Spirited Away (Le Voyage de Chihiro): what age is it for? 10 alone, 9 with a parent

The codes, for parents

A ten-year-old girl whose parents have been turned into pigs must work in a bathhouse for spirits to save them, and begins by losing her name.

The lexicon

• KamiThe Japanese spirits who come to bathe. They are neither gods nor monsters in the Western sense: every river, every radish, every mountain has one, and they deserve the respect owed to a customer.
• The sentô (bathhouse)The great red building where almost all the film takes place. Public baths are an institution in Japan, with changing rooms, buckets and rules; here the clientele is supernatural.
• Yubaba and the contractThe mistress of the bathhouse, a witch with an oversized head. She hires by having you sign a contract and stealing part of your name: that is how she holds people, and it is the film's real stake.
• Losing your nameChihiro becomes Sen. Forgetting your own name means never being able to go home. The whole story hangs on that thread, and it is what a child remembers best.
• No-Face (Kaonashi)The masked, silent spirit who follows Chihiro. He hands out gold to be liked, swallows those who accept it, and exists only through what is offered to him. He is neither good nor evil.
• HakuThe boy who helps Chihiro and turns into a dragon. He too has lost his name: he was the spirit of a river that was filled in to build flats.
• The stink spiritThe mud-covered customer Chihiro washes, out of whom pours a mountain of rubbish, a bicycle included. He is a polluted river spirit, and the scene is an ecology lesson without a word of explanation.
• Work as the conditionIn this world, whoever does not work becomes an animal. The rule is set out at once, and it explains why the little girl scrubs floors for half the film.

How the world works

The film does not separate the good from the wicked: Yubaba is harsh but keeps her word, No-Face is dangerous because he was badly welcomed, and nobody is punished at the end. There is no final battle and no victory. The heroine gets through by working, keeping her word and remembering, which disconcerts children used to action films. The rules of the spirit world are never explained: you learn them alongside Chihiro, through the mistakes she makes.

The references

• Hayao Miyazaki wrote the film for a friend's ten-year-old daughter, having decided no film spoke to girls that age without turning them into princesses.
• The baths, the lanterns and the spirits come from Shinto folklore, in which the world is full of entities you greet; that is not an invention of the film's.
• It is the only non-English-language animated film to have won the Oscar for best animated feature, and it remained the highest-grossing film in Japan for a decade.
• The disappearance of rivers under concrete, which explains Haku's story, was a real issue in 1980s Japanese urban planning.
• No-Face has become a common costume and a figure children draw without always knowing where it comes from, and images from the film circulate online as symbols of calm or melancholy. The studio long refused any merchandise based on that character.

Why they love it

• Chihiro starts out sulky, frightened and difficult, like a real ten-year-old, and becomes brave only because she has no choice: children recognise themselves more than in a gifted heroine.
• The film is frightening without a wicked monster: it is strangeness that unsettles, not menace.
• Many images stay for years, the run along the rails through water, the silent train, the white dragon.

Three questions to ask

• Yubaba takes the names of those she employs: why does a name matter?
• No-Face gives gold to everyone so as to be liked: does it work?
• At the end, Chihiro must not look back: would you have managed?