The Spirited Away Inspired Story of Little Nightmares
A side by side comparison of Tarsier Studio’s Little Nightmares and it’s inspiration: Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away
Note: Contains spoilers for both Little Nightmares and Spirited Away. Also, this post is picture heavy due to the comparative nature of the discussion.
Little Nightmares is one of those beautiful games where quality over quantity is palpable in every aspect of the game. Made by the same creators as the infamous Little Big Planet, Little Nightmares takes attention to detail to a whole new level by paying homage to one of Studio Ghibli’s most popular films, Spirited Away. While the movie is now 18 years old, it remains an inspiration to many artists and creators due to its beautiful world and whimsical story, carefully marrying dark themes with the quirky and magical setting of the bathhouse.
Playing Little Nightmares was like a twisted walk through my memory of the film as the games protagonist, a little girl named Six, attempts to escape the squalor of The Maw’s underbelly. Simultaneously, the player is taken through a journey around The Maw, discovering its secrets piece by piece as Six’s story unfolds. This article serves to highlight the Spirited Away inspired elements of the game by placing them side by side with the film.
First though, let me give you a quick overview about the game which will include my narrative assumptions about the game which are not confirmed. Much of it is widely thought to be true by fans of the game, but some of it is just me thinking too much into things.
Little Nightmares
The Facts:
Six is a young girl who wears a yellow raincoat which always hides her face. She wakes up inside a suitcase-turned-bed in a hidden away portion of the Maw, a ship/island machine. After passing through a room with a man who is dead and hanging above an opened envelope, Six leaves her lodgings in search of food to curb her ravenous hunger. She first goes through the prison where thin children sleep in beds under the watchful eye of The Janitor. The Janitor locks children away in cages and then wraps them up in body bags. Body bags are then sent into the kitchen. Six hitches a ride on a meat hook into the kitchen where she meets The Twin Cooks who are busy prepping and cooking tons of meat which then get served to the many guests that arrive on the Maw to eat themselves silly. Then, Six sneaks past all these people and arrives at the living quarters of The Lady, a mask wearing geisha who seems to have magical powers of some sort.
Along the way, Six meets creatures called Nomes who she can hug and they’ll follow her around a little bit. When Six becomes weak from hunger the lights around her flicker. Finally, when Six meets the Lady, she uses a mirror to kill her with her own reflection and then Six eats her. Having consumed her body, Six gains the Lady’s powers and as she walks through the dining hall to the outside world, she steals the life force of the guests, becoming even more powerful in the process.
The Not Facts:
So the theory is that Six is actually the daughter of The Lady, who is Five (not in age but in order from 1–6). We can see this in the numerous photos around The Lady’s home which depict her and four other figures and then portraits of a little girl wearing yellow who we can guess is Six. We can also make guesses that Six was thrown into the basement of the Maw and not into the children’s prison because she has power and that The Lady fears Six will overtake her and steal her power. Some people think that the man who committed suicide was actually Six’s father. I personally think that the envelope at his feet contained a letter which in some way forced him or persuaded him to hang himself, leaving Six alone and hungry in the process.
The Nomes are generally thought to be the embodiment of malnourished children who died before the Janitor could turn them into dinner meat. The Maw is said to be an energy farm for The Lady. They come to the Maw with the promise of food, dump their kids in the child’s prison and stuff their faces until The Lady steals their life force to make herself younger and more powerful. Despite being vain, she thinks that she will never be beautiful enough, which is why she wears a mask and why all the mirrors except the one Six uses to defeat her are smashed to pieces. It’s also thought that this was another reason for Six to be exiled, because The Lady knew that Six would be prettier than she. It’s some Mirror Mirror kinda stuff going on.
Alright, now that we’re all caught up. Let’s get going on our comparison between Spirited Away and Little Nightmares.
Aesthetic/Setting
Well for starters, the mere appearance of the game and design of the Maw is, in some places, a near replica of certain elements from Spirited Away. It seems that so many of the unique features of the film were relocated and made to fit inside a different world, from the bathhouse to the boat/island combination that is The Maw. Almost immediately in the game, I found this staircase which is almost identical to the one that leads down the side of the bathhouse to the boiler room where Chihiro first enters her new home and workplace. Six too starts her story in an industrial setting within The Maw, which then leads her up and into the other, less mechanical areas of her environment.
Even the posts that hold up the staircase are very similar, although Little Nightmare’s stairs are even more treacherous, having fewer stabilizing beams to keep the steps against the wall. One can also see the use of platforms in the staircase which links back to the iconic scene where Chihiro trips and runs for her dear little life, while she all but topples down the stairs onto a platform face-first, before continuing down the side of the building.
