Spirited Away, directed by the veteran anime film-maker Hayao Miyazaki, is

Japan's most successful film, and one of the top-grossing 'foreign language'

films ever released. Set in modern Japan, the film is a wildly imaginative

fantasy, at once personal and universal. It tells the story of a listless little girl

who stumbles into a magical world where gods relax in a palatial bathhouse,

where there are giant babies and hard-working soot sprites, and where a train

runs across the sea.

Andrew Osmond's insightful study describes how Miyazaki directed Spirited

Away with a degree of creative control undreamt of in most popular cinema,

using the film's delightful, freewheeling visual ideas to explore issues ranging

from personal agency and responsibility to what Miyazaki sees as the lamentable state of modern Japan. Osmond unpacks the film's visual language,

which many Western (and some Japanese) audiences find both beautiful and

bewildering. He traces connections between Spirited Away and Miyazaki's prior

body of work, arguing that Spirited Away uses the cartoon medium to create a

compellingly immersive drawn world.