Miyazaki Madness, Part 9: Why "Spirited Away" is my favorite movie

Masterpieces don't come more towering than this

On Thursdays, I’m publishing reviews of classic movies, including pieces that have never appeared online before taken from my book 200 Reviews, available now in Paperback or on Kindle (which you should really consider buying, because it’s an awesome collection!). In this series, we are examining the filmography of my all-time favorite movie director - and newly minted two-time Oscar winner with his win for The Boy and the Heron - Hayao Miyazaki! We will be looking at all of his theatrical feature films along with the movies he wrote but did not direct, for a total of 15 weeks of Miyazaki Madness! The series continues today with my favorite movie ever, 2001’s Spirited Away. Enjoy…

Spirited Away

2001, Dir. Hayao Miyazaki

Originally written September 26^th, 2023 for the book 200 Reviews

“What’s your favorite film?” is a difficult-bordering-on-impossible question, but if you’re in a position to regularly be asked it, you might as well have an answer. For a long time now, mine has been Hayao Miyazaki’s 2001 masterpiece Spirited Away, and it has always felt like a good and honest one. Few movies mean as much to me, and few have impacted my thinking on the medium and its boundaries – and, thus, my life and work in and around cinema – as much as Spirited Away.

And yet, somehow, I have never written about this film at any real length. I’ve given lectures on it, I’ve talked about it on podcasts, I’ve brought it up in a million contexts – but I realized, when putting this book together and finding I had reviews of every other Hayao Miyazaki feature, some published and some not, sitting in my archives, that Spirited Away was, ironically, the odd film out. Every time I’ve sat down to actually write about Spirited Away, to put my feelings about my favorite movie into words, I have found the blank screen before me impossibly daunting, a mountain I cannot figure out where to start climbing.

This isn’t just because I love the film so immensely, though that is of course part of it. What’s really challenging is that Spirited Away is as big a movie as I have ever seen – not in terms of length or scale or budget, but in terms of density, in the sheer number of ideas and emotions packed into it, in the way that it feels like a slightly different film every time I go back to it, always unfolding and opening up to me in new and surprising ways. It is both amusing and serendipitous that this film came out the same year as Mulholland Drive, a film that occupies a similar position in David Lynch’s filmography as Spirited Away does in Hayao Miyazaki’s; neither is their respective director’s ‘final’ movie, but each comes far enough along in their career that it feels like both a breakthrough and a culmination, a film where the auteur managed a complete and total expression of their singular, inimitable vision of the world through film, one so vast and all-encompassing, so limitless in what it expresses, that lovers of their work will never stop grappling with it. Everything that is David Lynch is tucked somewhere inside Mulholland Drive, and everything that is Hayao Miyazaki is hiding around a corner in Spirited Away. These are my favorite films by my two favorite living directors, and they are totalizing, grand, epochal works, the kinds of movies that will take more than one generation or one lifetime for the artform of cinema and the culture surrounding it to really wrap their heads around.