Even the overarching blueprint of the bathhouse and The Maw are fairly similar, shown here in the beginning of the film and the game as Haku leads Chihiro through the kitchen store room and meat locker to Kamaji’s workshop. In the parallel image, Six travels in the opposite direction from The Janitor’s workshop to the kitchen on a meat hook. The meat hooks and wrapped carcasses are also seen in Spirited Away as shown above on the left and right side of the images.
The guest areas are similar as well, both featuring painted Japanese-style panels, albeit The Maw boasts wooden floorboards where the bathhouse uses straw mat style flooring. Little Nightmare’s even goes so far as to depict the Maw itself in it’s panels as the waves rage on, bearing a similarity to Hokusai’s “The Great Wave off Kanagawa”, which I’m sure you’ve seen about a gazillion times.
There’s no doubt in my mind that this is a reference to the Japanese culture shown in Spirited Away but also in general, due to the delicate painting and the surrounding decor. There isn’t many cultures that do painted panels in the way that the Japanese do.
But what’s even more striking is that the game, created by a Swedish studio, uses numerous references to the Japanese culture, such as the use of teru teru bōzu in the janitor’s workshop. Teru teru bōzu are traditional Japanese paper crafts that are typically made by children the day before an outing in hopes of pleasant weather. In the world of Little Nightmares it’s unclear who has made these paper dolls but the use of a child’s craft in this setting gives me chills, especially considering the hanging body bags surrounding these dolls that look very similar to little ghosts. They also look very similar to The Nomes in the game. The fact that teru teru bōzu hang from their neck also paints an eerie resemblance to the hanging man at the beginning of the game who has presumably committed suicide via noose, which nicely ties the Japanese easter egg with the themes and motifs of the game.
Speaking of the themes and motifs of the games, here’s an image of a bathtub that’s probably not meant to reference the bathhouse beside a shovel (scary) and a used guillotine (scarier).
Moving on, Little Nightmares toys with sizes in the world to make Six appear even smaller than she is, a technique that is used in some ways in Spirited Away to make Chihiro seem smaller compared to her environment. In Six’s world, the only people her size are The Nomes and the imprisoned children who are seen sleeping in their beds , but in Chihiro’s world there are characters of all sizes. The large characters though, become quite large, such as No Face’s gluttonous form, the Radish spirit, Yubaba, Haku’s dragon form and the Stink Spirit, who are all giant by comparison.
Another technique used in both Little Nightmares and Spirited Away is the use of height in the protagonists’ surroundings to effectively scale them down by juxtaposition. In the workshops of both Kamaji and The Janitor, the use of extremely tall and narrow chests of drawers seem to stretch the environment, making small characters appear to be even smaller.
This idea is carried on throughout Little Nightmares, especially in the use of small doorways that no one else could fit through and the use of lattices to climb where no larger person would be able to climb. The use of small doors and lattices are also used in Spirited Away shown in the image below.
Next on the topic of aesthetics and setting, here is a side by side comparison of the guests to the theme park and to The Maw exiting their ship to join the party. Although the ship dropping the guests off at The Maw is not fully shown here, it bears similarity to the parallel image from Spirited Away.
Both also use similar elevators with levers to get around their environment.
Oh, and lastly, I feel like this black goo is worth mentioning:
Identity/Masks
Next on the docket is the theme of identity and the motif of masks. If you’ve seen Spirited Away, I’m sure that one of the most memorable scenes is the one where No Face enters the bathhouse and wreaks absolute havoc when Chihiro brushes him off. No Face is iconic, as is the use of masks in Japanese culture, so it’s no surprise to me that numerous characters in Little Nightmares cover their face with a mask. The Twin Cooks wear masks to make them look like Cabbage Patch kids(for some reason) and many guests of The Maw wear painted Kabuki style masks. Even The Lady wears a mask to hide her face. Her identity, as well as Six’s, is kept hidden to players and to the world around them. So while Six goes on a journey to (presumably) escape The Maw, the player finds out little to nothing about Six’s actual identity. Heck, I even assumed she was a boy the first time I saw the character design, that is just how perfect her anonymity is. And then when Six discovers her powers at the end of the game, one could say that it was a remedying of identity, allowing her to take hold of the power that was rightfully hers, which if you’ve read the theories about Six’s relation to The Lady, you’d know was probably the reason she was cast out in the first place, so that The Lady could retain the power for herself indefinitely.
Similarly, Chihiro’s story is also one of identity as her name is stolen away from her and replaced with ‘Sen’, which she goes by for much of the film. It’s Chihiro’s task to remember her own name and identity and to not forget the world she once came from. It’s also part of her story that she must remember the identity of her parents even after they’ve been turned into pigs, as well as Haku’s true identity, which was never really revealed to her.
