Spirited Away hidden details and meanings you might miss

Spirited Away hidden details: made for real children

Miyazaki conceived the film for the daughters of friends who visited his mountain cabin each summer, including the daughter of associate producer Seiji Okuda. He felt the magazines they read only offered romance and wanted to give them a heroine they could look up to.

It was his third proposal; the first two were turned down. The finished story was so long that the hardest task was cutting it, as it would have run over three hours.

The real places behind the spirit world

The bathhouse drew on one in Miyazaki's hometown, which had a small mysterious door that sparked his imagination, and on the Dōgo Onsen. The Meiji-era buildings were inspired by the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum, and the Notoya Ryokan in Yamagata was another reference.

Many fans believe the Taiwanese town of Jiufen was the model. Miyazaki has denied it.

Haku and the lost river

Haku turns out to be the spirit of the Kohaku River, which was filled in and built over with apartments. Chihiro once fell into it as a small child. He has lost his home and his name, which ties the film to Miyazaki's concern about development destroying nature.

The stink spirit is a polluted river

The huge, foul guest Chihiro bathes is not a stink spirit at all but a river spirit choked with rubbish. Chihiro pulls out a huge amount of rubbish, including tyres and a bicycle, and the cleaned spirit departs.

The scene is one of the film's clearest messages about how people treat nature, and it shows Chihiro earning respect in the bathhouse for the first time.

• No-Face takes on the traits of whoever is around him, which is why he turns greedy in the gold-hungry bathhouse.
• Chihiro's parents become pigs after eating without asking, a scene Miyazaki linked to Japan's bubble economy.
• Yubaba's Western rooms contrast with the traditional Japanese bathhouse below.

Why Chihiro loses her name

Yubaba controls her workers by taking their names. Chihiro becomes Sen, and Haku warns her that forgetting her real name would mean never going home. Critics read this as a symbolic death and rite of passage, and as a picture of how work can strip away identity.

Most characters were hand-drawn, with computer animation used selectively. Joe Hisaishi wrote the score, performed by the New Japan Philharmonic.

The film's success matched its ambition. It shared the Golden Bear at the 2002 Berlin International Film Festival and became the first hand-drawn, non-English-language film to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. It grossed about $396 million worldwide, and in Japan it earned ¥31.68 billion, a record that stood for 19 years. Those numbers matter because the film was built on such small, personal details.

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