Miyazaki and Magic That Can Happen

The magic I like is the magic you can almost believe.

I've had this idea for a long time that it's possible for magic to exist in our world, this world that we live in every day, but we could never be completely sure it existed. If someone saw something magic, there would always have to be a possibility that it was all happenstance and coincidence since, arguably, that would inevitably be the case.

Some day, I will make a movie. The movie I want to make will have magic, but it will happen in the world we live in, in the modern day. Putting magic in a movie that an audience can believe in, and that I can believe in, and that can actually happen in this world through what is arguably circumstance and coincidence, has proven to extraordinarily difficult to write.

It's a very tricky problem that I've tried to think about in a lot of different ways. One way is by thinking about movies that have done everyday magic very well.


I'm writing this today because last night I watched Hiyao Miyazaki's extraordinary Spirited Away. All Miyazaki's films involve magic. Maybe half of them start with a magical world (Princess Mononoke) or a magical main character (Kiki's Delivery Service).

The ones I enjoy the most, though, start in our world, and the magic is either very small (Porco Rosso contains exactly one talking pig) or very slowly or carefully introduced (Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro,Whisper of the Heart).

Most of the time, Miyazaki's main character is a young girl. Having a child as a main character helps us accept the magic of his worlds, because the audience puts itself in the place of the protagonist and a child doesn't question magic in the same way an adult does.


For example, one of the very simple spells that Haku casts on Chihiro early in the film will keep her invisibly as long as she holds her breath until she walks all the way to the other side of a long bridge. As Miyazaki points out in a documentary about the movie, this is something that might not make logical sense to an adult, but makes perfect sense to a child.

There is also something deeply personal and specific about Miyazaki's magic that makes it impossible not to accept. There's a very powerful sequence where Chihiro takes a train away from the bath house where most of the story has taken place so far.

Everyone on the train is a black, faceless figure moving around slowly and sadly in old, 1950s-style clothes, in sharp contrast to the colorful and energetic characters so far in the movie. They look like half-forgotten memories. There is something so personal to the sequence that you have to believe in it, even if you don't fully understand it.

Miyazaki is so good at getting us to accept his world that we can almost believe that it exists one wrong turn away. That's what I want my movie to do.