Spirited Away to Miyazaki Land

What happens when the surreal imagination of the world’s greatest living animator, Hayao Miyazaki, is turned into a theme park?

当世界上最伟大的（在世）动画师宫崎骏的超现实想象力变成主题公园时，你会看到什么？

By Sam Anderson

Feb. 14, 2023

As an American, I know what it feels like to arrive at a theme park. The totalizing consumerist embrace. The blunt-force, world-warping, escapist delight. I have known theme parks with entrance gates like international borders and ticket prices like mortgage payments and parking lots the size of Cleveland. I have been to Disney World, an alternate reality that basically occupies its own tax zone, with its own Fire Department and its own agriculture — a place where, before you’ve even entered, you see a 100-foot-tall electrical pole along the freeway with Mickey Mouse ears. This is a theme park’s job: to swallow the universe. To replace our boring, aimless, frustrating world with a new one made just for us.

作为美国人，我知道到达主题公园的感觉。全面的消费主义拥抱。直率的、扭曲世界的、逃避现实的喜悦。我知道主题公园的入口大门像国际边界，门票价格像抵押贷款和克利夫兰大小的停车场。我去过迪斯尼世界，这是一个基本上占据自己的税区、拥有自己的消防部门和自己的农业的另外一种现实——在这个地方，你甚至还没有进入，你就会看到一个 100 英尺高的电线杆长着米老鼠耳朵的高速公路。这是主题公园的工作：吞噬宇宙。用一个专为我们打造的新世界取代我们无聊、漫无目的、令人沮丧的世界。

Imagine my confusion, then, when I arrived at Ghibli Park, Japan’s long-awaited tribute to the legendary animation of Studio Ghibli.

想象一下当我到达吉卜力公园时我的困惑，这是日本期待已久的对吉卜力工作室传奇动画的致敬。

Like filmgoers all over the world, I had been fantasizing about a visit to Ghibli Park since the project was announced more than five years ago. I tracked the online rumors, inhaled the concept drawings, scrutinized the maps. Ghibli’s animation has always felt destined to be turned into a theme park. Hayao Miyazaki, the studio’s co-founder, is one of the all-time great imaginary world-builders — right up there with Lewis Carroll, Jim Henson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Charles Schulz, Maurice Sendak and composers of the Icelandic sagas. Even Miyazaki’s most fantastical creations — a castle with giant metal chicken legs, a yellow bus with the body of a cat — feel somehow thick and plausible and real.

和全世界的影迷一样，自五年多前该项目宣布以来，我一直幻想着参观吉卜力公园。我追踪网上的谣言，吸入设计图，仔细检查地图。一直觉得吉卜力的动画注定要变成主题公园。该工作室的联合创始人宫崎骏是有史以来最伟大的虚构世界建设者之一——与刘易斯·卡罗尔、吉姆·汉森、厄休拉·勒金、查尔斯·舒尔茨、莫里斯·森达克和冰岛传奇的作曲家齐名。即使是宫崎骏最奇幻的作品——一座有巨大金属鸡腿的城堡，一辆有猫身的黄色公共汽车——也给人一种厚重、可信和真实的感觉。

Miyazaki started Studio Ghibli in 1985, out of desperation, when he and his co-founders, Isao Takahata and Toshio Suzuki, couldn’t find a studio willing to put out their work. The films were brilliant but notoriously artsy, expensive, labor-intensive. Miyazaki is maniacally detail-obsessed. He agonizes over his children’s cartoons as if he were Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel. He will pour whole oceans of effort and time and money into the smallest effects: the way a jumping fish twists as it leaps, individual faces in a crowd reacting to an earthquake, the physics of tiles during a rooftop chase scene. Miyazaki insists that, although few viewers will be conscious of all this work, every viewer will feel it. And we do. Those tiny touches, adding up across the length of a film, anchor his fantasies in the actual world.

