The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Hayao Miyazaki · a film · 2001 · about 125 minutes · Studio Ghibli · in Japanese, as Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi
Mode
Fairy tale made as a whole world; a working life, a ghost story and a myth of descent in one
Mythos
The child hidden by the gods; the descent to the underworld, its food, its river and its name; the rule not to look back on the way out
Phase
A few days in the spirit world, from a car at a tunnel’s mouth to the same tunnel walked the other way
Presentation
Animated feature in colour, drawn by hand and finished digitally, about 125 minutes, in Japanese; one girl, one building, a train and a cottage
Register
From farce in the boiler room to terror in the corridors, from labour on a rope to a silent train across the water
Scale
One girl, one bathhouse, the gods who come to it
Governing Proposition
A sullen girl of ten, carried to a new town in the back of a car, passes through a tunnel into a world of spirits, loses her parents to their appetite and her name to a contract, and earns both back by work. The wager of the film is that the old belief in children hidden by the gods can be built into a whole world with its own laws, and that a child’s entry into the world of wages can be told as a descent to the underworld and a return.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
A car on the road to a new town. In the back sits a girl of ten, Chihiro, with a bunch of farewell flowers, sulking. The car stops before a tunnel. On the far side is an empty theme park, a ruin of the 1990s, in the afternoon light: stalls with food laid out and no one to serve it. The parents sit down and eat. The child refuses. The film begins in the most ordinary place it has, a family moving house, and sets beside it a monument to a spent economy.
The meal is the first law of the other world, and the oldest: whoever eats the food of the dead belongs to them. When night falls the parents have become pigs. The lamps of a great bathhouse come on at dusk, and spirits step off a ferry. Nothing has been explained and nothing needs to be. The title has already named the belief, kamikakushi, the child hidden by the gods, and the film now begins to build it as a place with rules, stairs, wages and a boss.
Hayao Miyazaki wrote and directed it for Studio Ghibli, with Toshio Suzuki producing, and it was released in Japan on 20 July 2001: one cut, in Japanese, about 125 minutes, drawn by hand and finished digitally, with limited computer-generated work. Joe Hisaishi wrote the music, Atsushi Okui was director of photography, Takeshi Seyama edited it and Yoji Takeshige directed the art. Rumi Hiiragi voices Chihiro, Miyu Irino Haku, Mari Natsuki both Yubaba and Zeniba, Bunta Sugawara Kamaji and Yumi Tamai Lin. It won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 2002, shared with Bloody Sunday, and the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in March 2003, the first for a film not in English.
Movement II
A boy, Haku, finds her and tells her what to do. She crosses the bridge to the bathhouse holding her breath. To ask for work she must go down: by a stair that runs down the outside of the building, high and steep, which she takes with a child’s awkwardness, to the boiler room at its foot. There Kamaji works with six arms, and the soot sprites carry their coal. Among the workers is Lin, who will stand beside her.
At the top lives Yubaba, who owns the house. The way through her rooms is a passage of terror, and the contract is the price of staying alive in her world: work, or be turned into an animal. Chihiro signs. Yubaba lifts the characters of her name off the paper until only one is left, and the girl answers to Sen. The self has been signed away for wages, and the film shows the transaction as plainly as a payslip.
Haku, it will emerge, has lost his own name. The building is now laid out as the film’s order of labour: upward to the boss, downward to the boiler, with corridors, lifts and pipes between, and every spirit and worker in a place. The form has a shape in space, and the girl must learn to move through it.
Movement III
Haku brings her rice balls. She eats them and weeps, and the scene holds nothing but hunger and grief and a boy’s kindness. It is one of the film’s heights, and it is made of almost nothing. A film made to be read whole by a child rises here on the simplest means, and the rise is earned by everything the girl has lost.
Then the work. A stink spirit arrives, so foul that the house recoils, and the new girl is given it to bathe. The whole staff takes hold of a rope and pulls, and out of the spirit comes a bicycle, then rubbish, more and more of it, until the water is clear and an old face rises laughing out of it. It was a river god, filled with what people threw into it. The sequence is a set piece of timing and weight, the rope drawn by many hands.
Work done well is a cleansing, and the bath could not be lost from the story without the story losing its proof. It also carries the film’s second disclosure, the polluted river, which Haku’s story will complete. For the first time the girl has done something the house values. The film’s argument about wages and the self turns from loss to labour.
Movement IV
A spirit called No-Face is in the house. It offers gold, and the staff come running. It eats, and eats the givers too: a frog is swallowed whole, and the feast grows until No-Face is swollen and running through the corridors. This is the film’s argument about appetite and money, and greed shows itself as a hunger that devours whoever feeds it. It sits beside the parents at their stall, and beside the empty theme park, without a word of comment.
Across it runs a second plot. Haku, in the form of a dragon, comes back wounded, with paper birds after him; there is a seal belonging to Yubaba’s twin, Zeniba, and a spell upon him. Boh and the Yu-bird are turned into animals, a mouse among them. Much of this is explained in a hurry, and some of it by Kamaji, who tells the girl what has happened while the film moves on.
