Spirited Away

Of all the strange and wondrous creatures who inhabit Miyazaki Hayao's Spirited Away (2001), only a handful are as thematically important as the witches Yubaba and Zeniba. As Zeniba says, the two are identical twins but exact opposites. Yubaba, the cruel taskmaster of an other-worldly bathhouse, turns young Chihiro's parents into pigs and controls Chihiro's friend Haku. Zeniba, by contrast, is relatively caring and helpful. Miyazaki's world, like the sisters, is dualistic; it's split between good and evil, humans and spirits, identity and anonymity, dependency and self-reliance, past and present. As Chihiro learns after passing through the dark tunnel like Alice falling through the rabbit hole, this world is also divided between selfishness and duty, childhood and adulthood, memory and forgetfulness, and presence and absence. There's a strong yin-and-yang, push-and-pull dynamic at work here.
In Spirited Away, Miyazaki is interested in many things, and the battle between opposites is chief among them. There's a danger in creating such a dualistic world because dualism too often simplifies the complexities of life. But Miyazaki avoids doing this. Yubaba is not entirely, consistently cruel. She displays motherly affection for that gigantic baby of hers and occasionally praises and rewards Chihiro, particularly after Chihiro's visually stunning battle with the "Stink God," a humongous amalgam of pollution that comes slithering into the bathhouse in search of, well, a much-needed bath. Zeniba is not entirely, consistently good. She nearly kills Haku after he has taken something from her. In Spirited Away, things and beings are more than they seem: a river spirit devours other spirits but treats Chihiro kindly; a friend might be a dragon, which might be a spirit; the cantankerous, six-armed man who operates the bathhouse boiler room turns out to be friendly and helpful.
Wonderfully, Miyazaki presents all this so naturally, with so little exposition, that the fantastic seems realistic and the world of this film seems as if it has always existed. Much of the film's imaginative realism exists in the details, in the wrinkles in Yubaba's face, the transparency of the river spirits, the pipes and gears in the bathhouse, the curious eyeballs of the soot creatures who work in the boiler room. The similarities between Spirited Away and Alice in Wonderland have been made before, but I don't know if many have insisted that it's the look of both that is truly similar. John Tenniel's drawings, and then Mervyn Peake's, of Alice's adventures work the way Miyazaki's animation does: they make imaginary worlds intimately familiar to us by, to borrow Susan Napier's words, creating "a topography that is exotic ... but at the same time so richly realized down to minute details that it seems at least potentially contiguous to our own world."
And let's not forget just how fantastic Miyazaki's universe looks on a purely aesthetic level, especially in those wide vistas during Chihiro's train trip to Zeniba's, when water expands as far as the eye can see and clouds glide like glaciers. The beauty of this place, like so much else, has its own opposites, including the grotesquery of radish spirits, the Stink God, even of Yubaba herself. It is in this in-between condition where Chihiro finds herself, stranded as she is between childhood and adulthood, immaturity and maturity. Yubaba calls her a "lazy, spoiled crybaby" and changes her name to "Sen." Chihiro even momentarily attains the transparency of a spirit. But in getting a job to sustain herself and in facing numerous challenges (including keeping that Paul Bunyan of a baby quiet and getting a ravenous river spirit to leave the bathhouse), she learns not simply responsibility but the importance of sacrifice. She wants to rescue her parents and leave the bathhouse for good, but instead decides to save Haku, who is dying. And in doing so, Chihiro grows out of that dualistic existence and moves closer to becoming a mature young woman.
She's not the only one struggling with her identity, however. To Miyazaki, Japan itself is caught between two worlds, the traditional and the modern. It slid down its own rabbit hole during the economic collapse of the 1990s, from which it has yet to recover. The abandoned amusement park in which Chihiro and her parents find themselves at the film's beginning is, as Chihiro's father remarks, one of the many casualties of Japan's economic growth, and Miyazaki presents modern Japan as an excessively consumerist culture perilously close to forgetting a sort of pastoral traditionalism; suburbs expand, Stink Gods pollute traditional bathhouses, spirits lust for gold. The maintenance of tradition and custom are important to Miyazaki and, as with so much else in the film, he expresses his values in the smallest of details. I had no idea how important Chihiro's eating of rice balls was until I read Napier's interpretation:
[the] quiet scene of Chihiro eating rice balls, a staple of Japanese culture ... has tremendous emotional depth, demonstrating the traditional values that form the heart of the film and give it its emotional and moral framework. The fact that the scene begins with Chihiro's acknowledgment that she has almost forgotten her name reminds the viewer of her vulnerability to the erasure of identity
Erasure comes not just with forgetting one's name but one's past as well. Chihiro needs to remember her parents and who she is the same way Japan needs to remember its cultural ancestry. Memory is crucial for a healthy existence; so is community. Chihiro survives because Haku helps her and succeeds in her challenges by replying on others, from the boiler man and his soot creatures to the river spirit called No Face. Again, it's a minute detail that carries Miyazaki's truism; Zeniba gives Chihiro a ring for her hair, telling her it will bring protection because its threads were woven by her friends. Miyazaki is conveying something here: the way out of confusion, limbo, malaise, fear, and societal degradation takes more than rugged individualism. It involves a sort of congenial collectivism that, at its heart, requires the uncomplicated but unfortunately uncommon act of setting aside self-interest and simply giving a damn.