宫崎骏于 1985 年创办了吉卜力工作室，当时他和他的联合创始人高畑勋和铃木敏夫找不到愿意推出他们作品的工作室，这让他感到绝望。这些电影很精彩，但非常艺术化、昂贵、费力。宫崎骏非常注重细节。他为孩子们的卡通片苦恼不已，就好像他是米开朗基罗在画西斯廷教堂一样。他努力投入大量的精力、时间和金钱来制作最小的效果：跳跃的鱼在跳跃时扭曲的方式、人群中的个人面孔对地震的反应、屋顶追逐场景中瓷砖的物理特性。宫崎骏坚持认为，虽然很少有观众会意识到所有这些作品，但每个观众都会感受到。我们做到了。那些微小的触动，加起来贯穿一部电影的长度，将他的幻想锚定在现实世界中。

“Ghibli” is an Italian word, derived from Arabic, for a hot wind that blows across Libya. The plan was for the company to blow like a hot wind through the stagnant world of animation. It succeeded. For more than 35 years, Studio Ghibli has been the great eccentric juggernaut of anime, cranking out classic after odd classic: “Castle in the Sky” (1986), “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988), “Kiki’s Delivery Service” (1989), “Only Yesterday” (1991), “Princess Mononoke”(1997), “Spirited Away” (2001). In Japan, the release of a new Ghibli film is a national event, and the studio’s most popular characters are ubiquitous: plump Totoro, mysterious No Face, the grinning Cat Bus, googly-eyed soot sprites. As a kind of shorthand, Miyazaki is often called the Walt Disney of Japan.

“吉卜力”是意大利语，源自阿拉伯语，意为席卷利比亚的热风。计划是让公司像热风一样吹过停滞不前的动画世界。它成功了。 35 年多来，吉卜力工作室一直是动漫界的奇葩巨头，一部又一部古怪的经典作品： “天空之城” (1986), “我的邻居龙猫” (1988), “琪琪的送货服务” (1989), “仅限昨天” (1991), “幽灵公主” （1997）， “千与千寻” (2001)。在日本，一部新吉卜力电影的上映是一件全国性的大事，该工作室最受欢迎的角色无处不在：丰满的龙猫、神秘的无脸人、咧着嘴笑的猫巴士、瞪着眼睛的烟灰精灵。作为一种速记，宫崎骏通常被称为日本的沃尔特·迪斯尼。

I was dying to see, in person, how a Ghibli theme park might work. How could these surreal worlds possibly be translated into reality? What would it feel like to lose ourselves inside them?

我非常想亲眼看看吉卜力主题公园是如何运作的。这些超现实世界怎么可能转化为现实？迷失在其中会是什么感觉？

In November, when Ghibli Park finally opened, I made sure to get myself there. And so, after many years, and much traveling — at long last — I found myself stepping into the wonders of Ghibli Park.

11 月，当吉卜力公园终于开放时，我一定要去那里。因此，经过多年和多次旅行——终于——我发现自己步入了吉卜力公园的奇观。

Or did I? Did I find myself stepping into the wonders of Ghibli Park?

我真的步入了吉卜力公园的奇观吗？还是我发现自己步入了吉卜力公园的奇观？

My first impression was not awe or majesty or surrender or consumerist bliss. It was confusion. For a surprisingly long time after I arrived, I could not tell whether or not I had arrived. There was no security checkpoint, no ticket booths, no ambient Ghibli soundtrack, no mountainous Cat Bus statue. Instead, I found myself stepping out of a very ordinary train station into what seemed to be a large municipal park. A sea of pavement. Sports fields. Vending machines. It looked like the kind of place you might go on a lazy weekend to see a pretty good softball tournament.

我的第一印象不是敬畏、威严、投降或消费主义的幸福。而是迷茫。在我到达后的很长一段时间里，我都不知道自己是否到达了。没有安全检查站，没有售票亭，没有吉卜力背景音乐，也没有多山的猫巴士雕像。相反，我发现自己走出了一个非常普通的火车站，走进了一个似乎是大型市政公园的地方。许许多多的人行道。运动场。自动售货机。它看起来像是那种你可以在慵懒的周末去观看一场非常棒的垒球比赛的地方。

There were some buildings around, but it was hard to tell which of them might or might not be Ghibli-related. In the distance, the arc of a Ferris wheel broke the horizon — but this, I would discover, had nothing to do with Ghibli Park. I wandered into and out of a convenience store. I saw some children wearing Totoro hats and started to follow them. It felt like some kind of bizarre treasure hunt — a theme park where the theme was searching for the theme park. Which was, in a way, perfectly Studio Ghibli: no pleasure without a little challenge. And so I headed down the hill, trying to find my way in.

