This turns out to be an old-fashioned light pole that is hopping along on one foot. In the distant forest they see a light approaching. There is a scene where the heroine and her companion get off a train in the middle of a swamp. Has any film ever contained more different kinds of beings that we have never seen anywhere before? Miyazaki's imagination never rests. The story of 'Spirited Away' has been populated with limitless creativity. But Miyazaki gives his bathhouse his complexity of a real place, which possesses attributes whether or not the immediate story requires them. It would have been quicker and easier to show just a bridge and a doorway. Notice how much of the bathhouse you can see. Mikayazi and his colleagues care enough to lavish as much energy on the less significant parts of the frame. That's what I mean by generosity and love. Most people watching the movie will simply read those areas of the screen as 'movement.' But if we happen to look, things are really happening there. It is realistic, changing, detailed motion. And it isn't the repetitive motion of much animation, in which the only idea is simply to show a figure moving. It would be easier to suggest them as vaguely moving presences, but Miyazaki takes care to include many figures we recognize. The central action and necessary characters supply all that is actually needed, but watching from the windows and balconies of the bathhouse are many of its occupants. 'We take handmade cell animation and digitize it in order to enrich the visual look,' he told me in 2002, 'but everything starts with the human hand drawing.'Ĭonsider a scene in 'Spirited Away' where his young heroine stands on a bridge leading away from the magical bathhouse in which much of the movie is set. But he personally draws thousands of frames by hand.

Miyazaki began his career in that style, but he is a realist and has permitted the use of computers for some of the busywork. 'Spirited Away' is surely one of the finest of all animated films, and it has its foundation in the traditional bedrock of animation, which is frame-by-frame drawing.

Spirited away eng dub