Parallel world Manga Artist

Chapter 345: Spirited Away

This was not the first time a Shirogane-sensei animated film had released in Japan. Theatre chains had long since learned the specific preferences of his fan base: a group of young people who treated cinema premieres as anime conventions with assigned seating.

Many theatres in first-tier cities opened as early as six in the morning to accommodate the more energetic members of this demographic.

Although the premiere was scheduled for ten o’clock, several major theatres in Tokyo were already crowded by eight. Famous cosplayers had constructed costumes based on raw images leaked during the promotional campaign. They were not entirely certain what the plot involved.

They cosplayed first and asked questions afterward.

The theatres did not open early out of goodwill alone. Nearly half of a cinema’s revenue came from selling popcorn, drinks, and snacks. People arriving at the theatre at eight in the morning to occupy space and generate atmosphere had no objection to paying theatre prices for breakfast. The economics were straightforward for everyone involved.

Starting from the early hours of July 15th, fans across Japan began posting the situation at their local theatres online.

Several major theatres in Tokyo and other first-tier cities had arranged direct collaborations with Rei: Spirited Away setting manuals and concept posters could be redeemed at the counter using online purchase confirmation codes. Small gifts. Enough to make the physical experience of attending the premiere feel different from streaming.

At 9:30 in the morning, Nana Aoyama arrived at a theatre near her home and stood with her mouth open for several seconds.

She had just finished her university entrance examinations and submitted her college applications. Her chosen major was Animation Production at the university where Shirogane-sensei had studied.

Her post-graduation goal was already decided: enter Illumination Production Company. This clarity of direction came not only from being a committed anime fan but also from growing up with a father who worked there.

He was an ordinary mid-level employee, but the family’s financial situation had changed significantly since he had joined Illumination Production Company four years ago. His income had increased several times over.

The mortgage that had been projected to run twenty years could now be paid off in two or three more at his current salary level.

She had attended anime conventions and events with her father many times. Somehow the scene in front of her still managed to surprise her.

Almost every significant figure in the ACGN fan community must be in their respective cities right now, watching the Spirited Away premiere.

She looked around and identified several well-known ACGN cosplayers who were livestreaming and photographing simultaneously, while groups of peers gathered to exchange prints and merchandise.

It is a pity Dad was invited to the internal staff collective viewing event with Shirogane-sensei. I do not know if he will manage to get the autograph I requested this morning.

According to her father, who had worked on the film as Art Director, Spirited Away was genuinely exceptional. More interesting than Demon Slayer and Your Name. He said this about everything Shirogane-sensei made, which had somewhat diluted the impact of the statement over the years.

But this time he had said it while already fantasising about whether he would have the opportunity to accept an award on stage when the film swept the animation prizes.

That level of excitement from her father was a different category of endorsement.

If Spirited Away really does sweep the animation awards and Dad appears on television holding a trophy, my university classmates will be extremely envious.

A small mysterious smile appeared on her face at the thought. Several nearby attendees with cameras found reasons to look in her direction. There were plenty of cosplayers in elaborate makeup. The expression of a girl not wearing any of it carried a different quality in an ACGN fan setting.

She collected herself and went to the automated machine to redeem her ticket.

She had booked within thirty minutes of online sales opening. Even so, in a central Tokyo theatre, the best seats for the premiere had sold out in under thirty minutes. Her seat was not in a corner, which counted as a reasonable outcome.

Ticket in hand, she stopped in front of the large Spirited Away promotional poster.

A girl in a white and light green shirt walked forward in the image. Behind her, a boy dressed in a style that suggested an older era, who bore a notable resemblance to Akira Toya from Hikaru no Go, watched her without looking away.

No romance. As if anyone believes that. Nana Aoyama smiled at the poster. Even if you intended to depict friendship, Shirogane-sensei, you cannot stop fans from reading what they choose to read.

Inside the screening room, several hundred seats were filling steadily as ten o’clock approached.

Nana entered and looked around. A screening room that could hold three to four hundred people. Even the front-row seats were occupied, which meant either genuine enthusiasm or a complete sell-out situation. Probably both.

Sitting in the front row and looking up for two hours will produce cervical spondylosis. She located her own seat, which was not in the front row, and sat down with a sense of mild relief.

She opened her backpack. Pre-packaged popcorn and drinks purchased from the mall downstairs on the way over, along with a selection of additional snacks.

The seven-yen popcorn and three-yen drinks from the mall were a different category of value from the thirty-yen bucket and fifteen-yen cup available at the theatre counter. She was a pragmatist. There was no particular reason to be overcharged for the same product.

In under ten minutes the entire screening room was nearly full.

