Chihiro Ogino is ten years old, sulky about moving to a new town, and clinging to a bouquet of flowers that are already wilting. Twenty minutes into Spirited Away, her parents have been turned into pigs, she is trapped in a bathhouse for spirits, and the witch who runs it has stolen her name. The girl who started the film whining about not wanting to leave her old school must now navigate an alien world, rescue her parents, and recover her identity — armed with nothing except good manners and a stubbornness she did not know she had.

Losing Her Name Was Losing Herself

Yubaba — the witch who runs the bathhouse — takes Chihiro's name and replaces it with Sen. In the spirit world, names are identity. Lose your name and you forget who you are, becoming a permanent servant. Haku warns Chihiro to remember her real name. This is not a metaphor for anything. It is the thing itself: the experience of entering a new environment so overwhelming that you lose track of who you were before. Developmental psychologists at the University of Cambridge have studied how children navigate major transitions — new schools, new countries, family disruptions — and found that the children who maintain connection to their pre-transition identity show greater resilience. Chihiro remembers her name. That is how she survives.

She Works Her Way Out

Chihiro does not fight. She does not discover a hidden power. She does not receive a prophecy or a magic weapon. She gets a job in the bathhouse, learns the work, treats the spirits with respect, and earns her way to a position where she can negotiate her parents' release. The film's quiet insistence that labor — real, boring, difficult labor — is the mechanism of agency is radical for a children's film. Research on self-efficacy from Stanford University has shown that the experience of competence — successfully completing challenging tasks — is the single strongest builder of confidence in children. Chihiro does not believe in herself at the beginning. She believes in herself at the end because she has done hard things and survived them.

Miyazaki Made It for Ten-Year-Old Girls

Miyazaki has said that he made Spirited Away specifically for the ten-year-old daughters of friends, because he felt that the entertainment available to girls that age was either patronizing or sexualized. He wanted to show a girl who is not special, not chosen, not beautiful in a conventional sense, doing something extraordinary through nothing more than courage and decency. The film won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2003 and remains the highest-grossing film in Japanese box office history. Chihiro is on HoloDream. She is not special. She is brave anyway. That might be more useful to you than any superpower.