatening form, and by
the mouse form of Bo the giant baby, remember, was
transformed by Zeniba into a little else and the fly
form of you Baba's evil bird. So I like that
all of her companions on this journey are beings that

(01:11:10):
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 2 (01:11:25):
Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 4 (01:11:26):
That's true.

Speaker 2 (01:11:27):
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. It's gorgeous and it is just
like in the movie where Yeah, she sits on the

(01:11:49):
train and No Face just sits down next to her
on the red cushioned bench. Yeah, very you know, meek
and peaceful.

Speaker 3 (01:11:56):
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,

(01:12:21):
and there's a wonderful encounter on the way to the
witch Zaniba's house, which is the foot lamp. How would
you describe this rob.

Speaker 2 (01:12:29):
I mean, there's there's strong Yokai sensibilities to this thing's designed.
It's kind 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 (01:12:44):
Yeah, that's a good comparison. But eventually our characters here
do make it to Zaniba'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 2 (01:12:58):
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 (01:13:06):
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

(01:13:32):
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's a big revelation.
Remember there's been this mystery the whole time. How did
Haku know Chihiro from before? How did he already know

(01:13:54):
her name? And how was he familiar with her before
she arrived. She has a memory, and we've seen flats
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

(01:14:14):
the Cohaku 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 2 (01:14:22):
Yeah, yeah, I believe so. And then we get these
these sequences underwater. They are, in 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 (01:14:37):
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

(01:15:01):
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 you
Baba'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

(01:15:22):
go free, 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

(01:15:45):
that none of them are her parents. It was a trick,
trick question, but she she outsmarts it, and thus the
magic is broken. Sin is chi hero once again and
she can return home.

Speaker 2 (01:15:57):
All of her coworkers celebrate. They are all know again
she's completely won them over, so they're cheering her on
the whole way.

Speaker 3 (01:16:04):
Yeah, just a.

Speaker 2 (01:16:06):
Sweet ending, though we're not quite to the complete ending yet,
but a sweet resolve of what's going on in the
fantasy realm here, that's right.

Speaker 3 (01:16:14):
So she has her goodbyes with Haku, 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 about life.

(01:16:34):
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

(01:16:54):
pin down, rather than being like a single semantic lesson
of the plot.

Speaker 4 (01:16:58):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:16:59):
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 is kind of hard to really
put your finger on. Well that here is is brought

(01:17:21):
to us through the lens of fantasy. Yeah, so she'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 she
is she's ready for this to go through, with this
change that's occurring in her real life.

Speaker 3 (01:17:42):
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
or is that something of the magic world is real

(01:18:03):
and follows you home. Because when 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, it's all dusty inside.

(01:18:25):
So clearly they've been gone a long time. And not
only that, but chi Hero has an artifact from the
magic world with her, the hairband that Zeneba gave her.

Speaker 2 (01:18:34):
Ah. 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

(01:18:56):
of character, you know. And yeah, it's just a nice ending.
It's a film that definitely has its has tension, 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 (01:19:13):
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

(01:19:36):
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 uh, you know, find

(01:19:56):
their way around problems. And yet at the same time
it doesn't feel un realistic about like ignoring the reality
of threats. It's just such a great storytelling sensibility and
the perfect art to match it.

Speaker 2 (01:20:09):
Yeah, I mean, in a way, it's a 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 it

(01:20:34):
does 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

(01:20:54):
little differently, like it speaks to you at different ages
and during different challengees and in different celebrations as well. Yeah,
just a great picture overall.

Speaker 3 (01:21:05):
Well said.

Speaker 2 (01:21:06):
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

(01:21:27):
great list going over at letterbox dot com.

Speaker 3 (01:21:29):
This L E. T.

Speaker 2 (01:21:30):
T E R. B o x D dot com. I
feel like most film fans know about 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
a great way to organize your your two C lists

(01:21:51):
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 (01:22:03):
Also a great place to find funny reviews.

Speaker 2 (01:22:07):
Funny, some funny, some not funny, but there are some.
There are 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 (01:22:29):
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 1 (01:22:49):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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