Why are you into it?
Good taste disguised as a routine.
About
Spirited Away opens with a ten-year-old girl sulking in the backseat of her parents' car. Chihiro is moving to a new town, unhappy about leaving her friends behind. Her father takes a wrong turn, they park at what looks like an abandoned theme park, and within twenty minutes her parents have been transformed into pigs. Hayao Miyazaki doesn't ease you into the strange. He throws you in headfirst and trusts you to swim.
What follows is the most immersive animated world ever created. Chihiro finds herself trapped in a bathhouse for spirits, run by the witch Yubaba, who steals names and memories from those who work for her. The girl must earn her keep scrubbing the filth off river gods and radish spirits while plotting to free her parents. Every frame contains impossible architectural details that feel completely logical. Staircases spiral into nowhere. Boiler rooms stretch infinitely downward. The No-Face spirit starts as a lonely shadow and becomes a consuming monster that devours everything in its path, including the bathhouse's greed.
Miyazaki built this on the skeleton of Alice in Wonderland, but where Carroll's world runs on nonsense, this one runs on work. Chihiro survives not through cleverness or luck but through stubborn persistence and genuine kindness to creatures others ignore. She remembers the real name of the dragon Haku, who had forgotten it himself. She cleans a "stink spirit" that turns out to be a polluted river god. She feeds the ravenous No-Face until he vomits up his stolen personality and becomes gentle again.
Studio Ghibli's hand-drawn animation makes every impossible thing feel tactile. You can smell the sulfur from the boiler room, feel the squish of the soot sprites, taste the feast Chihiro's parents devour before their transformation. The film won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2003 and remains the highest-grossing film in Japanese box office history. But statistics miss the point. This isn't entertainment disguised as art. It's a master class in world-building that happens to include a story about growing up. Good taste disguised as a routine, exactly as promised.
Fun fact
Miyazaki based the bathhouse design on a real nineteenth-century bathhouse in Tokyo that his production team visited repeatedly, sketching every tile and timber joint.