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Eiko Kadono (Author) • Tokiko Kato (Singer) • John Lasseter (Director) • Rieko Nakagawa (Author) • Tatsuo Hori (Author) • Mamoru Hosoda (Director) • Yoshie Hotta (Author) • Yōichi Kotabe (Senior Animator) • Naohisa Inoue (Artist) • Keisuke Miyazaki (Son) • Kenji Miyazawa (Author) • Yasuji Mori (Animation Director) • Hideo Ogata (Animage Editor) • Osamu Sagawa (Friend) • Ryōtarō Shiba (Author) • Mamiko Suzuki (Toshio Suzuki's Daughter) • Mamoru Oshii (Director) • Yasuo Ōtsuka (Director) While the film featured a climactic flying scene with Haku and Chihiro, Miyazaki was more enamored by the train scenes, but feared adding too many would recall Kenji Miyazawa's Night on the Galactic Railroad.
Spirited Away Cinema Comic <12> Bungeishunju
Upon completion of the film, Hayao Miyazaki held a press conference at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. He was asked that towards the end of the film, audiences finally saw a flying scene, with Chihiro and Haku flying again. Miyazaki responded, "I never thought about whether we should include scenes of Haku or Chihiro flying or not. But on my own, I did think about having Chihiro ride on a train. And since I spent so much time telling people we should do this, I was really happy when she finally did get on board. We were collecting sounds of train audible through the shadows of trees, or shots of the trains running, but from my experience that usually just results in train scenes and nothing more. So in that sense I thought it really was wonderful to have Chihiro actually ride the train, even better than flying through the air." The film was made to please the ten-year-old daughter of Hayao Miyazaki's personal friend, director Seiji Okuda. Okuda's daughter even became the model for the film's protagonist, Chihiro. During the film's planning phase, Miyazaki gathered the daughters of Ghibli's staff in a mountain hut in Shinano Province to hold a training seminar. His experience led him to wanting to make a film for them, since he had never made a movie for girls at the age of 10. When describing why he made Haku a bishōnen or 'pretty boy character', Miyazaki responded that he originally had no intention to, "But if you've got a girl, you've got a boy; if there's a boy, there's a girl. That's what makes our world. And since our heroine's a tad ugly, I thought without a fair and handsome boy, it would be too boring." When asked to elaborate on whether it was intentional in depicting Chihiro as ugly, "No, but I really don't think she's your typical beautiful girl. I didn't draw her thinking that at all. I wanted to depict a girl who would make viewers worry about what she would become in the future. And while I was drawing her, I thought that she would probably become cool. Because they can change so suddenly. Take people's faces; I think that people create the faces they wear. So I didn't want to draw Chihiro with your stand cute-girl face. And I was right in making that decision." But things became clearer at the beginning of 2001. At the beginning of January, the magazine Animage presented the images of the teaser (short trailer), then screened in Japanese theaters. On January 26, the NTV channel broadcasts it exclusively on television. Soon follow a new trailer, the trailer and finally a clip illustrating the magnificent song of the end credits. But there is more to promoting the film than advertisements on television. Tôhô, the film's distributor in Japan, is carrying out a Disney-worthy marketing campaign and, with such media hype, observers expect a tidal wave.Like Japan's most famous children's writer, Kenji Miyazawa (another source of inspiration for Miyazaki), Kashiwaba is from Iwate. The story goes that during the summer holidays six year old Rina is sent on her own to stay in the village in the countryside where her father had stayed as a child. Where Rina gets off the train, the village people are only half convinced that her destination, the valley of mist, exists, but following their uncertain directions, she sets off, and helped by her umbrella, which gets blown away so that she has to chase after it, she finds herself in a strange one street village. This film possesses or appeals to a persuasive force according to which the word represents an own will, an energy. There, the fact of having realized a fantasy taking place in Japan has a meaning. Even though this is a fairy tale, I didn't want to do a western fairy tale, with many loopholes. This film may seem to be in imitation of a different world, but rather I wanted to think about a direct line with the tales of the past like Suzume no Oyado (The house of the hawk) or Nezumi no Goten (The Palace of Mice).