"Just a Girl"

Spirited Away is among the most celebrated of the films by legendary Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki—and for good reason. With its marvelous traditional animation style, poetic images and well-rendered dialogue this story of a young girl’s escape from a spirit-infested, abandoned amusement park is at times hilarious, horrific and overall—pardon the pun—magical. Yet it is not just the aesthetic and technical aspects of Spirited Away that distinguish it from the larger body of critically-acclaimed animated films, including those of Miyazaki himself. Rather, it is the identity of Chihuro, the film’s protagonist, and the intense portrayal of her maturation that marks Spirited Away as an integral piece of the animated film canon.

Contradictory to the classic dichotomy of the male protagonist/savior and female object/damsel in animated fantasy films, especially the ever-pervasive works of the Walt Disney Corporation, Chihiro is a young girl who, through dignified perseverance, finds a sense of self. She begins the film as a sullen and frightened child, angered by her parent’s decision to uproot their family and move to the country; a choice that will require her to begin a new school and formulate new friendships. It is the uncertainty triggered by this disruption of her adolescent routine that raises Chihiro’s apprehension of the amusement park when she and her parents accidentally happen upon it during their trek. Despite her overwhelming fear, however, Chihiro, after being separated from her parents when they are magically transformed into pigs, is able to manage her own way through the park. Relying on her own determination, and the goodwill of a few spirits she befriends, Chihiro continues on to accomplish numerous feats. She obtains a job at a spirit-world bathhouse, is blessed by a medicine spirit, saves the life of the boy she falls in love with, ends a family feud, helps a spirit named no-face—whose fear of solitude and displacement metamorphoses him into a bratty monstrosity reminiscent of Chihiro’s earlier self—find a friend and single-handedly saves the lives of her parents. Unwilling to be the Disney princess who waits trapped in her castle/tower for the salvation of a prince on a steed Chihiro takes her fate into her own hands, and in the process learns the very methods of adaptation, alliance and self-assuredness that she lacks at the films start.

Still, it is not merely Chihiro’s development into a self-dependent female character, but also her identity as a non-magical human protagonist, that makes Spirited Away so uniquely important. Unlike the other heroines in Miyazaki’s films—such as the titular witch of Kiki’s Delivery Service or the supernatural warrior in Princess Mononoke—and even the enchanted or trained women in Disney films (think Sleeping Beauty or Mulan), Chihiro is nothing more than a tenacious ten-year-old girl who does the best she can when placed in a difficult situation. In spite of this lack of mystical characteristics Chihiro survives, overcoming denigration at the hands of the more powerful, phantasmal characters through cunning and compassion. By situating a non-traditional, non-magical character in the role of the protagonist of an animated fantasy film Miyazaki celebrates both the triumph of humans, especially youth and women, in the face of unrelenting adversity and the human ability for growth and change. In the rebellious words of Gwen Stefani, the princess of 1990s ska, it is because Chihiro is “just a girl” that she is able to realize her own strength and worth in a world that is strange and generally unkind to her.