Spirited Away: Live on Stage Is Now Streaming

Studio Ghibli made waves recently thanks to the release of The Boy And The Heron into theaters. The film, titled “How Do You Live” in Japan, became the number one movie in North America for its opening weekend and received wide acclaim from both critics and anime fans alike. To further celebrate all things Ghibli, the latest live-action stage play of Spirited Away has made its way to streaming to watch at your leisure if you’re a subscriber that is.

Spirited Away on MAX

You can currently check out the live-action version of Spirited Away on MAX by clicking here (if you want to watch Mone Kamishiraishi as Chihiro). The play also saw Kanna Hashimoto as Chihiro, and MAX is allowing anime fans to watch this performance as well by clicking here. 

In 2023, we here at ComicBook.com had the opportunity to chat with the play’s director, John Caird, who had this to say when it came to bringing one of Ghibli’s biggest projects to the stage, “I’d done big musicals [at the Imperial Theatre] like Les Mis and Knight’s Tale and huge, huge musical theater ventures. I just thought I’d love to do something authentically Japanese there, and so I was really looking for a potential Japanese project that would fill a massive theater. I started to think about what might that be. What might be the great big Japanese story that would appeal to a big audience? And almost immediately I started thinking about the greatest Japanese storyteller alive today, Hayao Miyazaki. That made me think, well, which of his movies could be adaptable most immediately? I thought that Spirited Away was the one that presented itself as the best candidate.”

Caird also continued by stating why he believed Ghibli projects worked so well when it came to bringing them to the stage, “I think because they’re just really good stories. Yeah, at the heart, Miyazaki he’s a great animator, he is a great artist, but his art is always in the service of the story. He’s a great storyteller. And it is just that he tells his stories not through words. And so the secret of getting them right on the stage is to make sure that the imagery, the visual imagery, is faithful to Miyazaki’s vision and then everything else follows. So whether you are doing a cat bus or whether you are doing a Kaonashi who grows bigger and bigger and bigger and starts eating frogs, you’ve got to believe in his vision and find a way of putting his vision on stage, and then you’re telling the story he’s telling. It’s really as simple as that.”