Spirited Away

Spirited Away follows Chihiro, a reluctant girl whose family stumbles into an abandoned park that turns out to be a gateway to a world of spirits. Her parents are transformed into pigs, and to survive she takes work in a vast bathhouse run by a witch who strips her of her name. To find her way home she must hold on to who she is while navigating a landscape of appetite, greed, and transformation.

The film reads as a passage through the unconscious: the loss of the name stages the threat to identity, and the strange figures Chihiro meets externalise the tasks of separation and growing up. It offers a rich text on dream logic, on how a child works through fear by facing it in disguised form, and on the recovery of self. It won the Golden Bear at the 2002 Berlin International Film Festival.