Money On Film: Spirited Away

Welcome to a very special Money On Film miniseries! Over three episodes, Slate Money’s Felix Salmon and Slate culture writer Nadira Goffe revisit three films at the intersection of culture and finance. On this episode, Nadira and Felix take a trip to a bathhouse for spirits in 2001’s Spirited Away . Directed by Hayao Miyazaki, the film follows a girl named Chihiro, who becomes trapped in the spirit world and must save her parents, encountering soot sprites, river spirits, a giant baby, and many more wonderful and terrifying beings along the way. The film is a masterpiece of storytelling and technical animation, but as Felix explains, it also works as a highly developed metaphor for capital and the Japanese economy at the close of the millennium: the bathhouse stands in for a stable but exploitative economic system, beset by outside capital forces, with workers stripped of their names and identities. This is the final episode of the Money On Film miniseries. Thanks for listening! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You can listen to Money On Film: Spirited Away online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Money On Film: Spirited Away is an episode from Slate Money by Slate Podcasts.

This episode is 29:05 long.

This episode was published on Mar 27, 2026.

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