Spirited Away: The Truth Behind Faceless Finally Revealed by Miyazaki

Spirited Away director Hayao Miyazaki has finally lifted the veil on one of the film’s greatest mysteries: the truth behind the Faceless Man.

Spirited Away is a Studio Ghibli classic. In addition to animation worthy of the studio’s best productions, the story invented by Hayao Miyazaki presents a complex and poetic plot at the same time, filled with youkai, these spirits of Japanese folklore. Subject to numerous interpretations, from Homer’s Odyssey to a Japanese Alice in Wonderland, the feature film has always retained an element of mystery on many points.

We follow Chihiro, a teenager like any other, catapulted into a world of strange creatures while her parents gave in to the sirens of gluttony before being transformed into pigs by the terrible Yubaba. She must then try everything to save her father and mother and return home, and will have to undergo several tests while meeting surprising characters.

And the most enigmatic of them is certainly the Faceless, this spirit wearing an inexpressive mask and seeking by all means to get the girl’s attention. If the creature has long been the subject of debate among spectators, it seems that the author has in fact already taken the floor to explain it.

Hayao Miyazaki tackles the mystery of Faceless in Spirited Away

Faceless Feast Spirited Away — studio ghibli/toho

Comic Book has indeed reported an update offered by Nippon TV. The network broadcasts films every Friday, in a program called “Kinyo Roadshow.” And Spirited Away occupies the first slot of 2024. For the occasion, Nippon TV live-tweeted details about the film, including an anecdote from Miyazaki that few knew until now.

According to the director, “There are many people like the Faceless One among us… He is the type of person who wants to relate to others but who has no self-awareness. They are everywhere.”

More than two decades ago, Hayao Miyazaki already stated that the identity of the Faceless One in Spirited Away is much more important than viewers may think. The character does not have a specific identity, and it is not for nothing: he is, in a way, an entity having lost his own self-awareness.

The Faceless is therefore the type of person who will try to adapt to the personality of his interlocutors, as he does by tempting the greedy employees of the Bath house or by seeking to obtain the good graces of Chihiro. But faced with the young girl’s indifference, the creature finds itself thrown off balance, and becomes unpredictable.

Spirited Away has been out for more than twenty years now, but the film continues to attract attention: more recently, it is a live-action adaptation, generated by an AI, which triggered the anger of fans of Studio Ghibli.