周围有一些建筑物，但很难判断其中哪些与吉卜力有关，哪些与吉卜力无关。远处，摩天轮的弧线打破了地平线——但我会发现，这与吉卜力公园无关。我在便利店里进进出出。我看到一些孩子戴着龙猫的帽子，开始跟在他们后面。这感觉就像某种奇异的寻宝游戏——一个主题公园，主题正在寻找主题公园。在某种程度上，这是完美的吉卜力工作室：没有一点挑战就没有乐趣。于是我下了山，试图找到进去的路。

Like many non-Japanese viewers, I first encountered Studio Ghibli through the 2001 film “Spirited Away.” It is Miyazaki’s masterpiece, a popular and critical supertriumph that won the Oscar for best animated feature and became, for two decades, the highest-grossing film in Japanese history. Critics all over the world simultaneously fell out of their armchairs to praise it in the most ecstatic possible terms. Nigel Andrews of The Financial Times rated it six out of five stars, justifying this mathematical impossibility (“Exception must be made for the exceptional”) with a flood of rapturous beat poetry: “What is the film about? It is about 122 minutes and 12 billion years. It sums up all existence and gives us a mythology good for every society, amoebal, animal or human, that ever lived.” And he offered the ultimate existentialist blurb: “Rush now while life lasts.”

和许多非日本观众一样，我第一次接触吉卜力工作室是通过 2001 年的电影《千与千寻》。这是宫崎骏的杰作，一部广受欢迎和评论界的超级胜利，赢得了奥斯卡最佳动画长片奖，并成为二十年来日本历史上票房最高的电影。全世界的评论家同时从他们的扶手椅上摔下来，以最狂喜的方式赞美它。 《金融时报》的奈杰尔·安德鲁斯(Nigel Andrews) 将其评为五颗星中的六颗星，用大量狂喜的节拍诗来证明这种数学上的不可能（“例外必须为例外”）：“这部电影讲的是什么？大约是 122 分钟和 120 亿年。它总结了所有存在，并为我们提供了一个神话，对曾经存在过的每一个社会、变形虫、动物或人类都有好处。”他提出了存在主义的终极格言：“趁着生命还在继续，赶快行动吧。”

I, on the other hand, am not a film critic. I am an ordinary American, someone raised on MTV and “S.N.L.” and CGI. Which means that my entertainment metabolism has been carefully tuned to digest the purest visual corn syrup. Sarcastic men with large guns. Yearning princesses with grumpy fathers. Explosive explosions explosively exploding. When I watched “Spirited Away,” at first I had no idea what I was looking at. In the simplest terms, the film tells the coming-of-age story of a 10-year-old girl named Chihiro. It takes place in a haunted theme park — where, almost immediately, Chihiro’s parents are turned into pigs, and Chihiro is forced to sign away her name and perform menial labor in a bathhouse for ghosts (ghosts, spirits, monsters, gods — it’s hard to know exactly what to call them, and the film never explains). A full plot summary would be impossible. The story moves at a strange, tumbling pace, with elements connecting and separating and floating around, revolving and recombining, as if in a dream.

另一方面，我不是影评人。我是普通的美国人，在 MTV、“SNL”和 CGI 中长大。这意味着我的娱乐新陈代谢经过精心调整，可以消化最纯净的视觉玉米糖浆。带着大枪的爱讽刺的男人。向往生活的公主和脾气暴躁的父亲。炸药疯狂地爆炸。当我看《千与千寻》时，起初我不知道我在看什么。用最简单的话来说，这部电影讲述了一个名叫千寻的 10 岁女孩的成长故事。它发生在一个闹鬼的主题公园——在那里，千寻的父母几乎立即变成了猪，千寻被迫签下她的名字，在一个鬼魂（鬼魂、精灵、怪物、神——这很难确切地知道如何称呼他们，电影从不解释）澡堂干苦力活。完整的情节摘要是不可能的。故事以一种奇怪的、翻滚的速度发展，元素连接、分离、漂浮、旋转和重组，就像在梦中一样。

But plot isn’t really the point. The majestic thing about “Spirited Away” is the world itself. Miyazaki’s creativity is radically dense; every little molecule of the film seems charged with invention. The haunted bathhouse attracts a proliferation of very weird beings: giant yellow ducklings, a sentient slime-blob, fanged monsters with antlers, a humanoid radish spirit who appears to be wearing an upside-down red bowl for a hat. There is a trio of green disembodied heads, with black mustaches and angry faces, who bounce around and pile up on top of one another and grunt disapprovingly at Chihiro. There are so many creatures, stuffed into so many nooks and crannies, that it seems as if Miyazaki has been spending multiple eternities, on multiple planets, running parallel evolutionary timelines, just so he can sketch the most interesting results. As a viewer, you have to surrender to the abundance. Crowd-surf into the hallucination.