Food Symbolism
Moving on, let’s talk about food. If you’re anything like me, you love food. But probably no where near as much as the guests of The Maw and Chihiro’s pig-form parents. To me, I don’t really see how Little Nightmare’s design team could have come up with this idea for hungry, blob-like people if not for the inspiration from Spirited Away.
Originally, the game was actually going to be called ‘Hunger’ and the story was meant to focus more on the topic of food as Six journeyed just to feed herself. While it is still a crucial part of the story, and she is driven to do terrible things because of her hunger, in the final version of Little Nightmares, it seems to be about so much more than hunger and survival. It’s about identity and about power.
In Little Nightmares, the symbolism for food takes on a whole new meaning as it becomes the driving factor for not only Six, but also the guests of The Maw who are trying to eat her, The Twin Cooks who are trying to cook her and also The Janitor, who is trying to make her into another body to send to the kitchen for meal prep. With each level, Six becomes stronger as she evades her enemies and draws closer to The Lady, who uses these guests as her source of power.
Luckily for The Lady, these guests are bottomless pits who never stop eating. They thrive off their gluttony, just as the characters in the bathhouse make an absurd amount of food for No Face in their desire for gold.
No Face himself has a gluttonous side, as he eats anything that comes to close (including Aogaeru and the Bathhouse manager). But it’s not until Chihiro refuses to take his money or spend time with him that you realize No Face never actually desired food, but instead he wanted the power that came when he gave money to the workers and they in-turn, gave him whatever he wanted. But no amount of money could distract Chihiro from her mission.
Food is also symbolic of sustenance and the prevention of fading or wasting away which can be seen in both Spirited Away when Haku forces Chihiro to eat food from his world. In this case, she is literally fading away and becoming nothing, first by being see-through and then as her condition worsens, she is no longer solid and can put her arm straight through Haku’s body. This idea of needing help from a more experienced person is also seen in Little Nightmares when a boy (The Runaway Kid?) throws Six his piece of bread through the bars so that she can have the strength to continue on. The Runaway Kid is from the games DLC and tells his story in The Maw, which takes place before the events of the main story. In this way, we can consider him to be an experienced person in the same way Haku is and plays a crucial role in allowing Six to rise to power at the end of the game.
In Six’s story though, food also symbolizes strength past the idea of health. It also symbolizes her power over her environment. At first, Six eats this piece of bread. Next she eats a piece of meat and then, a she feasts on a live rat, until finally, she reaches the point of no return, using the trust that she established with the Nomes and abusing her power by eating a Nome, even as it offers her food to eat. Until finally, Six is strong enough to eat the Lady and take her powers. I believe Six always had these powers because whenever she is hungry, the lights around her flicker and pulse in response to her suffering.
The Janitor
Alright, now this is where we really get to the good stuff. I mean, look at these guys’ arms! I don’t feel like I have to do a lot here to convince you that both Kamaji and The Janitor have ridiculously long arms which define their physical character.
Just as Spirited Away’s boiler man, Kamaji, uses his arms to navigate his surroundings, so too does The Janitor in Little Nightmares. Kamaji rarely ever has to leave his work station because of how long his arms are. He can reach everything he needs, he has little dust spirits to work the furnace and Lynn brings him his meals. He works and sleeps in the same position because of his arm length. Frankly, The Janitor is not as efficient as Kamaji, but his willingness to be mobile is all the more terrifying as the player scurries around, attempting to keep Six out of his ridiculously long reach.
The main difference I see in their characters is that The Janitor has more curiosity. While Kamaji never stops working for anyone else’ sake and barely even turns a head when Chihiro appears, the Janitor is curious about the noises he hears around his workshop. While the mask-like gathering of skin over his eyes leaves him blind, his sense of sound is impeccable and he’ll absolutely stop working to figure out the source of the sound. For Kamaji, he could probably be ransacked by some thugs and not pay them any mind until he ran out of ingredients to make the bath water or they forcibly removed him from his post. While neither character is inherently good or bad, they both serve as a sort of calm, neutral party, just trying to do their work amongst the chaos that the protagonist of each story brings. They are both just doing their jobs and fulfilling their duties as defined by their title. But again, The Janitor is just a little more curious, which leads him to his room full of children’s toys and his library full of books. He’s even mesmerized by TV’s in a way that I could never even fathom for Kamaji.
What’s even more neat is that the shape of The Janitor’s head only resembles Kamaji’s with the addition of his red hat, which looks very similar to the red bowl that the Radish Spirit is seen wearing in the image from earlier in this post. Not only does it serve to further the resemblance to Kamaji, but it also links back to the Radish spirit’s red bowl hat in some small way.
So anyway, that’s it. That’s all I got for you. Did I leave anything out? Leave a comment below with your opinions and have an awesome day!
