Why Spirited Away’s Train Scene Is The Best Anime Moment of All Time
Hayao Miyazaki isn’t just another anime director. He’s a rule-breaker, and, for many, he is the closest thing the genre has ever had to a guide. His greatest gift to anime, however, hasn’t been in creating beautiful animated worlds or interesting 2D characters (although he has done that too), but rather in telling powerful stories that feel like strange dreams every one of us has lived through. And nowhere has that magic been captured more beautifully than in the train ride from Spirited Away, a 2-minute sequence that many fans, critics, and animators agree is the greatest anime scene of all time.
Now, that’s a very big claim, sure. But rewatch the train scene again and tell us it isn’t earned.
The melancholic train scene comes towards the end of Spirited Away, just after Chihiro hurringly escapes the bathhouse. There’s no sad monologues. No explosions. Just a sweeping orchestra and a piano to cue your emotions.
Chihiro is sitting silently on a train, No-Face next to her, staring out at a flooded world where ghostly passengers board and exit. She stares out of the window and looks over the figure of a girl who looks like her. It’s at that point when we actually realise that this moment on the train isn’t just an escape from the bathhouse, but it represents the ten-year-old rethinking her life.
Like Chihiro, over two minutes, twenty-one shots, and hundreds of hand-painted frames, the audience is given a moment to reflect. And it’s incredibly powerful stuff.
See, Miyazaki doesn’t do storyboards in the conventional way. He doesn’t work from a traditional script like everyone else. Instead, he crafts storyboards as he goes, often drawing the film’s direction scene by scene. In his own words, “It’s not me who makes the film. The film makes itself. And I have no choice but to follow.” That’s not a great director showing off. It’s his personal philosophy. And it means that it’s the visuals that dictate the rhythm of his stories.
At this point in the film, Chihiro’s adventure is slowly building to its conclusion, and she has matured. She’s changed. She’s no longer the selfish girl we met at the beginning of the story. But Miyazaki doesn’t tell you this. He doesn’t need to. You feel it. You sit with her. You take the ride home with her. And by the time the ride ends, you understand her.
And maybe that’s what makes this scene so powerful. In a world that constantly pushes for more, faster, now, Miyazaki trusts the audience to feel and dares them to slow down. It reminds us that not every great moment needs an Avengers-level CGI battle, an epic on-the-edge-of-your-seat climax, or even a big, surprising resolution. Sometimes, greatness is just a ride on a mysterious train with a quiet sense of stillness and reflection.
The late Roger Ebert, one of the world’s most famous film critics, once told Hayao Miyazaki that he loved “the gratuitous motion in his films”. “We have a word for that in Japanese,” Miyazaki responded, “It’s called ma. Emptiness. It’s there intentionally.” Then he clapped his hands three or four times. “The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it’s just busyness, but if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension,” he continued. That’s brilliant.
Is Spirited Away’s train ride the greatest anime scene of all time? If you don’t think so, good luck finding another scene that hits as hard as this without saying a single word.