但情节并不是真正的重点。 《千与千寻》的宏伟之处在于其世界本身。宫崎骏的创造力极其丰富；电影的每一个小分子似乎都充满了发明。闹鬼的澡堂吸引了大量非常奇怪的生物：巨大的黄色小鸭子、有知觉的粘液团、长着尖牙和鹿角的怪物、一个似乎戴着一个倒置的红色碗作为帽子的人形萝卜精。有三个绿色的空头，长着黑胡子和愤怒的脸，他们跳来跳去，一个接一个地堆在一起，对着千寻不满地咕哝着。如此多的生物，塞进了如此多的角落和缝隙，宫崎骏似乎在多个星球上度过了多个永恒，运行着平行的进化时间线，只为勾勒出最有趣的结果。作为观众，你必须屈服于丰富。人群冲浪进入幻觉。

Miyazaki knows that his work can be difficult — and he is, at all times, righteously defiant. “I must say that I hate Disney’s works,” he once declared. “The barrier to both the entry and exit of Disney films is too low and too wide. To me, they show nothing but contempt for the audience.” At home, Miyazaki is a celebrity, recognizable to the point of parody: caterpillar eyebrows, heavy, dark-rimmed glasses, sculpted white beard, cigarette. In 2019, the TV network NHK — Japan’s rough equivalent to the BBC — aired a four-part documentary chronicling Miyazaki’s creative process. It is a festival of grouchy agony, full of insults (“He’s not an adult yet,” he says of his then 39-year-old son Goro) and self-reproach (“I feel like a comb with missing teeth”). Miyazaki is the curmudgeon’s curmudgeon. Over the decades, he has dismissed everything from iPads (“disgusting”) to 1980s Japanese animation (“resembles the food served on jumbo-jet airliners”) to art created by artificial intelligence (“I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself”). Many artists have high standards. Miyazaki’s are in outer space.

宫崎骏知道他的工作可能很艰巨——而且他在任何时候都是义正辞严的。 “我必须说我讨厌迪斯尼的作品，”他曾宣称。 “迪士尼电影的进出门槛太低也太宽。对我来说，他们只表现出对观众的蔑视。”在国内，宫崎骏是个名人，一眼就可以认出他：毛毛虫似的眉毛、厚重的黑框眼镜、雕刻的白胡子、香烟。 2019 年，电视网络 NHK——在日本大致相当于 BBC—— 播出了一部记录宫崎骏创作过程的四集纪录片。这是一个充满怨恨和痛苦的节日，充满了侮辱（“他还没有成年，”他谈到当时 39 岁的儿子Goro ）和自责（“我觉得自己像一把缺牙的梳子”）。宫崎骏是脾气极其暴躁的人。几十年来，从 iPad（“恶心”）到 1980 年代的日本动画（“类似于大型喷气式客机上提供的食物”），再到人工智能创造的艺术（“我强烈认为这是对生命本身的侮辱”。）。许多艺术家都有很高的标准。宫崎骏则是生活在外太空。

Disney is, famously, a vast corporate content farm, with all artistic choices carefully examined by an assembly line of executives, marketers, focus groups, etc. Whereas Miyazaki’s vision is absolutely his own. Despite its global success, Studio Ghibli has remained quirky and unpredictable, a direct reflection of the personalities of its founders. To this day, Miyazaki insists on meticulously hand-drawing his own storyboards. When his sketches go to Ghibli’s larger team for the technical work of animation, he checks every image, and if he sees something he dislikes he will erase it and draw right over it — explaining the whole time why it was wrong. For as long as he possibly could, Miyazaki resisted computer animation. He still refuses, on principle, to make sequels. He has long told parents that children should not watch his films more than once a year. (“Whatever experiences we provide them,” Miyazaki has said, “are in a sense stealing time from them that otherwise might be spent in a world where they go out and make their own discoveries or have their own personal experiences.”)