Then, at a specific moment, the theatre lights went dark.

No opening credits. No studio logos running for thirty seconds. In a single beat, a brilliant visual appeared on the giant screen: a hand-drawn scene of extraordinary detail, rendered with a care that was visible from the first frame.

The audience went quiet. The people still on their phones turned them off without being asked.

A soft piano BGM began to play. Slightly melancholic. Within seconds it had pulled Nana Aoyama’s attention entirely into the film.

Chihiro, a sixth-grade girl whose parents had taken a new job requiring a move to the countryside, sat in the back seat of the family car using silence as her protest. The flowers her classmates had given her when she left had already begun to wilt. She only registered sadness when she noticed this.

"The first time I received flowers, they were parting flowers. That’s so sad."

The complaint landed immediately. Nana felt the immersion arrive without effort.

As the car drove away, the full view of the town appeared. The piano and the visuals combined to produce a quality of gentle melancholy that settled in the chest without demanding anything from the audience. One minute into the film and the visual standard had already produced a visible response in the screening room.

The BGM might have been even better than the images.

The plot of Spirited Away was simple in a way that Your Name had not been.

Your Name had required the audience to track a time-travel structure and its implications. Spirited Away had no complex settings at all. Parents relocating for work. Forced school transfer. Father getting lost and finding a tunnel entrance deep in the mountains.

Out of curiosity, both parents insisting on going inside to explore despite Chihiro’s protests.

Then, on the other side of the tunnel at dusk, a bustling food market. Full of food. No chefs, no stall owners, nobody visible at all.

The tired parents, ignoring Chihiro’s objections, sat down and began eating without permission.

Ten minutes in and the plot was, objectively, quite plain.

The audience had patience. Shirogane-sensei’s works were always like this. Your Name had spent twenty minutes establishing its time-swap premise before the story properly began. You watched and waited and trusted the construction.

Chihiro did not eat. She felt something was wrong and wandered instead.

Then the plot turned.

The further she explored, the more wrong everything became. The silence of the market acquired a different quality. The emptiness stopped reading as peaceful and started reading as waiting.

On a bridge, a boy appeared. White clothing in an older style. The resemblance to Akira Toya from Hikaru no Go was present in a way that was impossible to ignore.

"You must not come here. You must go back before dark."

The sunlight dropped below the horizon.

As darkness came in, the buildings of the market lit up one by one. The lanterns igniting across the architecture read less like illumination and more like eyes opening. The atmosphere shifted completely in the span of seconds.

The boy told Chihiro to run while he stalled for time.

Night arrived. Non-human shapes appeared on the streets. The empty food stalls that had been abandoned a moment ago were suddenly occupied by entities that were eating. Chihiro ran back to where her parents had been sitting and grabbed them, trying to leave.

When the two figures turned around, two massive pig heads covered in grease looked back at her.

Horror and fantasy and a specific kind of visual magnificence, all present simultaneously.

Nana’s fists had clenched without her deciding that.

The path back. Where was the path back. The grassland they had walked through to reach this place had become a vast open sea. Even Chihiro’s body was beginning to turn translucent, flickering at the edges as though she was being erased from the space she was standing in.

Spirits and creatures disembarked from ships in the distance.

Is this a horror film, Nana thought, blinking.

Then Haku appeared again. Found Chihiro huddled in a corner and fading. Brought her food and made her eat it to stop the disappearing. Told her to go to the Bathhouse and find work, that this was the only path to staying real in this world.

He guided her through: past the pig farm, across a bridge where she had to hold her breath to avoid being detected, through a series of increasingly strange encounters, to Kamaji below and then up through the Bathhouse to the top floor where Yubaba operated behind an enormous desk with her giant baby son and her sharp, mercenary intelligence.

Chihiro asked for work. She got it, on terms that were not favourable.

Nana exhaled slowly.

The rhythm of this film.

It was not mentally demanding. It moved with a specific quality of ease that did not mean shallowness. The plot had rises and falls without ever becoming exhausting to follow. Interesting without being tiring.

Chihiro herself was a girl with genuine flaws. She had a temper. She complained constantly. She was timid. Her physical stamina was poor.

The film had placed a character like this into an enormous crisis and was watching her navigate it, watching her learn that work earned food, that strength came from somewhere unexpected, that relationships with other people were built through the accumulation of small reliable choices.

A growth story with fantasy elements. A girl full of flaws becoming something more than she started as.

And underneath this, threaded through every scene, small lessons delivered without being announced.

Once you started helping the Soot Sprites carry coal, you did not leave the job half-finished or others would lose their work and you would carry that consequence.

