Miyazaki's bathhouse epic was Japan's top film for nineteen years
Chihiro wanders into a spirit spa, loses her name to the witch Yubaba, and works to free parents turned into pigs. Hayao Miyazaki's 2001 Studio Ghibli film cost about US$19 million, grossed about US$396 million worldwide, and held Japan's box-office crown for nineteen years before a Demon Slayer movie unseated it.
Written and directed by Miyazaki, produced by Toshio Suzuki, and released by Toho on 20 July 2001, Spirited Away stars Rumi Hiiragi as Chihiro with voices including Miyu Irino and Mari Natsuki. Miyazaki shaped the story for a friend's ten-year-old daughter after other proposals failed. Pixar's John Lasseter pushed Disney to secure North American rights and executive-produced the English dub. Joe Hisaishi scored the film; Youmi Kimura's closing song Always With Me even helped spark the project.
After her parents gorge in an empty resort, Chihiro meets Haku, signs Yubaba's contract, and becomes Sen. She cleans a polluted river spirit, accidentally unleashes No-Face's appetite, recovers a stolen seal from Zeniba, and remembers Haku as the Kohaku River spirit who once saved her. Passing Yubaba's pig test restores her name. Production mixed careful CGI with hand drawing, borrowed Meiji-era buildings from Tokyo's open-air architectural museum, and nodded to a Yamagata inn and European fairy-tale structure.
Critics and audiences answered with a Golden Bear at Berlin in 2002 and the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature—the first for a hand-drawn, non-English animated film. Sight and Sound ranked it among the greatest films in 2022. Domestic takings of ¥31.68 billion made it Japan's highest earner until 2020. The film's lasting pull is less spectacle than moral gravity: a child navigating labor, greed, and forgotten names in a world that feels older than any theme park.
Source: Spirited Away
