Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Hayao Miyazaki’s popular first Academy Award-winning film, Spirited Away, invokes the Greco-Roman katabasis, or “journey to the underworld.” Miyazaki uses Greco-Roman literary tropes, something that he has done in earlier films such as Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and imbues them with Japanese folklore motifs. As a result, Miyazaki replicates a distinctly Classical katabasis story structure within a definitively Japanese setting and medium. Makoto Shinkai, drawing inspiration from Miyazaki, likewise made successful katabatic films, Your Name and Weathering with You. Through the influence of these two Japanese filmmakers, the katabasis motif has become increasingly popular in the last ten years. This chapter traces the inception of this pattern in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away and shows how it is molded into a stricter pattern in Shinkai and eventually later animated films as well, paying attention to Greek and Roman source texts as well as Shinto religion and Japanese folklore motifs.</jats:p>