How did Spirited Away change anime abroad?

Spirited Away opened in Japan in July 2001 and became the highest grossing film in the country's history at the time, passing Princess Mononoke and Titanic alike, on the story of Chihiro, a sullen ten year old who must work in a bathhouse for the gods to free her transformed parents. It is the most decorated film in the studio's catalogue and the one title a general Western audience can be assumed to know.

The international honours were unprecedented for anime. The film shared the Golden Bear at the 2002 Berlin International Film Festival, the first animated film to win it, and in 2003 it won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, still the only hand drawn and only Japanese language film to do so. Miyazaki did not attend the ceremony, a absence widely reported at the time against the background of the Iraq War, and the award was accepted in his absence.

The American release was a deliberate act of advocacy. Pixar's John Lasseter, a friend of Miyazaki's since the 1980s, championed the film inside Disney, supervised the English dub's spirit, and fronted its promotion, and the dub, with Daveigh Chase as Chihiro, became a model of how to localise without domesticating. The film's long American afterlife in repertory cinema, including annual Ghibli festival screenings, dates from that release's success.

Its effect abroad was structural: after Spirited Away, festival programmers, critics and distributors treated top tier anime features as cinema rather than as a genre import, a shift that later benefited an entire generation of Japanese directors. On the shelf, it is the automatic anchor title of any Ghibli collection, with Japanese editions from LaserDisc's successors through the silhouette Blu-ray line and English editions in both the Disney and GKIDS eras.