How fictional worlds like Studio Ghibli’s “Spirited Away” teach us how to experience our world through transit
I get an overwhelming sense of peace when I watch the closing scene of Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away. The first half of the story is jam-packed with action and curiosity. We watch as Chihiro, the young protagonist, explores a confusing and dangerous spirit world on her own, filled with lively soot sprites and rowdy spirits.
My favorite scene comes near the end, as we watch Chihiro walk to a floating platform in the middle of an ocean and wait as a train, skimming across the water, pulls into the station. She finds a seat, the train passes through a world submerged in water with floating houses on grassy islands, passengers leave, and Chihiro patiently watches, soaking it in. Without a single word of dialogue we see a complete world. The sounds of the train moving through water makes viewers feel as though they are there, observing the scene as just another passenger.
Here Studio Ghibli masters “soft” world building, where there isn’t an explanation to why the train floats atop water, where the railway starts or ends, or the kind of world Chihiro is navigating but it somehow makes sense. Every scene leads up to this moment of reflection, where the audience, along with Chihiro, sits quietly experiencing the spirit world that, through careful observation, makes so little yet so much sense. No narrator needs to spell out the scene, not every unfamiliar part of the world needs to be defined. We can place ourselves not just in a character’s lived experience but also imagine being a part of their world.
We learn about our world in just the same way. Scenes in transit, like Chihiro on the Sea Railway, mimic how we absorb the world around us in our normal everyday lives. Just as we ourselves move through spaces, either on train, or car, bike, walking, fictional characters learn about the world around them instinctively. Our time in transit is a part of the magic of learning about new worlds or a world new to us. Movement in transit and the sights, the sounds, and the smells teach us about our cities. The way we experience those moments matter, they provide even more context to how we live our lives woven into the world around us.
I think of all of the types of transit that helped to build my favorite worlds, the Polar and Hogwarts Expresses, Appa the flying Bison, the Cat bus, the Magic School bus, and so on. There are so many beloved fictional transit systems that help to complete a world for us. When we see characters moving through their worlds, transit is a place unto itself. More than a vessel, it’s part of the journey. All of these magical transit options in my favorite fictional worlds made me wonder, what if every trip taken helps us “softly” build the world we live in?
Maybe forget about the importance of our daily journeys because it gets redundant, the same commute to and from work, to and from home. Maybe we’ve learned all we could learn from the world we live in daily to find the same kind of magic it feels like watching Chirhiro on her train adventure. Or maybe we simply view our transit as a means to an end, simply a utility in our world.
So why, after watching Spirited Away at least twenty times in 10 years, haven’t I tired of the exact same scene, over and over?
Next time you’re on that mundane commute, I challenge you to think about your favorite fictional world, how characters move through it, and how much value those moments are in understanding the world around them and try looking at your commute through a similar lens. If we start thinking about transportation outside of just routine and utility, we can understand the intrinsic value of the systems that move people and how they inform the way we see and move about our cities.