Prompt: Movie's visual qualities

I'm actually a huge fan of visually based and animated movies, so I'm going with Spirited Away for this one.

The movie is about a human who gets trapped, perhaps temporarily, in a fantastical fairy-tale world. A bath-house for the spirits. In particular, there's a set of scenes at the beginning where Chihiro (the main character)'s family discovers what they think is an abandoned amusement park, and explore it. In the evening, the park reveals its true nature: the spirit's bath house.

The above are from BEFORE the bath-house is revealed. It's a small difference, but the images are slightly paler and more pastel. This may also be a result of the bath-house's nature being revealed at night.

Haku's arrival signals the start of the bath-house becoming a supernatural place, and the colors darken and the image becomes more serious in response.

 

Images from when Chihiro has found out the truth of the bath house. The colors are more serious, more ominous. though also warmer.

Partially because the main character of the movie is a child, and partially because she is a human in the land of spirits, chihiro is outsized. Everything is larger in scale, more panoramic, when she is in the picture. She's usually placed so as to be small, to seem smaller, especially in the beginning of the movie. This is NOT true of all media by this author, all media involving child protagonists (who sometimes seem larger then they should be because they are  a large part of the story and the focus), or even all miyazaki films involving children. Haku's human self also resembles a child, and his presence in the film is larger/any scene he occupies.

The bath-house's colors are more serious and somber. Everything in the movie is high-color (though not nessicairly high key color all the time), which is a feature of Miyazaki's often fairy-tale-like narratives. This one is particularly colorful. None of the color is nonsensical, but more opportunities have been found in this story to express color-- because this narrative is a highly fantastical narrative, possibly the most fantastical narrative in the [my list of] Big Three Miyazaki films (Princess Mononoke (which is way more adult-oriented and somber), spirited away, and Howl's moving castle (which straddles the line between fantasy genres and intended audience.)) The bath house's color tends to have deeper shadows in places, and the colors are often more intense there then they are in other settings, where they become almost pastel.

Most of the settings are extremely linear, and project upwards. This helps the scale, because chihiro (constructed primarily of softer, round shapes) is more of a contrast. The sharp upward direction also makes her seem smaller, and makes this fantastical setting seem larger, with more space for there to be story. This is not a cramped setting, and its colorful cast of spirit-creatures fit within it's confines.

The texture of this movie is fairly smooth-- significant because i think most of the backgrounds are paintiend; but they have appropriate textures where it is relevant, and it's not the artificial smoothness of some animated movies where the visual shorthand/language aspect of the drawings is what's important to convey clearly where they are and what's happening, but otherwise richness of imagery is not important. Miyazaki films are smooth enough to be clear but also created with concerned with the aesthetics of the scenes. They are bot very painterly, with brush strokes visible, which is what I usually equate with texture, but nevertheless background textures are employed nicely.
Textures are not really employed in the figures, but that is fairly typical for this style of animation.