Fairy Realms In The Film Spirited Away

Often times you hear that if you get sucked into the fairy realm, you shouldn’t eat their food. It gives them power over you. More often than not, heroes finally escape the fairy realm after what they perceive to be a very short time (a night or a week… only to find that seasons or years have passed. In the film Spirited Away by the acclaimed Studio Ghibli, a young girl named Chihiro Ogino is moving with her family to their new home in the suburbs, when they end up trapped in a mysterious and dangerous realm full of supernatural friends and enemies after passing through a mysterious tunnel located in a forest clearing. Chihiro manages to free her parents and return to the human domain, but time passes differently in the Spirit World than in the human one (think Narnian time warps), and so it is unclear just how long they spend inside.

The car was surrounded by trees, and wood is known to shed dirt at an alarming rate, so the amount of time that passed in order tor this much dust to accumulate on the car could be placed at anywhere from several days to longer than a week. However, when one examines the tunnel itself, they may find a different conclusion. Before Chihiro and her family enter the Spirit World, the tunnel is a red, stone wall in mediocre condition, with the paint peeling in large gaps in some places (). But the tunnel’s appearance after they return is drastically different. The paint is either completely gone, or has been hidden from sight by the cloak of ivy and vines that cover the wall of the tunnel (). In addition, and plaster that may have covered the tunnel originally is now gone, and the bare stonework of the tunnel is visible. This level of weathering upon the setting indicates that not only a few weeks, but several months must have passed during the events of the