《千与千寻》为什么如此经典What Makes Spirited Away a Classic

Children are not something their parents own. They have to learn the rules of this world and discover the beauty inside their own hearts.

Spirited Away is a fairy tale that tells a real story unfolding right beside our children.

1: The Parents

The parents are ordinary city people, fairly wrapped up in their own pleasure. To them, life is a set of rules — adapting to other people's rules, and making other people adapt to theirs.

Dad likes to drive fast, so Mom and Chihiro just have to put up with it. Mom likes to take in the scenery at her leisure, so Chihiro isn't allowed to cling tightly to her hand. They want to pass through that eerie tunnel; if Chihiro doesn't want to follow, she can just stay in the car. What Chihiro actually thinks, they have no interest in hearing. She's only a little kid — what does she understand?

Their kind of parenting brings no joy, and so the light goes out of Chihiro's eyes. Dad says this spot is lovely, Mom says that spot is lovely; their eyes are fixed only on the sights outside, never on how lonely their own child is. A child's heart is innocent — Chihiro grows sad at a withered flower, frightened at a stone statue — but her parents' reactions are so flat. They've given up on connecting with their child, and missed the wonderful chance to do so.

Parenting, to them, means keeping the child from causing them trouble. And in that they succeed: when they gorge themselves at an unattended food stall, Chihiro doesn't cry, doesn't shout — she can only quietly walk away by herself. Her parents surely think: what a willful child Chihiro is. Yet it's precisely that willfulness that keeps Chihiro from being turned, along with them, into a fat-headed pig. As for being well-behaved — Chihiro at least knows that you don't touch other people's things without the owner's permission. On that count alone, she's already a cut above her own parents.

On that ghostly, uncanny street, her parents are turned into pigs for greedily devouring food offered to the gods. Chihiro has to look after herself. Behind this scene lies one of Miyazaki's recurring themes: adults, undone by their own flaws, are destined to be cast off by society, and the only thing children can lean on is themselves.

2: Friends

Once you step out the door, a child isn't alone. There will be the paper birds hunting her, and there will be Haku, who helps her. Mom and Dad always said don't talk to strangers — but if Mom and Dad have both turned into pigs, then the only ones she can trust and lean on are strangers. Haku holds out a pill, and Chihiro remembers her mother saying that people only give you drugs to daze you, to make you do whatever they want. Faced with a lonely little girl, every man has three feet of drool hanging from his mouth.

Chihiro doesn't want it, but when she reaches out to push it away, her hand passes straight through Haku's body — and only then does she realize she's really in trouble this time, that she really does need help from someone else. In the instant she opens her mouth, she learns to trust, and discovers that the seed of friendship was buried in her heart all along.

Running alongside Haku, crossing the bridge, holding her breath, Chihiro comes to know that friendship is held right there in her own hands. Even though she gasps a small breath out of shock, her friend still keeps a tight grip on her. Racing past those monsters, ducking into a little hut, she doesn't forget to comfort herself: "You did really well."

From then on, Chihiro understands that a friend is someone who doesn't lose their temper — someone who forgives, tolerates, and encourages.

3: Kamaji

The iron law of the bathhouse is that everyone must work. Don't work, and you turn into a pig. This is a portrait of our own age: turning into a pig means an easy way of life, and people who chase the easy way are everywhere. They want the "shortcut," they want to enjoy life — forgetting that without sweat and dreams, life is no longer life.

Even work doesn't come easily. In the boiler room no one pays her any mind; no one believes she can do the job. When, with tremendous effort, she finally gets a lump of coal into the furnace, the little soot sprites hauling coal go on collective strike, protesting that this human has come to steal their rice bowl.

Still, by her sheer diligence Chihiro wins over Kamaji. Though he can't take her in himself, he introduces her to Lin. Chihiro rushes off in a flustered hurry, only to be scolded by Lin: Kamaji looked after you like that, and you can't even say thank you?

Children are always so clumsy and scatterbrained — but in the middle of someone's scolding, she learns her manners.

4: Yubaba

Lin tells her to go find Yubaba and sign a contract. Chihiro seems to have grown up: hiding behind the plump, white radish spirit, she isn't even that afraid anymore, and stepping out of the elevator, she actually gives the radish spirit a respectful nod. It really does look like Chihiro has learned some manners.

Facing the empty corridor, thinking that her fate is about to be decided right here, her heart fills with unease.