Interfering in someone else’s situation with good intentions and causing them to lose their position was still harm regardless of the intention.

A Stink Spirit arrived at the Bathhouse, and the terrible task of dealing with it fell to Chihiro. But the Stink Spirit was a River God, not filth by nature: everything foul about him was the accumulated waste that humans had dumped into his river over generations. The horror of him was human-made.

No-Face, let into the Bathhouse out of a small kindness, had no desires of his own initially. But tainted by the greed of the environment he had entered, his desires swelled beyond any control.

The film kept doing this. Kept delivering observations through images and situations rather than through dialogue explaining what they meant.

The feeling of watching this was different from any of Shirogane-sensei’s previous works.

But it was good.

Nana felt that the emotional fluctuations while watching were not as intense as Your Name or Five Centimeters Per Second had produced in her.

But she kept being moved by small things.

Haku taking Chihiro to the pigpen during the day to visit her parents, who had become pigs, while she was crying. Chihiro transforming bit by bit through hard work, going from a human employee that everyone in the Bathhouse resented to someone who kept performing small acts of genuine merit.

Haku’s complicated relationship with his master Yubaba, the loyalty and the conflict running simultaneously underneath every scene they shared.

Nana had lost track of time without noticing.

Watching Chihiro in the animation prepare to set out for Zeniba’s place to return the seal Haku had stolen, hoping Zeniba would be willing to spare him, Nana’s chest was tight with the specific anxiety of caring about what happened next.

She looked around the screening room.

Not a single person was on their phone. Not a single person was whispering to their neighbour. Middle-aged people in their forties and fifties. Children aged a few years old up through teenagers. Every age present in the room, and every one of them with their eyes wide open and fixed on the screen.

This was completely different from watching any other film. No matter how good a film was, there were always people who disliked parts of it, found sections boring, drifted away and checked their phones during the stretches that did not hold them. Every film lost some portion of its audience at some point.

Spirited Away, at least in this screening room, had not lost anyone.

Men, women, young, old: all of them absorbed in Chihiro. Watching this girl full of flaws endure enormous fear and go to Yubaba to beg for work in order to save her parents. Taking on the Stink Spirit bathing job that nobody else would touch.

Receiving the River Spirit Dumpling from the River God as a prize, and then using that dumpling to save Haku when nothing else was working.

In just over an hour, the girl that much of the audience had found slightly irritating at the start had become someone they were invested in.

The transformation had not been announced. It had simply happened, accumulated through small choices made under pressure, and the audience had accumulated feeling for her without being directed to.

This was not like Your Name or Demon Slayer, where the emotional impact arrived in a concentrated wave when the plot reached its climax. This was a trickling stream that had been moving through the audience steadily the entire time, and they were already deep in it before they realised.

Yubaba’s craftiness. Zeniba’s warmth. The specific texture of every character in this world, none of them simple.

And then the scene that the film had been building toward without announcing it.

Zeniba’s observation: Haku’s injuries had not healed because Yubaba’s curse was still active. But the curse had already been completely broken by the River Spirit Dumpling that Chihiro had given him. It was gone. The only thing preventing his recovery had already been removed.

Outside Zeniba’s house, the White Dragon descended.

Haku, in his true form, had come to take Chihiro back to the Bathhouse. To take her to the confrontation with Yubaba that would decide whether her parents were returned to her.

High in the sky, moving through the air together, Chihiro remembered.

She remembered why she and Haku knew each other. The thing neither of them had been able to recall. The reason that had been present underneath every scene they shared without either of them being able to name it.

Haku was a River God. The god of a small stream that had long since dried up, filled in by humans for construction, built over and forgotten.

His true name was the Kohaku River.

When Chihiro had fallen into that river as a small child, it was he who had carried her safely to the bank.

The dragon scales cracking layer by layer as he transformed from his dragon form into human form, both of them falling rapidly through the sky hand in hand, the memory arriving for both of them simultaneously at the moment of the fall.

Nana could not find words for what watching that scene produced in her.

Who says this is not love. This is more romantic than the most romantic scene in the most romantic film I have ever seen.

The film operated like a fairy tale and like a fable simultaneously. Children watching it saw a child’s world. Adults watching it saw an adult’s world. The things they responded to were different and all of them responded.

The two flawed children at the centre of the story: Chihiro became brave. Yubaba’s giant baby son, who had begun the film incapable of considering anyone outside himself, had learned consideration somewhere along the way, had something that resembled kindness growing in him by the end.

The film had done this without making it the point. It had simply let it happen in the margins while the main story moved forward.

Nana looked around the screening room one more time.

Every person in it was looking at the screen with eyes that caught the light.

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