'Spirited Away': Early Sketches For Hayao Miyazaki's Animated Fantasy (PHOTOS)

The images reposted here originally appeared in a post for JoBlo.com.

Over at the movie-cataloguing site JoBlo, a guy named Steve Seigh keeps writing unbelievably in-depth histories of animated movies for a column he calls "Ink & Pixel." It's the kind of internet rabbit hole that takes a lot of work to put together and often goes un-fallen through, and in an attempt to even out that balance we'll be pointing an arrow every so often to Seigh's best efforts.

The last Seigh post we featured used early sketches to tell the story of how Pixar made "Up," an elaborate process that involved a "design vocabulary chart." Now, Seigh's broken down "Spirited Away," the Japanese fantasy film about a girl set on rescuing her parents from a parallel universe that's turned them into pigs (har har). The way Seigh tells the story, "Spirited" was the gorgeous little film that could. Director Hayao Miyazaki and his team had to quadruple their output 6 months before the premiere date in order to finish, which they managed without fudging what any fan will tell you is an unusually beautiful aesthetic.

Below, we've reposted some of the stills and early "Spirited" sketches Seigh shared. Head on over to JoBlo for the full story and more images.