Spirited Away: Live on Stage Has Its Own Magical Story
By Rob Bricken
Watching the stage play adaptation of Hayao Miyazaki’s Academy Award-winning, animated masterpiece Spirited Away is a surreal experience. The Studio Ghibli film gets brought to life (literally!) through bunraku puppetry, incredible sets, and astounding practical effects, creating an incredibly faithful adaptation that’s simultaneously original. Also amazing: it was written and directed by John Caird, one of England’s most acclaimed playwrights. With recorded performances about to hit U.S. theaters beginning this weekend, we spoke to Caird about this seemingly impossible task of bringing Spirited Away to the stage.
Rob Bricken, io9: What’s your history with the original movie?
John Caird: I just loved it when it first came out. My wife is Japanese, and we have three half-Japanese children and so I’ve been steeped in Japanese anime culture for a very long time. And when Spirited Away came out, I was just astounded by it. I thought it was not just the best animated movie I’d ever seen, it was one of the best movies I’d ever seen. It’s such a great work of art, so I’d always admired it and it never occurred to me to try to make a theater piece out of it. That came much later, but I’ve always thought it was beautiful. I’ve seen it countless times.
io9: When did the idea of adapting it as a play occur to you, and what gave you the idea?
Caird: It was 2018—something like that—and I was searching for new ideas to put into the Imperial Theater in Tokyo which is a very big space that Toho owns and they’re always looking for big projects to go in it. And I was thinking, you know, what’s the next big musical going to be? And then I thought, well, what about doing a big play in that? That, and suddenly it occurred to me, you know, usually I’d been doing big Western stuff in there and I thought, let’s do something Japanese. What could we do that’s a really, authentically Japanese story? And then I thought, well, the great storyteller is Miyazaki. So which one of his movies would do it? And as I trawled through them, I thought, well, there’s only one really that will work in the theater and that was where the choice came.