Here the film is loosest. The feast is required and runs long; the mechanics of the seal, the curse and the twin witch are announced as they are needed rather than found, and the telling relies in places on characters explaining the plot to one another. The rules the middle introduces late are consistent with those set early, and nothing in it contradicts the world: it is loose, not incoherent. But a part of it could be lifted and the story would still close.
Movement V
Chihiro takes the train to Swamp Bottom, to Zeniba. It runs across a flooded plain, the water to the horizon, carrying silent, translucent passengers; a girl stands on a platform in the dusk; Hisaishi’s piano plays under it. Nothing happens, and it is the purest stillness in the film, the long interval the Japanese call ma given its whole length. At the end of the line is Zeniba’s cottage, and a quiet that the bathhouse never has.
The flight home is the last summit. On the dragon’s back Chihiro remembers falling, as a small child, into a river, the Kohaku River, and gives Haku back his name. The scales fall away. His river has been filled and built over and has lost its name, and the spirit of the place has survived as a child’s memory of falling into it. The recovery of a name is the film’s sacrament, and here it is administered by a girl of ten.
Yubaba sets the last test, a test of recognition among the pigs, and Chihiro passes it. Then the tunnel, walked out with the rule of every descent: do not look back. The parents remember nothing. Haku’s fate under Yubaba’s contract is left open by assertion. The world of spirits was real, its rules held from the first meal to the last step, and the closing song, “Itsumo nando demo”, sung by Youmi Kimura, plays over the return to an ordinary world.
Act III · The Twelve
The first half is close to proof against subtraction. The parents’ meal, the bridge crossed on a held breath, the stair down the outside of the building to the boiler room, the contract and the stolen name: each step is required, and each is the condition of the next. The river spirit’s bath could not go; it proves that work done well is a cleansing. The cost is the long middle. No-Face’s feast is needed and runs long, and it is crossed by a second plot, Haku, the seal, the paper birds, Boh and the bird turned to animals, explained in a hurry and partly by Kamaji. A part could be lifted from the middle and the story still close.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The film discloses, and does not only render a mood. A sullen child becomes a person through work: the self found not in a quest but in a job on a contract, under a boss, among co-workers. The name is the self, and the self can be signed away for wages. Greed is a hunger that eats the giver, as No-Face’s gold shows. A river can be filled and built over and lose its name, and the spirit of a place survives as a child’s memory of falling into it. The empty theme park sets the parents’ consumption beside the bathhouse’s. Held at the bar: much of this arrives as allegory a child can read whole, and its social reading is lightly fixed.
Score: 8.5 / 10
It rises often, and its heights are of more than one kind. The lamps of the bathhouse coming on at dusk as the spirits step off the ferry. The stink spirit’s cleansing, the rubbish drawn out on a rope by the whole staff, and an old face rising laughing from the water. Chihiro weeping as she eats the rice balls Haku gives her, a height made of nothing but hunger and kindness. The train across the flooded plain, its passengers silent and translucent, with Joe Hisaishi’s piano under it. The flight home, and the scales falling away. Terror too: Yubaba’s rooms, No-Face swollen in the corridors. Held below the top where the middle’s crossing plot, explained in haste, gives fewer heights than the passages around it.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Built, not evoked. The title names kamikakushi, the old Japanese belief in children hidden by the gods, and the film makes that belief a whole world. Under it runs the descent to the underworld: a tunnel, the food of the other world eaten and the eaters transformed, a river crossed, a name surrendered, a test of recognition, and the rule not to look back on the way out, which meets the myths of Izanagi and of Orpheus without quoting either. The bathhouse is an order of gods who must be washed. Held from the top because the descent is the oldest of patterns, received more than remade, and because the seal, the curse and the twin witch of the middle are plot devices more than myth.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The departure is real. Against the inherited pattern of the feature-length fairy tale, Disney’s chiefly and Japan’s own as well, there is no villain destroyed, no romance completed, no lesson stated, and long passages in which nothing happens. A ten-year-old’s ordinariness stays at the centre of a spirit world. But the stake was smaller than the turn. This was the most trusted animator in Japan, coming after Princess Mononoke (1997, on this desk at 8.5) had broken the box office, on a kind of fantasy he had made before: My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service already hold the girl, the spirit and the job. The swerve is from the animated feature, and only partly from his own path.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Substitute live action and the film cannot say that the spirits are as real as the parents, or that transformation is the ordinary law of the world: pigs, a mouse, a dragon, a heap of rubbish that is a god. The drawn image carries the knowledge that the material and the sacred are made of the same line. The form is also a shape in space and time: the building as a vertical order of labour, upward to Yubaba and downward to Kamaji, and long quiet intervals, ma, between the busy sequences, by which a child’s sense of time is given. Held at its figure by the middle, whose plotting is in a looser form than the beginning and the end and could be told otherwise without loss.
