Miyazaki Didn't Attend the Oscars Because of the Iraq War. Then His Fi

Spirited Away street art, Barcelona

Spirited Away won Best Animated Feature at the 75th Academy Awards in March 2003. Hayao Miyazaki was not in the building. He was in Japan. He had reportedly declined to attend because he opposed the Iraq War and didn't want to fly to the United States while the invasion was underway. His film won the Oscar anyway, becoming the first and still only non-English-language film to take that category.

The film had opened in Japan on July 20, 2001 — before September 11, before the war, in a different world. It became the highest-grossing film in Japanese history, a record it held until Demon Slayer: Mugen Train displaced it in 2020. Studio Ghibli had made beloved films before — Totoro, Mononoke, Kiki's — but Spirited Away was the one that crossed over completely. It wasn't an anime film that non-anime audiences tolerated. It was a film.

The American release came in January 2003 through Disney's distribution arm, which had acquired Ghibli's catalog in 1996. The distribution deal had a specific clause: Disney could not cut or alter the films in any way. This was reportedly negotiated after Miyazaki heard about the butchered US release of Nausicaä and his producer, Toshio Suzuki, sent Disney a katana with a note reading "No cuts."

The bootleg and unlicensed merch that circulated around Spirited Away in the early 2000s came from the specific subculture that cared about this film before it became universally agreed-upon — the anime collectors, the Ghibli devotees, the art students who'd imported VHS copies before the Disney deal. The shirts from that era are from a different moment in the film's life, before the cultural consensus solidified.

This one is white cotton, fits like an XL. There's only one.

Miyazaki Didn't Attend the Oscars Because of the Iraq War. Then His Film Won.

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