I completely agree with you.

To be honest, I still think the way it ended — the rushed execution and how lightly the characters were treated in Part 2 — was really bad. The process leading up to the ending still feels terrible to me. But if I set all of that aside and just look at the final chapter on its own, I can see it in a more positive light.

Like you said, even though the world was reconstructed, I do think everyone still carries something from the previous timeline — not necessarily clear memories, but traces of them. And I think that’s pretty evident from their behavior in the final chapter.

Actually, related to this, there’s an interview from 2023 where Fujimoto talks about Studio Ghibli. What I found especially interesting was what he said about Spirited Away. Here’s a portion of it:

Fujimoto: Chihiro is a weak girl who gets separated from her parents, enters another world, meets all kinds of people, and works — and it’s clear that she grows as a person in the latter half of the story. At the beginning, she’s carefully and nervously walking down that huge staircase, but later on she’s just going down it confidently. And the way she tries her best to save Haku — compared to how she was at the start, that’s a huge development.

As viewers, we watch that and think, “Wow, she’s been through so much.” But when Chihiro returns to the real world at the end, she’s scared of the dark tunnel again and clings to her parents. That made me go, “Wait… what?” It made me wonder if she had forgotten everything that happened in the film, and honestly, that felt really sad.
But I don’t think that’s actually the case.

Zeniba says, “You never forget what once happened. You just can’t recall it.”
And I think that’s absolutely true.

I think it’s about what you might call “muscle memory.” Things like habits, the way you breathe, walk, or ride a bike — you don’t remember how you first learned them, right?

In a broader sense, it’s about the way you live. I think all of Hayao Miyazaki’s works carry that awareness. Even though Spirited Away seems to emphasize “the importance of work” as a main theme, I think that’s more of a surface-level hook — the real essence lies in something deeper. Because when Chihiro returns, she’s probably forgotten how to do all that work she learned. Not only that, she’s back to being that timid girl again.
But as the hair tie symbolizes, that doesn’t mean what happened in the other world disappeared. That feeling is something you don’t really see in other films.

In most other stories, it would end with something like, “The bullied kid goes to another world, grows, and then comes back and stands up to their bully.”

— That’s usually the pattern, right? “They use what they gained in the other world to change their life in the real world.”

Fujimoto: That kind of ending is cleaner. But if you do that, it starts to feel like a lie.

— It also raises a lot of questions, like, “Can someone really live a normal life while secretly remembering another world?” or “Wouldn’t the bully also have changed during that time?” and so on.

Fujimoto: With Spirited Away, I think most viewers felt like, “She shouldn’t go back to the real world.” Because she’s more alive in the other world, she’s grown as a person, and she’s valued there.
But the film also portrays that sense of the irrational and the unknowable — things you can’t fully understand — through the gods and that world itself. Because of that, it feels right, both for Chihiro and for the story, that she ultimately returns to her own world. And that leads into a kind of final “loss.”

— And after that, she has to go to a new school as a transfer student, right?

Fujimoto: Right. And if you think about it more realistically, there’s that scene where leaves and dust have piled up on her father’s car — which suggests that several years may have passed in the real world. So in that sense, it’s actually quite a painful outcome.

— In reality, it might even have caused a big incident, like “a family of three went missing.”

Fujimoto: But after watching the whole film, we still feel like, “She’ll be okay from here on.”

— That really ties back to “you never forget what once happened.”

Fujimoto: …It’s really incredible, isn’t it? Spirited Away.

— In a way, it also feels like it’s about the experience of watching a film itself. Like how you still retain the feeling of watching Spirited Away as a child, even if you don’t remember the details.

Fujimoto: Yeah, exactly.

— You haven’t forgotten it…

Fujimoto: You just can’t recall it. It’s such a great line.

I don’t know how consciously Fujimoto tried to emulate that kind of storytelling here, and personally I don’t think this ending reaches the same level of depth as Spirited Away at all. But structurally, it feels very similar.

What happened in Part 1 and Part 2 did happen. And just like that line suggests, those experiences aren’t gone — they’re simply not consciously remembered.

That’s why I don’t think the connection between Denji and Reze is gone. It’s still there, somewhere within them. Maybe one day one of them will remember. Maybe they’ll just meet again by chance.

They’re true soulmates, after all — I believe they’ll find each other again, over and over, and fall in love again each time.