When I was 6 years old, my father took me to the movie theater to see Spirited Away. Being a known cinephile, he hoped to pass his passion for good movies onto me through the tranquilizing effect animated movies have on any human being under 8 years old. I had just now reached that age where I was able to pay attention through a whole movie without squirming, and he took full advantage of that. What began as an innocent father-child bonding session turned into the birth of my creative mind, which has not died out since.

To avoid spoilers I’ll refrain from describing the movie too much, but suffice to say Spirited Away changed me. As soon as the movie began I became sucked into the great world of Hayao Miyazaki. I looked through the eyes of Chihiro, the main character, and was swallowed up in the world of kindness, spirits, and mysticism which was captured in the very lines of the animation like I had never seen before. For the first time I saw there was an entirely new world behind the walls of real life; a fictional realm in which you could see yourself and explore worlds you likewise never would have dreamed of. I realized that stories exist as an art form, not just a simple teaching method for learning the alphabet, and from that day on, I was obsessed.

As a young fiction writer and artist, Spirited Away, and later the subsequent movies by Studio Ghibli, shaped my creativity in a way no other movie, book, or television show ever has, and likely ever will. As soon as I came home from the movie that evening, my father and I couldn’t stop talking about the magic we had seen. I found myself trying to recreate the images I had seen with crayons and markers when I sat down to draw. When I began writing fiction I found myself analyzing the plot structure of the movie in order to guide myself in my writing.

If it were not for Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli, and the movie Spirited Away, I would likely still be an artist in the visual and written forms, but I would not be anywhere near the same were it not for that evening spent with my father inside the movie theater. Many artists cite dozens of influences in their work, and while I could do that, I would rather cite the influence that started it all.

Thank you for everything you have done, Hayao Miyazaki. May you live many more years full of life, love, and of course, magic.