Money On Film: Spirited Away
Slate Money
Slate Podcasts
4.1 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 27 March 2026
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello. Welcome to Money on Film. I'm Felix Salmon of Bloomberg. I'm here with |
| 0:11.1 | Naderigoff. Culture writer at sleep. We are in our third and final of this little mini-series. |
| 0:19.5 | We have already talked about margin call. |
| 0:23.4 | We have already talked about materialists, which is a movie you don't need to see. |
| 0:28.0 | But this week is the culmination, the climax, the greatest of all. |
| 0:33.9 | This week we are going to talk about economics. |
| 0:41.2 | In a way, we're going to talk about economics in a way we're going to talk about spirited away the 2001 haio Miyazaki animated studio jibli film which is one of my favorite movies |
| 0:47.5 | of all time from one of my favorite directors slash animators slash creators of all time and is this |
| 0:53.0 | a movie that you had seen before? |
| 0:54.3 | No, I had never seen this before. |
| 0:56.0 | Okay. |
| 0:56.5 | Well, I'm excited to talk about it. |
| 0:58.5 | How many times have you seen this movie? |
| 1:00.6 | That's a really good question. |
| 1:02.4 | It's not the Studio Jibble movie that I've seen the most because that would be Howl's Moving Castle. |
| 1:07.2 | But I've probably seen this movie at least five times. |
| 1:13.0 | So your spirit of the way count is higher than my marginal count. |
| 1:18.2 | Yeah, though my house-moving castle account would probably scare a Victorian child. |
| 1:23.5 | So, yes, I watch the studio Jibli movies a lot. And I have such a fond place in my heart for them. And what's really lovely about my face when I talk about these movies is all I can do is smile. And if you would like to see that, you can because we're taping Insight Studios. |
| 1:42.2 | And there is the queen of the Segway. |
| 1:47.7 | And so if you would like to watch these episodes on YouTube, |
| 1:49.0 | that's where they'll be available, |
... |
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