Score: 8.5 / 10
A quarter century of return, by children who grew up with it and by critics, has not exhausted it. The readings hold together without closing one another: a parable of work and of the child’s entry into wages; an ecological allegory, in the river spirit and Haku’s buried river; a figure of Japan after the bubble; the bathhouse as a brothel; Shinto cosmology; the open question of what No-Face is. Formal return yields too, in the colour of the lamps, the layered backgrounds, the score’s motifs returning at the train and the flight. Held below by the span and the kind: twenty-five years is short, part of the return is to texture and wonder rather than meaning, and its depth is not yet shown across generations.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Field: the animated feature and the cinema of the 2000s. Intrinsic force is high: the film showed that a hand-drawn feature could run two hours on a child’s attention without a villain or a song, and could hold the sacred and the economic in a fairy tale, at the moment the American model was turning to computer animation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Golden Bear and the Academy Award carried animation into the festival cinema and Japanese animation into the world’s, and for a generation outside Japan the film became the door to Ghibli and to anime as art. The limit stands: its manner has been admired more than imitated, and its field was moved chiefly within animation.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Twenty-five years, and the film as released survives whole: one cut, the original Japanese track, the drawn image unaltered. The red colour cast of the early home-video transfers was a fault of surface, since corrected, and the original survives behind it; nothing is charged to it. Presence is of the widest kind for a film of its age: continuous circulation, theatrical revivals and study, and it was the highest-grossing film in Japan from 2001 until 2020. Fame and returns are evidence of presence only. Little of the surface is fixed to its moment: a car, a ruined theme park and a burst economy are furniture to a myth. Survival is credited for what twenty-five years have shown, and no more.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Read to the anchors of the elder arts. The backgrounds are worked at every depth, and the bathhouse is a coherent building, legible as architecture from boiler to penthouse. Movement carries character: Chihiro’s awkwardness on the outside stair, Kamaji’s six arms at work, the soot sprites carrying their coal. The stink spirit sequence is a set piece of timing and of weight, the rope drawn by many hands. Hisaishi’s score knows when to stop, and Atsushi Okui’s digital compositing serves the drawn image and never shows. The costs fall on the telling: in the middle, characters explain the plot to one another, and the seal and Zeniba’s spell are hurried. The craft of the telling is not everywhere at the height of the craft of the image.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the opening, a sulking child in a car with a bunch of farewell flowers, and the dragon’s flight with the scales falling away. One law governs both: the world of spirits is real, and it has rules. Eat its food, keep your name, work or be transformed, do not look back. The comedy of Boh and the terror of No-Face live in one physics, and the range is wide: farce, horror, labour, grief, rapture. The strain is in the middle, where the rules of the seal, the curse and the twin witches are announced as they are needed rather than found, and in an ending that leaves Haku’s fate under Yubaba’s contract open by assertion.
Score: 8.4 / 10
It holds more than its scale suggests: a child’s consciousness; the family, in parents who eat and are transformed and know nothing of it; labour, in a whole economy of shifts, wages, bosses and a boiler room; money and appetite, in No-Face; the sacred, in the gods who come to bathe; the natural order, in a polluted river and a buried one; modern Japan, in the ruined theme park. They are integrated through one girl and one building, not listed. What holds the axis lowest: history and the state are nearly absent, and every order passes through a ten-year-old’s perception, which is the film’s genius and its limit. Nothing exceeds her, and the world outside the bathhouse is a train and a cottage.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime at 8.8, then The Archetypal Deep and The Made at 8.7. Heights of more than one kind, the bath, the rice balls, the train across the water and the flight home; a myth of descent, its food, river, name and backward look, built into a whole world with rules; and a drawn image worked at every depth, in a building legible from boiler to penthouse.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8: labour, money, the sacred, the family and the natural order are held through one girl and one building, but history and the state are nearly absent and nothing exceeds a ten-year-old’s perception. Below the rest, The Inevitable at 8.1, where a part of the long middle could be lifted and the story still close, and The Swerve at 8.2, a real departure from the animated fairy tale made on a path its maker had already proved.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.7, The Living Form at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Archetypal Deep at 8.7, Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Unconcealment meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.2 falls three tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.1, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.4 from a sum of 101.3, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi, 千と千尋の神隠し) as released in Japan on 20 July 2001, the Japanese-language theatrical cut of about 125 minutes, the film’s one cut, from the car at the tunnel’s mouth to the tunnel walked back: written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, produced by Toshio Suzuki for Studio Ghibli, with music by Joe Hisaishi, photography by Atsushi Okui, editing by Takeshi Seyama and art direction by Yoji Takeshige. The English-language version of 2002, which adds a few explanatory lines, is a translation and not the object, and nothing here is charged to it. The red colour cast of the early home-video transfers, since corrected, bears on survival only and is charged nothing. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted, and no line of dialogue is held to the word, so none is quoted and speech is described. The exact order of some short scenes in the bathhouse middle is not relied on. Details that could not be verified, among them the credits below the heads of department, the timing and share of each movement, what the father says of the theme park, how the storyboards were made, the director’s own word on the bathhouse, later stage versions and the testimony of other animators, are not given.