How Hayao Miyazaki’s songs made Spirited Away a stage musical

When Toho Stage released the first photos of the puppets and performers from the live theater adaptation of Hayao Miyazaki’s beloved anime movie Spiritually gone, it created a perfect recipe for FOMO. The images were rich, surprising and even funny. Miyazaki’s story about a young girl named Chihiro, trapped in the spirit world and forced to work in a bathhouse for the gods, never seemed like a project that could work outside of animation, but the pictures were compelling. At the same time, it was clear that most of the global fandom surrounding Miyazaki and Japanese production house Studio Ghibli would never get a chance to see the play for themselves.

Spirited Away: live on stage fulfills the promise of those first images. Two versions of the show were filmed, starring two different sets of performers as Chihiro and as Yubaba, the witch who runs the ghost bathhouse. Both versions are a chance for the international audience to see how famous director John Caird transformed Miyazaki’s work into a live show, mixing traditional Japanese stage techniques with Western ones, and adding musical numbers written by Miyazaki herself. Polygon caught up with Caird (who also directed both film versions) to talk about the adaptation process, how he got Miyazaki’s approval, and where he had to work hardest to make such a vividly visual film work live.

[Ed. note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.]

Polygon: Some of the earliest reports on this play said you met Hayao Miyazaki and got his full approval for this stage adaptation. How did you convince him?

John Caird: When I met him and his producer, Toshio Suzuki, I thought it would be very difficult to convince them. Mostly, I think, because I didn’t really know how to do what I described myself. It seemed an impossible task.

I think what I said to them, which I illustrated with some quick drawings, was how I thought the secret would be to bring the bathhouse to the stage, because the beauty of Sen to Chihiro is that most of the action happens all in one place. [Ed. note: The movie’s Japanese title is Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi.] That’s unusual for Miyazaki’s films – most of them are about mountains and through clouds, in the sky and underground. But this one has a basic theatrical setting – the bathhouse itself. So I described how I thought: If I could get my designers to make a bathhouse on stage, that would be the answer. And I described roughly how I could do it. And that was it almost enough for them.

I also talked to them about the great characters he had written, and how great it would be to have those characters played by living actors. And he agreed almost immediately. It did not take long. And then he said, “OK, you can – but how are you going to do it?” And I thought, “O Lord, I’ve got to do it now.”

Miyazaki is known as a notorious sourpuss.

Oh no, he isn’t. He’s not a sourpuss. He may have a grumpy reputation for the way he treats members of your profession. Because I think he’s probably not very comfortable explaining himself and explaining his process. Everything about Hayao’s work comes from drawing images, which is a wordless activity. You don’t need words to describe how to create images, it’s all in the images.

So I imagine he gets a little tired of being asked to find some intellectual support for what he’s doing, or find a way to describe his process. I can imagine how difficult that is for him. Whereas if he’s just talking to another artist, like me or anyone else in our craft, we’re just talking about the work and how you do the work in a technical way. He feels much more comfortable with that, I think. He was definitely absolutely charming with me.

Did he have any input into your approach?

No not at all. I think he knew the movie clearly spoke for itself. I think the assumption was that I would be respectful of the material – which of course I had no choice but to be respectful. It’s one of the greatest movies ever made.

This is a movie full of transformations. How did you handle those effects?

The very first thing I knew was that I had to surround myself with a great design team. I had just worked with Jon Bausor, the great British designer A Knight’s Tale, a musical I did in Tokyo. And I had a great time working with him on that. So I knew John would be the right person to come up with an imaginative way to decorate the bathhouse.

And I knew we were going to need the help of a lot of brilliant puppets because there are so many characters on the show that are non-human and need to be presented in a vibrant, dynamic way. So Jon and I knew we had to pool the talents of Toby Olié, the great puppeteer responsible for War horse. He’s simply the best in the business. And as soon as we got him on board, a lot of the answers started coming in, in the form of Toby’s drawings, or Jon’s drawings, and the collaborations between them.

You come from your own tradition of stage theater and adaptation, but this one brings in elements of Noh theater, and bunraku also. Were you focused on bringing Japanese elements into the stage work?

Yes. But what fascinates me is the strong relationship between the ancient Japanese theater traditions and Shinto, the religion, the philosophy. They are all connected. One of the ideas I wanted to include from the very beginning — if you look at the kanji, the Chinese characters of Chihiro’s name, in the title Sen to Chihiro, “Sen” and “Chi” are the same. We flipped one and they form a Shinto gate, which the characters drive through. I immediately noticed that about the kanji, and I thought: We have to somehow incorporate that into the first ride to the world, because it goes through that Shinto gate that changes everything, because only in the world of Shinto can you meet the 8 million gods.

