Spirited Away

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In this series of The Essay, five leading cultural voices choose a great work of art and talk about a small, under-appreciated aspect of the piece that carries great meaning for them. In this edition, we hear from Welsh journalist and author Angela Hui. Her memoir is called ‘Takeaway: Stories from a Childhood Behind the Counter’, and in this essay she draws our attention to a moment in a movie which others might have seen hundreds of times before but may have missed. For Angela, there’s a small uneventful scene in Hayao Miyazaki’s ‘Spirited Away’ where No Face, one of the spirits in the film, is politely drinking tea and eating a slice of cake that makes her laugh out loud and warms her heart to the core. Producer: Emma Betteridge