This article investigates the symbolism of Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away. The aim is, without reducing it to a critique of capitalism or a revival of animism, to hermeneutically reconstruct his concept of life and to compare this position with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Bildungsroman and Friedrich Nietzsche's nihilism. In the first part, Miyazaki's selected interviews are scrutinized to bring his ambivalent perspective towards the nature of life into the foreground. Subsequently, the results are expounded in two additional studies. The juxtaposition with Goethe's novels will show a tension between two aspects of Chihiro's adventure which are related to the vocational functionalism of Montan and Makarie's illuminating benevolence. In regard to nihilism, Nietzsche's renunciation of idealistic sophistries is linked to Miyazaki's cynical comments on post-modern society. But Miyazaki does not resort to the instinctive will to power, as does Nietzsche, but to the primitive intuition of compassion. The necessity of hard work in a society on the one hand and the innate, innocent sociability of a child on the other are unified magically in the realistic drama of Chihiro.