Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. 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 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 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.
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 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. 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 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 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.
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 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 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 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.
Absolutely yeah, I don't think it's very controversial to say it absolutely deserved. That Oscar over the movie Ice Age.
And that's never seen that so I can't compare.
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, 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 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 give those tickets in advance.
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, 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 just go in knowing nothing and experience it for yourself.
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 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.
Honey, don't take a short cut, you always get us lost from master filmmaker Hyao Miyazaki.
What is it?
Come on, let's go in. I want to see what's on the other side.
Will hey, you.
Shouldn't be here, Get out.
Of here. Now leave before it gets dark. You've got to get across the river.
Go.
I'll distract him.
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. I own this one on 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 suddenly Netflix may have your studio Ghibli films. Just see what's up when you're there.
I guess Google Results falsely told me I could stream them on Netflix. Oh it's not the case.
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 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 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 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 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 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.
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.
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 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, 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 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.
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?
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.
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
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 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 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
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.
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.
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 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?
You know?
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?
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.
No face.
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 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 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 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 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.
Don't want your visual attention to vice I did reading the subtitles.
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 can absorb.
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.
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. 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
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.
That's the American remake of The Ring where.
Yes, yes, wow, she's definitely creepy in that quite yes, 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.
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, 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 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.
That is a heck of a one degree connection spirited away to robot Jocks.
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 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 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.
Plachette is very good. In the English dub.
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 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 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
songs in that one. She was on Steven Universe. Oh, and she also provided some vocal talents for the English dub of Porco Roso.
Oh nice, that's the one with the pig fighter pilot. Yeah.
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 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.
You'd be like crawling around at the feet of an enemy soldier and he'd suddenly like snake, watch out for yeah.
Or indeed he would be like snake, go touch some grass, which was probably some good advice.
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.
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 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, 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.
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 it makes me feel.
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.
Yeah, there's some high speed, lowel to flight.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I'm off and inside.
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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 walk into the tunnel, and she's also afraid to be left behind at the car, so she runs after them.
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.
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 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 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 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.
Yeah, she's dealing with more than enough already. She doesn't really want to take a potentially scary side trip into the other.
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 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 and they all went out of business, and they've found one that nobody goes to anymore. It's just empty.
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, 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.
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, 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 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.
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 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.
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. 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.
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
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.
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 dig in because we can pay the person who runs the stall whenever they come back. Surely they'll be back in a minute.
Yeah, it's like, Daddy's got a credit card. Don't worry, dig in, honey, grab some soup bunts.
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, 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 is for kami. It is for the spirits.
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.
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. 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. 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.
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. 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, which is terrific for all ages as well, but definitely has a little kids in mind.
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, 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 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,
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 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 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 to go ask for a job and don't leave until you get one. Yeah.
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 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, 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.
We discover it as she discovers it about herself.
Yeah.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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, fetching ingredients for the water, occasionally reaching back and getting what I assume is a picture of tea and drinking directly from the spout.
It just puts the spout in his mouth.
When he has little black sunglasses over his eyes.
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.
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.
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 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.
Yeah, yeah, they're in the house that the family moves to in the country in my neighbor Toto.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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 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.
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 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 don't know. In the end, they kind of are won over by Chia heroespunk.
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, 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.
Wait, is that a statue or somebody in a costume? 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 Ratish spirit is my favorite.
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, who is a giant, destructive baby named bo Oh.
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.
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.
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 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.
Yes, we'll come back. Are you thinking of the foot lamp?
Oh, yes, there's a foot lamp too. Yes it is. You never know what's gonna show up in this picture.
But the footlamp doesn't work for you, Baba.
They show up later independent independent contractor.
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, 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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.
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 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 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 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 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
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?
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 to one of Godzilla's adversaries, who is We talked about this one on Weird House.
Oh.
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.
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.
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 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. 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 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. 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,
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 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 the side of it and then leaves behind the clean water spirit in its wake.
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 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 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. 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.
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 readjust there's a lot of that in this film.
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.
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 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 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.
Yeah, she's like, I'll hop you that sane happens.
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, 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.
You yeah, or I will break your arm. Yeah, that's like the big baby is terrifying here.
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 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 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.
Yes.
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 gave Sen a magic dumpling in reward for helping him?
Oh yeah, yeah, this becomes important.
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
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 to people and the people are like, yeah, yeah, give me that gold. But then yeah, I don't know.
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 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 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.
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
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.
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 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, 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.
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. Was this part of your costume, Rob.
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? Yeah.
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.
Yeah, they're all okay, everybody's fine.
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 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.
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, just misaligned spirits.
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, 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 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 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 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 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.
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. 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 cushioned bench. Yeah, very you know, meek and peaceful.
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, 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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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 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 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 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.
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.
Yeah, just a.
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.
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. 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 pin down, rather than being like a single semantic lesson of the plot.
You know.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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 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.
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 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 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.
Well said.
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 great list going over at letterbox dot com.
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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.
Also a great place to find funny reviews.
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.
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.
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