For our Ghibli Miniatuart papercraft this time we'll be doing No. 11, a Spirited Away one which also happens to be a two star one again like the Kiki's Delivery Service I put together the last time.

Spirited Away just happens to be one of my top Ghibili movies thanks to how exotic the art is and I'm sure most would agree it was quite moving how Chihiro persevered to save her own parents.

Anyway, back to the model.

Funnily enough, it didn't take as long. Fastest one out of the ones I've done so far at 6 hours. Probably because there isn't a lot of small pieces to put together.

So as before, I decided to put together what looked like the easiest object first which was the Bath House because it was the largest object in the model.

This particular model featured a nice shimmering piece of gold card but too bad most of it is covered up.

Even though this is a miniature and doesn't require you to build rooms like the larger models, there's still a lot of layers to put together to recreate the depth and detail.

Some parts of the Bath House is like a jigsaw puzzle like here. Luckily it's not hard to tell which side you should be glueing here.

You can see they use a lot of these white panels to represent the sliding doors you can see through the windows.

And we're almost done with the house. Seems we need to do some cutting out with a pair of scissors instead of just popping parts out of the stencils.

The purple curtain was probably the hardest to cut thanks to the curves caving inwards.

Note that the square patterns aren't the correct size. Be sure to trim them so that they don't cover the tiny red hinges that stick out from the the right parts of the entrance. You'll know why later.

You'll definitely notice the patterns aren't the correct size once you stick them onto these walls and bend them.

Trees were made up of many parts but wasn't as time consuming to put together as the bits of sponge I had to glue together for the Totoro model.

Another problem I came across was they expected you to have something to render the lanterns and Chihiro's shirt white... Obviously I didn't have a white marker pen. After digging around I found a white crayon but it didn't work out very well so I decided to just leave them as is.

Bridge itself is curved but wasn't hard to put together since it has arches underneath to help keep it in shape.

Now this is the part where you'll have problems if you didn't trim the patterns properly. The outside wall is supposed to clip neatly onto a hinge sticking out on the red wall of the entrance. I hadn't trimmed it thinking it was supposed to be like this. Since it was already glued together, the only option I had was to trim the wall instead until it fitted into place =/

It was the same with the other outside wall on the left hand side.

Now we just had to put in the lanterns, trees and other objects. Turned out quite difficult with the house in the way so I had to hold them upright with a pair of tweezers to put them into place. Of course, I added a smidge of glue along the edge to help support them.

Slotting the bath house flag into place was quite hard too - it didn't fit in as easily as Chuu Totoro did in the Totoro model. I used tweezers to push it in so that I didn't end up breaking it with my fingers.

And yes, Chihiro doesn't have a face... Looks like she lost that as well as her name here. Kind of thought of drawing a smiley on but didn't want to ruin the model, lol ^^;

Here's a screenshot from the movie for reference.

And the finished model!

Tips

• Trim the square patterns so that they don't cover the hinges of the cards or you'll have problems aligning everything later.
• You're going to need some kind of white coloured paint or chalk for rendering Chihiro's shirt and lanterns white.
• If you're going to follow the instructions in order then you'll definitely need tweezers to put the trees and lanterns into place.
• If you have problems slotting the flag pole in place, use tweezers instead of your fingers. Otherwise you might break it.