drawing spirited away, one impossible room at a time

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An art book is a useful way to spend more time with a movie without asking it to become a franchise. No sequel announcement required. Just let somebody explain how the rooms got there.

The Art of Spirited Away is the production-art option: VIZ’s 240-page hardcover gathers paintings, designs, sketches, storyboards, commentary and a complete English-language script. It is a book about the film’s visual construction, rather than another adaptation to follow through the same plot.

That distinction is the reason to consider it. A finished animated scene makes hundreds of design decisions look inevitable. A room has a particular shape, a character occupies it a particular way, and somehow the whole thing feels like a place that existed before the camera arrived. Looking at the preparatory work changes the question from “what happens next?” to “how did anyone decide this should look like that?”

The finished film gives those rooms and streets a life of their own. The book goes back to the drawings that built them.

VIZ has a preview and edition details. Try that first. Choose this for an interest in drawing, environments or filmmaking; skip it if what you want is a new story. The book includes the script, so it is better saved until after the film if you want to avoid plot details.

The linked edition is the English-language Studio Ghibli Library hardcover, ISBN 9781569317778. Check that number rather than treating every cover with Chihiro on it as the same book. Apparently even a trip to a spirit bathhouse benefits from checking the paperwork.

For the finished film, here is GKIDS’ official trailer. Spirited Away on Trove keeps the film alongside the rest of the collection.

Image credits: featured photograph, Ghibli Museum exterior, lumoplank, CC0; Hayao Miyazaki at the 2008 Venice Film Festival, Thomas Schulz, CC BY-SA 2.0. Images resized for display; no other changes. The museum is contextual photography, not a location depicted in the book or film; the portrait is editorial, not an endorsement.

Additional image: Spirited Away film still, © 2001 Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli, NDDTM, via Studio Ghibli’s official still gallery. This is a finished-film image, not a page from the book. Resized for display; no crop.