Three big green disembodied heads bounce along the floor — can heads be kept as pets, too? But she hasn't come here to sightsee; she's come to fight for work and survival. Chihiro says boldly, "Please let me work here" — and then finds that Yubaba has sealed her mouth shut with magic.

Yubaba rails at her: "You're willful, you're a crybaby, you're dim-witted — so useless, what on earth can you do?" But Chihiro knows she has to survive; only by surviving does she have any chance to save her parents. And so she swallows all her fear, doesn't let a single tear fall, and only pleads again and again, "I want to work here" — running through the hopeless dark on the strength of the conviction in her heart alone.

In our world, what those capable, ambitious, dream-filled young people lack most is exactly this kind of persistence. The moment work stops going their way, they want to job-hop — but wherever they hop, there's the same lack of opportunity. Those middle managers can't stand to see a newcomer outshine them, and the young dare not hold on for their dreams to the very end. They dare to quit, but not to go over their boss's head, not to raise a storm across the whole company. Chihiro, this little child, held on all the way through — and in the end she won the chance to work.

5: Pigs

When she signs the contract, her own name is taken from her; from then on Chihiro only remembers that she's called "Sen." Haku and Lin are good to her, but in front of others they put on a cold, distant face, and it stings Chihiro, as if she were somehow beneath them — as if caring about her openly, in front of other people, were something shameful.

Then she thinks again: those greedy eaters were all turned into pigs. In this society, humans hold a status not much above a pig's, don't they? Think of how people treat pigs in real life — Mom would surely pinch her nose and grumble about the stench — which is about how she herself is being treated now. The only thing Chihiro can do is work in earnest, to make these ghosts and gods see that not all humans are greedy like pigs, that there are good children who work hard too.

Haku takes her to see her parents. In the pigpen, Mom and Dad lie there without moving. Chihiro thinks they've fallen ill, but Haku says they've just eaten too much and gone to sleep. Chihiro yells, furious, "Stop eating — you'll be slaughtered!" Seeing her parents reduced to this, Chihiro grows all the more resolute: I will never become a person like Mom and Dad!

She wants to be like her friend Haku, warm-hearted in helping others. Haku helped her get her own name back, and from then on she knows how good a thing it is to reclaim your true self. Later, whenever she meets people who have lost their own hearts, she is determined to try to help.

When No-Face stands all alone out in the rain, Chihiro leaves a door open for him.

6: The Rotten Grown-up

Work really is bitter. A ten-year-old girl, however hard she tries, is no match for the grown-ups.

Where Chihiro outdoes the others is probably in giving it her whole heart. When the rotten grown-up comes to bathe, everyone else catches the foul stench and shrinks far away — but Chihiro forces herself to stand right beside him and take the money from his hand. Sticky, slimy sludge falls onto her hand too; Chihiro breaks out in goosebumps, her hair standing on end. But she grits it out and doesn't leave.

To wash the customer down, Chihiro drags her legs through knee-deep sludge; the stench from his mouth washes over her, and she still stretches out desperately to pull the switch, even tumbling into the tub herself. By accident she discovers a thorn lodged in the customer's body, so she dives underwater to tie a rope around it and gets everyone to pull together. Amid the heave-ho, out comes a battered old bicycle, out comes all sorts of garbage, out comes heaps of sludge — it turns out this customer is a river god, polluted by humans into this shape.

A clear, limpid river god polluted into a "rotten grown-up" — that, too, is a fairy tale only our own age could produce.

The river god leaves gold dust on the ground, leaves a pill for little Sen, and departs with a great laugh. Precisely because little Sen's effort carries the hidden meaning of "atoning on humanity's behalf," she earns everyone's respect — even Yubaba praises her.

7: No-Face

No-Face conjures up gold, and when a frog comes over to grab it, No-Face swallows him in one gulp. Everyone scrambles to bring him fine wine and fine food — only Chihiro shakes her head at the gold in his hand. But when the deputy manager says Chihiro doesn't know her place and needs to be taught a good lesson, No-Face swallows him and a bath-worker down in one gulp too.

To be faceless is to be unable to find yourself — unable to find your own joys and sorrows. To conjure gold is to do it because others like it, to bend and fawn to please. A person with no self can only find happiness in other people's praise and flattery. And swallowing the frog is disgust — at himself as much as at others: I shouldn't be this base, and you shouldn't be even baser than me.

