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Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki is famously protective of his creations, so it was no small thing when Studio Ghibli, the production company he cofounded in 1985, agreed to let theater director John Caird mount a live-stage version of Miyazaki’s most beloved work, Spirited Away. Caird had promised not to throw in a lot of unnecessary high-tech effects. This meant that the responsibility fell upon U.K.-based puppet master Toby Olié to imagine how the Oscar-winning movie’s ensemble of spirits and gods would interact with human actors in the physical world. Could Haku the dragon, the Radish Spirit, No-Face, and the Kodama tree creatures be at once otherworldly and exist in real life?
Olié is no stranger to complex puppeteering challenges, having designed or worked on large-scale puppets for stage versions of War Horse, Peter Pan, Pinocchio, and other cultural touchstones. But Spirited Away presented two unique hurdles: He’d have to win Miyazaki’s blessing while also pleasing the millions of superfans for whom the 2001 animated movie is sacred.
His epiphany came when he realized that he could use those very same superfans for inspiration. Olié drew on the wealth of Spirited Away fan art that populates online forums such as Pinterest, where artists working in all kinds of media build on Miyazaki’s retrained style—soft colors, hand-painted images—to create incredibly detailed, photorealistic versions of his two-dimensional characters. This crowdsourced approach helped Olié not only expand his vision for what was possible in three dimensions, but also offered a window into the expectations of hard-core fans and what they wanted to see.
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