Spirited Away, directed by the veteran anime film-maker Hayao Miyazaki, isJapan's most successful film, and one of the top-grossing 'foreign language'films ever released. Set in modern Japan, the film is a wildly imaginativefantasy, at once personal and universal. It tells the story of a listless little girlwho 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 trainruns across the sea.Andrew Osmond's insightful study describes how Miyazaki directed SpiritedAway with a degree of creative control undreamt of in most popular cinema,using the film's delightful, freewheeling visual ideas to explore issues rangingfrom personal agency and responsibility to what Miyazaki sees as thelamentable state of modern Japan. Osmond unpacks the film's visual language,which many Western (and some Japanese) audiences find both beautiful andbewildering. He traces connections between Spirited Away and Miyazaki's priorbody of work, arguing that Spirited Away uses the cartoon medium to create acompellingly immersive drawn world.