Spirited Away Main Characters, Ranked By Intelligence
Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away is one of Studio Ghibli's most renowned films and is widely considered among the best-ever animated features. The film's mystifying and heartwarming tale of a girl transported into a world of spirits, witches, and curses is fondly remembered by fans for its cast of distinctive and vividly realized characters.
This spirit world is full of trickery, mainly thanks to Yubaba, and the characters' cleverness and resolve are tested multiple times throughout the narrative. While some characters demonstrate great wisdom and intellect, others are revealed to be not particularly bright.
10 Aogaeru
Aogaeru is a frog spirit and one of Chihiro's coworkers at Yubaba's bathhouse. He deserves some credit for being perceptive, as he notices that Chihiro is human before anyone else, but he proves severely lacking in street smarts.
His affinity for gold and his greedy nature make him easy prey for No-Face when scrambling for the precious pieces scattered around the bathhouse. Perhaps he has sustained one too many of Haku's stunning spells to fully have his wits about him.
9 Boh
Boh is Yubaba's son, a giant baby prone to sudden tantrums. Although it wouldn't usually be fair to judge an infant on his smarts, Boh possesses remarkably advanced speech capabilities as the child of a witch—but no magic powers as of yet. When Chihiro stumbles into his room, he captures her and threatens to cry, thereby summon his mother, a tactic that demonstrates some level of cunning.
By the movie's end, his stint as a transfigured mouse has matured him to the point of standing up to Yubaba—and standing up for himself.
8 Akio & Yuko Ogino
Chihiro's parents don't get a ton of screentime in Spirited Away, but, in their brief appearance, they make some decisions that could easily be seen as foolish. With an explorer's spirit, Akio unwittingly leads the family and a reluctant Chihiro through the abandoned temple and into the spirit world.
That's innocent enough, but the couple's choice to sit down in the town and help themselves to food with no vendor is more questionable, and it causes their daughter quite a headache. Akio and Yuko seem to be pleasant and loving parents, but their naivety is central to the film's plot.
7 Yubaba
Yubaba is the owner of the bathhouse, a cunning and money-minded witch who rules over her business with an iron fist. She seems to consider herself an effective manipulator who seeks to control her employees using sneaky contracts, if not by outright poisoning them with a mind-controlling slug (as in the case of Haku).
To her credit, she has many tricks up her sleeve, like the glamor she places on her employees to make them look like pigs. But, the supposedly powerful sorceress doesn't recognize her own baby when he's turned into a mouse, and she ends up being outsmarted by a child, albeit a very precocious one.
6 Lin
Lin is Chihiro's trainer in the bathhouse, a grown woman who, like Chihiro, dreams of leaving the film's pseudo-island setting. She has wit and street smarts from her tenure at the bathhouse, and she passes these qualities down to Chihiro while showing the younger girl the ropes.
She knows how to manipulate her coworkers, as viewers see when she distracts a cook with a roasted newt so Chihiro can secretly take the elevator to Yubaba's penthouse. It's likely that after Chihiro's departure from the spirit world, the savvy cleaner manages to realize her plan to board the train and start a new life.
5 Haku
Haku is clearly one of the brightest people in the bathhouse, and viewers can sense this as soon as he warns Chihiro to escape from the spirit world before dark. Once she becomes trapped, he begins a double life of sorts as Chihiro's ally and advisor and does so while maintaining his position as Yubaba's henchman. He also deserves credit for knowing how to magically unfreeze Chihiro's legs and how to avoid Yubaba's harpy crony.
But, in dragon form, Haku appears much less reasonable, as fans remember from the painful sequence where he's injured by Zeniba's paper birds and won't stop thrashing around long enough for Chihiro to care for him.
4 No-Face
One of Spirited Away's most iconic characters, No-Face is a spirit unique amongst those who frequent the bathhouse. He's quite intuitive, quickly observing that gold motivates the entire bathhouse to no end and then using this knowledge to try to curry favor with Chihiro.
The towering spirit has a weakness for food that obscures his intelligence—and especially so after he begins eating the bathhouse employees—but, in his neutral state, he watches and learns at a remarkable pace. Viewers see this again when he takes up sewing at Zeniba's house.
3 Kamaji
Kamaji is the bathhouse's many-limbed boiler man who, despite his initial reservations, proves to be an invaluable ally to Chihiro. He intuitively knows what's wrong with Haku when his dragon form is injured and theorizes he swallowed something—in fact, Yubaba's poisonous slug. He encourages Chihiro to save Haku by asking for Zeniba's forgiveness and even produces ancient train tickets for the journey.
Beyond helping Chihiro, he magicks soot into living beings, knows exactly which herbs make which baths, and easily produces an excuse—his granddaughter is visiting—for Chihiro's presence at the bathhouse. Kamaji is not only a benevolent and lovable figure, but also someone who seriously has his wits about him.
2 Chihiro
Spirited Away is Chihiro's coming-of-age story, and, in its course, she learns all about the spirit world and how to survive in it. She's thrown into a bewildering situation, and, although she's scared at first, she quickly understands what she needs to do to get her and her parents to safety, a skill which it's implied will go on to help her navigate the real world.
She figures out that her gift from the River Spirit will cure No-Face of his gluttonous rampage, deduces Haku's real name based on a childhood memory—as well as remember her own—and outsmarts Yubaba in the film's climactic moments. Clearly, she's one of the film's sharpest characters.
1 Zeniba
The second witch viewers meet in Spirited Away is quite petty when it comes to her relationship with her sister Yubaba, and this leads Zeniba to display a dazzling array of magic tricks when viewers first meet her. But, unlike her brash and ill-tempered twin, Zeniba proves to be quite wise, and she instinctively knows that Chihiro's problems require careful reflection and, most of all, patience.
This simple advice leads Chihiro to remember Haku's real name, and it's plausible that it also helps her discern that none of the pigs later presented to her by Yubaba are her parents. Her wisdom ultimately has an important role in shaping the story's outcome.
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