Growing up, staged as a job
Chihiro's parents are turned into pigs within the first ten minutes, and the film spends almost none of its runtime dwelling on how frightening that ought to be. Instead it puts her straight to work in a spirit bathhouse, scrubbing floors and calming a stink spirit, because Spirited Away's real subject isn't rescue — it's competence, earned the unglamorous way. Chihiro doesn't defeat Yubaba, the witch who runs the bathhouse and controls her name, through a heroic confrontation. She simply becomes too useful and too observant to be discarded, and that quiet, procedural version of growing up is far stranger and more honest than a typical rescue plot would allow.
Miyazaki fills the bathhouse with spirits whose needs are mundane rather than menacing — a polluted river god just wants to be cleaned, a lonely faceless spirit named No-Face just wants to be noticed — and the film's generosity toward even its strangest characters is part of what keeps it from ever curdling into a simple morality tale about good and evil.
A train that keeps its own quiet time
The sequence of Chihiro riding a silent train across a flooded landscape, alongside faceless passengers heading nowhere in particular, has almost no narrative function and is one of the most purely felt passages of the entire film — a stretch of stillness Miyazaki allows the story simply because it earns the pause. Few animated films this widely loved are willing to be that patient in the middle of their own plot.
Earns it, entirely. A coming-of-age story that trusts hard, unglamorous work over destiny, and trusts its audience — young or old — to sit with strangeness without needing it fully explained.