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240 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2001
I would say that this film is an adventure story even though there is no brandishing of weapons or battles involving supernatural powers. However, this story is not a showdown between right and wrong. It is a story in which the heroine will be thrown into a place where the good and the bad dwell together, and there, she will experience the world. She will learn about friendship and devotion, and will survive by making full use of her brain. She sees herself through the crisis, avoids danger and gets herself back to the ordinary world somehow. She manages not because she has destroyed the “evil,” but because she has acquired the ability to survive. (15)This summary of Spirited Away reminds me of a comment Miyazaki made later, in a 2010 interview at Berkeley:
To have a film where there’s an evil figure, and the good person fights against the evil figure and everything becomes a happy ending—that’s one way to make a film. But then that means you have to draw, as an animator, the evil figure, and it’s not very pleasant to draw the evil figure. So I decided against having evil figures in my films.It’s a very interesting perspective, partly because it’s an intriguing ethos to guide storytelling, and partly because it forces me to look at Spirited Away differently, so much am I in the habit of identifying the “good guys” and “bad guys” in any story.