I was so excited by that thought that I went back to Suzuki in Ghibli and asked him to do the calligraphy of the name. And he did it for us, because he’s a brilliant calligrapher. And then he also agreed for Ghibli to do the opening animation for the gateway to the show, which is fantastic.

What was involved in designing the bathhouse, in terms of creating a space that could consist of so many different individual sets?

The brilliant idea that Jon Bausor had is that he essentially took a Noh theater stage and put it in the middle of a Western stage. That structure in the middle, and the walkway that comes out of it and the platform at the end of the walkway, is essentially a Noh theater. That was a wonderful way to question the deep-rooted Japanese culture. Because there’s such a strong connection between traditional Japanese theater and – even sumo wrestling is connected to kabuki, to Shintoism. The costumes are the same. The hanamichi, the walkway they use in kabuki theatre, is actually derived from sumo wrestling. So we used that to bridge the gap between the outside world and the bathhouse. It’s a way of incorporating aspects of Japanese culture into the set, so you always know you’re in Japan, in an authentic Japanese world.

The stage version is mostly a very loyal, faithful adaptation, save for grace notes like that gate and the songs. Was there a guiding principle about where you added new elements?

Not really. There are three songs: the arrival of the gods at the beginning, the arrival of Kamaji and before the intermission. And they’re all there for a very good reason: they’re taken from lyrics Miyazaki wrote for Joe Hisaishi, as a way of explaining what he wanted the film’s music to be like. They were published in a photo album. The song of the gods allowed us to have a parade of the gods entering the bathhouse, which you don’t have in the movie, but we need it in the theater – you have to have that sense of delight when it comes to seeing all these different gods coming. In an animated film, you can get close-ups of them all so easily, but in the theater you need time for an audience to really appreciate the beauty of the costumes and the different characters that show up, and to feel that the world is completely is populated.

Kamaji’s song is a working song that was not written especially for him, but only for someone who works in the bathhouse. And I thought it allowed us to see him work with his eight arms, and appreciate what a great construct that is, before we suddenly have to move on with the story. The interval number – there’s no interval in the movie, of course, but I had to make one for the play. After the madness of the river gods series, I just wanted to find a nice quiet moment of reflection, with the women looking out to sea and quietly taking us to the break, so we got somewhere – we had arrived at Chihiro with full shot in her new world.

What was the hardest doll to put together, in terms of what it had to do?

The sloppy river god was very difficult – getting a safe costume for a single dancer to wear that was big enough and looked gooey enough. That was a big challenge, because he has to walk through the bathhouse, then climb up and get into the bath. That was difficult. But the one that took us the most effort was figuring out how to make Kaonashi [No-Face] bigger and bigger and bigger. We started with inflatables, but they were so clumsy to work with.

And during rehearsals, I came up with the idea of ​​adding more and more dancers so that Kaonashi gets bigger and bigger, just by attaching more and more people to it. And that was more fun for the audience and more fun for the performers, and it wasn’t dependent on anything technical. It could just rely on the skill of execution.

How was directing the movie version of the show different?

We shot it with a lot of cameras, so we just had a huge amount of material – I think we had 14 cameras in total. So we had a huge amount to choose from in editing, and then we had to go through it very, very slowly, to make sure that everything we wanted the audience to look at was what they were looking at. But for an audience, the live show is of course more fun, because they can choose what they want to watch.

The casting for this edition of the play is so remarkable – every time you get a close-up of the main cast, they look strikingly similar to Miyazaki’s film. How did you deal with casting?

I didn’t really think about copying the animation. It’s much more the minds of the actors that you have to get right. With Lin, it’s that feeling of a pretty girl who’s a little thin and wispy, and fun and full of life and glee. On the face they look nothing like the animated character, but they have the same spirit, and when they say the lines, they have the rhythm of the language. And with Yubaba, one of the Yubabas is Mari Natsuki, the voice of the original in the original movie. So we got all that mind and language resonance for free.

Spirited Away: live on stage will play in theaters during special screenings on April 23 and 25 (starring Kanna Hashimoto as Chihiro) and April 27 and May 2 (starring Mone Kamishiraishi as Chihiro). For participating theatres, check out the movie’s website.