众所周知，迪士尼是一个庞大的企业内容农场，所有艺术选择都经过高管、营销人员、焦点小组等的流水线仔细审查。而宫崎骏的愿景完全是他自己的。尽管在全球取得了成功，吉卜力工作室仍然古怪和不可预测，这直接反映了其创始人的个性。时至今日，宫崎骏仍坚持精心手绘自己的故事板。当他的草图交给 Ghibli 更大的动画技术工作团队时，他会检查每张图片，如果他看到不喜欢的东西，他会擦掉它并直接在上面画画——一直解释为什么它是错误的。宫崎骏尽可能地抵制电脑动画。原则上，他仍然拒绝制作续集。他早就告诉父母，孩子一年看他的电影不应该超过一次。 （“无论我们为他们提供什么体验，”宫崎骏说，“从某种意义上说，都是在偷走他们的时间，否则他们可能会在一个他们出去发现自己的世界或拥有自己的个人经历的世界里度过。”）

Miyazaki is now 82. He has tried multiple times, without success, to pass the creative torch. “I trained successors, but I couldn’t let go,” he once said. “I devoured them. I devoured their talent. ... That was my destiny. I ate them all.” Even his elder son, Goro, has tried his hand at directing — with mixed results. Miyazaki has abruptly retired, and then just as suddenly unretired, by my count, four times. He is currently finishing work on a new film titled “How Do You Live?” It is now in production and should be out in Japan this summer.

宫崎骏现年 82 岁。他曾多次尝试传递创意火炬，但均未成功。 “我培养了接班人，但我不能放手，”他曾说。 “我把他们吃掉了。我吞噬了他们的才华。 ……那是我的命运。我把他们都吃了。”甚至他的大儿子Goro也曾尝试过当导演，但结果喜忧参半。宫崎骏突然退休，然后突然不退休，据我统计，有四次。他目前正在完成一部名为“你如何生活？”的新电影的工作。它现在正在制作中，应该会在今年夏天在日本上映。

All of which raises some huge questions for Studio Ghibli — questions so deep they are practically theological. What will happen to the company when the great Miyazaki is gone? Can such idiosyncratic imaginative worlds outlive the mind that made them? Would a theme park help (as it did for Walt Disney) to answer both of those questions?

所有这些都为吉卜力工作室提出了一些巨大的问题——这些问题非常深刻，几乎是神学问题。伟大的宫崎骏走了，公司会怎样？这种奇异的想象世界能否比创造它们的思想更长久？主题公园是否有助于（就像沃尔特·迪斯尼那样）回答这两个问题？

“Spirited Away” is now more than 20 years old. Since that first confused encounter, I have watched it many, many times. I still find it strange and scary and disorienting — but also uplifting. Despite his crankiness, Miyazaki has always defined his artistic mission in inspirational terms. “I want to send a message of cheer to all those wandering aimlessly through life,” he has written. So when the real world gets bad — when I feel depressed, stressed, misanthropic, crushed by politics or deadlines — I often find myself stepping once more into Chihiro’s world. I find myself wanting to float around in Miyazaki’s imagination as the spirits float in the herbal pools of the “Spirited Away” bathhouse. I want to snuggle into the world of Ghibli like Totoro snuggling into a bed of ferns.

《千与千寻》如今已有 20 多年的历史。自从那次迷茫的相遇后，我已经看了很多很多遍。我仍然觉得它很奇怪、令人恐惧和迷失方向——但也令人振奋。尽管脾气暴躁，宫崎骏始终以鼓舞人心的方式定义他的艺术使命。他写道：“我想向所有在生活中漫无目的地游荡的人发出欢呼的信息。”因此，当现实世界变得糟糕时——当我感到沮丧、压力大、厌世、被政治或最后期限压垮时——我常常发现自己再次踏入了千寻的世界。我发现自己想要漂浮在宫崎骏的想象中，就像灵魂漂浮在“千与千寻”澡堂的药草池中一样。我想依偎在吉卜力的世界里，就像龙猫依偎在蕨类植物的床上一样。

‘‘Do you recognize this?” one of my Ghibli Park guides asked me.

I did. Of course I did.

“你认出这个？” 我的一位吉卜力公园导游问我。

当然。我当然认出了。

（待续）

Sam Anderson is a staff writer at the magazine. He has written about rhinos,pencils, poets, water parks, basketball, weight loss and the Fountain of Youth. Rinko Kawauchi is a Japanese photographer known for her images of elemental subjects collected in books including “Ametsuchi” and “Halo.” Her solo exhibition will be shown at the Shiga Museum of Art through March.