Film writer Patrick McElroy on the 20th anniversary of Hayao Miyazaki's masterpiece SPIRITED AWAY

The term landmark is often thrown around to describe certain movies.

While some of the films might be great, we may not think of it as a time before, or after they were released. But if there was one film within the last few decades that I would think of as a landmark, it’s Hayao Miyazaki’s animated masterpiece, Spirited Away, which was released twenty years ago today. This is a film of endless imagination, and originality, in which many works that are either fantasy, or animation released since owe a debt.

Miyazaki had a career directing animated movies for more than two decades, setting standards with classics such as My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, and Porco Rosso. With the painstaking process of hand-drawn animation, he intended his 1997 epic Princess Mononoke to be his swan song at the age of 56. After the release of that film, he was vacationing with close friends of his, and he noticed how the adolescent daughter of one of them behaved as if she was in a world of her own. This would then inspire him to make a movie for 10-year-old girls, since he had made movies about teenagers and small children before. He would obviously take inspiration from Lewis Carroll, but would also take inspiration from Japanese folklore, and Shinto-Buddhism, while commenting on western consumerism. When released, the film out-grossed Titanic in Japan, but Disney would poorly market the movie in America, resulting in little attention at first. Then the movie would go on to win the Oscar for best animated feature.

Afterwards US audiences would seek out the movie, and other films from Miyazaki in the following decade, turning him into a cult figure. To watch the film as an adult is to be reminded of a child like innocence that we forget about in our daily lives, in which were so consumed by meaningless things such as commercialism, gossip, cynicism, and greed. That’s the same spell that the best of children’s fantasy such as Hans Christian Anderson, Walt Disney, and L. Frank Baum have given us for generations, and Miyazaki will have the same effect for future generations.  

Patrick McElroy is a movie writer and movie lover based in Los Angeles. Check out his other writing at: https://www.facebook.com/patrick.mcelroy.3726 or his IG: @mcelroy.patrick