Spirited Away: A Film Almost Without Villains

Yubaba shouts, threatens, and turns Chihiro’s parents into pigs within the first ten minutes. By any normal grammar of children’s cinema, she is the witch to be defeated. She never is, not in the way the setup promises. Neither is No-Face, who arrives looking like the film’s monster and spends most of his screen time being something closer to a lost guest who doesn’t know how to want things properly. This is the strangest thing Hayao Miyazaki does in Spirited Away, stranger than any of the spirits or gods that fill the bathhouse: he keeps building antagonists and then declining to use them as antagonists.

Work, not warfare

The film’s actual conflict is Chihiro learning to work, to be useful, to hold a name and a self inside an economy that would rather she forget both. Yubaba is the boss of that economy, not its evil. She is exacting, greedy, occasionally moved, and entirely uninterested in Chihiro’s death or destruction so long as the bathhouse runs. That is a more honest shape for menace than a fireball-throwing sorceress would have been, and it is why the film rewards adults who come to it expecting a fairy tale and leave having watched something closer to an account of labour, obligation, and the slow, unglamorous business of growing a spine.

Miyazaki’s animation carries this without strain. The bathhouse is drawn with the patience of someone who has actually thought about where the pipes go and how the soot sprites carry coal, and Chihiro’s face does more emotional work in stillness than most scripts manage in dialogue. Joe Hisaishi’s score never oversells a scene; it is content to let the imagery be strange without insisting the audience feel a particular way about it.

Who it is for, and where it strains

This is a film for people who like their magic administrative rather than epic, and for anyone who wants to see what a coming-of-age story looks like once you remove the villain from it and replace him with a supervisor. Older children will find it slower than the marketing around Studio Ghibli sometimes suggests; there is no chase-and-defeat structure to hang onto, and the middle stretch, all bathhouse routine and small transactions, asks for patience rather than delivering incident.

The honest reservation is that patience. Without a clear enemy to root against, some of the tension Miyazaki is after depends on the viewer caring about dignity and work for their own sake, which not everyone will. It is a deliberate choice, and largely a successful one, but it means Spirited Away rewards a second viewing more than it grips on the first. Watch it once for the world; watch it again to notice how carefully it withholds the villain you were promised.