This kind of person is raised by the parents of modern society. From an early age they teach the child to obey, to curry favor, to worship money — everything except what it means to be a true self.

Modern people have a common affliction: only spending money makes them feel confident. Their confidence lives not in their own hearts, but in the respectful looks in other people's eyes. The bathhouse's rule is money-worship — whoever has money is God — and that's exactly the common affliction of the modern enterprise. Businesses exist to serve ordinary people, and what ordinary people need is not just goods, but respect and care.

Chihiro cares about No-Face, and so she earns his respect. The deputy manager only cared about people's money, never offering a customer his true heart — and so he was swallowed whole.

Through this small thread of plot, Miyazaki wants children to understand the rules of the competition in the society to come. What's contested isn't who flatters best, but who is most sincere, who cares the most.

When the grown-ups all say business is hard these days, Miyazaki is quietly telling them: there's a little something wrong with the way you do things.

8: Friends

Haku is hurt. My friend once saved me, and I must save my friend — so she summons her courage, runs along a pipe suspended in midair, then climbs an iron ladder floor by floor, and finally reaches Yubaba's room.

Here the giant baby wants her to play with him, the three heads want to shove Haku into the pit, and the paper birds wheel about trying to peck at him. Chihiro really can't cope. Luckily Zeniba, Yubaba's sister, appears through the paper bird beside Chihiro and turns the giant baby into a mouse, the paper birds into a crow, and the three big heads into copies of the baby. But she, too, has come to kill Haku, and Chihiro and Haku can only tumble helplessly down into the abyss of the pit.

They reach the boiler room, and Kamaji says Haku is about to die. Chihiro has no other way; she can only take the river god's pill — the one meant to save her parents — and feed Haku half. In that moment, Chihiro sees her own heart clearly: her friend matters more to her than her parents. Her parents only cared about themselves as they turned into pigs, leaving her all alone; her friend, at the moment she needed help most, saved her life.

Haku spits out Zeniba's magic seal. There's nothing left for Chihiro to do here — she has to return the seal to its rightful owner. From the moment her parents turned into pigs, she'd committed it deep to memory: you don't take what belongs to others. Even though her own friend went to enormous lengths to steal it.

But Chihiro believes that a person should help a friend make up for a mistake, not shove that friend deeper into the abyss of error. Friends are meant to walk the right road.

9: Hope

No-Face throws the bathhouse into chaos, and Yubaba wants to make Chihiro the scapegoat. And Chihiro's only weapon is the love and care in her heart. No-Face has forgotten his own home, forgotten his own mother and father; he doesn't even have a voice of his own, and has nowhere left to go.

This person needs help, and Chihiro can't just ignore him, so she pushes the remaining half of the river god's pill into his mouth. Half a pill — the last hope of saving her parents. But No-Face is the one she brought into the bathhouse; he needs her help. Out of love, out of care, Chihiro genuinely aches for him, and gives away all she has left.

And so No-Face begins to vomit — vomiting up all the delicacies, vomiting up the people he ate, vomiting up flattery, money-worship, vanity, all the common afflictions of modern society, retching them out completely clean. Only then can he follow Chihiro to Zeniba's and lend her a hand.

Zeniba asks Chihiro: do you know what the seal you're returning to me is for? Chihiro shakes her head. "I only know it's important to you. I'm apologizing to you on Haku's behalf."

This is a child's kindness — a treasure held in every child's heart, and the hope of this world's future.

10: A Journey Full of Expectation

Chihiro helps Haku recover his name — Kohaku River — and Haku too remembers how the two of them first met years ago. Smiling, hand in hand, they fly through the air, tears seeping from the corners of their eyes and drifting up into the sky on the wind.

By the rules of the magic world, Chihiro must pick out her parents from among twelve pigs. They look exactly alike; none of them has the warmth and tenderness she holds in her mind's image of her parents. In her heart, Chihiro pictures how her parents would look if they had suffered and been made better — and so she says: they aren't here.

The magic contract is broken from then on. Chihiro forces herself not to look back, and keeps running until she catches up with her parents, only to find that they're exactly as before — selfish, cold. Only this time, Chihiro is no longer the same. She knows how she ought to live.

At the film's end, Chihiro boards a train alone. Miyazaki said: compared with No-Face's rampage or the battle with Yubaba, what matters most for a child is boarding a train alone and setting off on a journey full of expectation.

Reposted from Douban — I felt I couldn't write anything better.