To live is to exist in state of constantly being torn in two. This is true on a strictly biological level—cells reproduce through mitosis—but it's true on a less literal level as well. Childhood and adulthood are thought of as distinct, but there's no easy way of actually separating the two in practice. We're taught gender as assigned and binary, and are expected to adhere to the according stereotypes, no matter how we might feel about them. What's expected of us is usually different (to some degree) from what we want or what we're capable of. We are walking contradictions, and it's not necessarily a resolution one way or the other that we come to as we grow, but clarity as to how those natures mesh, and an acceptance of the in-between. There's no film that illustrates this middle ground as well—and as beautifully—as Spirited Away.

I'll admit to an intense personal attachment to the film. I first saw Spirited Away at the age of nine. It was almost two years after I had moved from New York to Illinois, as my attachment to the East Coast was slowly edged out by what would be a total of ten years in the Midwest. It was also just as I was beginning to understand that the hyphen in "Korean-American" was a visual representation of poles in my own identity. Chihiro, the young girl at the center of Spirited Away, embarks upon her adventure just as her family is moving, and upon becoming a part of the spirit world, juggles identities as well. She even gives up her name (though not by choice), going by "Sen" for the duration of her time with the spirits. To that end, the original Japanese title of the movie makes this split more explicit, addressing her as if as two different people—it's called Sen and Chihiro's Spiriting Away.

The spirits that she meets present similar dichotomies: the men who work at the bathhouse all seem to be halfway between human and frog; the sootballs that help stoke the boilers eat sugar stars that are their aesthetic opposites; No-Face goes from being a meek shadow to a monstrous glutton and back again; even in the bathhouse itself, the Japanese architecture and decor give way to distinctly European influences in Yubaba's suite. Then there's Haku, who spends his time alternately as a boy and as a dragon, who can't free himself of Yubaba's grasp because he's forgotten his true name, his true self. As such, he understands better than anyone else that there are two sides to Chihiro; midway through the movie, he returns her old clothes to her, telling her that they're for when she goes home. He also returns a farewell card she'd been given by her friends when she moved, the only memento Sen has of the name Chihiro.