The Spiriting Away of Chihiro: Miyazaki’s Global Heroine

From 1963 to present day, Hayao Miyazaki has recounted the Heroine’s Journey of strong girls and young women through his animated films, television series and manga. Theatrically released in 2001 his hand drawn masterpiece Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Sen and Chihiro’s Spiriting Away) became the highest grossing film in Japanese history. It was dubbed into English and released by Disney in 2002, and went on to win the Academy Award for what is still the only foreign film to have ever won the Best Animated Feature category. Many critics have ranked it as the best animated film ever made. It’s a coming of age fantasy written and directed by Miyazaki and animated by his Studio Ghibli. It’s the Heroine’s Journey of 10-year-old Chihiro Ogina who is on her way to moving to a new home when she’s sidetracked into the Shinto spirit world of folklore. Her parents are transformed into pigs by the witch Yubaba, and Chihiro must find a way, as she works in Yubaba’s bathhouse to free her parents and escape back to the human world. This essay examines and analyzes how Spirited Away follows the 10-stage model that Maureen Murdock describes in her book Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness. Murdock was a student of Campbell’s and came to believe through her work with women in therapy that his model of the Hero’s Journey didn’t acknowledge the psychological-spiritual aspects of a women’s journey. It argues that Miyazaki and his male dominated studio didn’t follow the Joseph Campbell model of The Hero’s Journey by simply telling a Shero’s journey or one that replaces the male protagonist with a female one, but that he celebrates the psycho-spiritual journey of Chihiro that Murdock outlines.