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Spirited Away

a review by Jeffrey Overstreet

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Believe it or not…

…the most visually surprising and inventive film of the year is not about a galaxy far far away. The movie with the most amazing creatures is not based on work by J.R.R. Tolkien. And the year’s most dazzling animation is not from Disney animators or Pixar digital magicians.

Spirited Away is the invention of an animator who does things the old fashioned way— by hand, producing thousands of frames personally. Hayao Miyazaki is the greatest Japanese animator and arguably the greatest animator in the world, back from retirement with what may be his masterpiece. There’s a good reason this movie has Japan’s all-time box office record. In fact, it won Best Film at the Berlin Film Festival. So far, Spirited Away is far and away the best film I’ve seen this year.

A lot of readers will have given up at first glimpse of the term Japanimation. I don’t blame them. I will be the first to agree that most Japanimation is irritating, hyperviolent, indulgent, and devoid of good storytelling.

Miyazaki is an exception. You can spot his work from a mile away. The attention to detail and the intensity and delicate shading of the colors have more in common with fine gallery art than Saturday morning cartoons. Miyazaki also has a great sense of humor, a gift for subtle poetic storytelling, and a thrilling taste for adventure. His first film, The Castle of Cagliostro, is a hilarious action adventure that inspired some of Spielberg’s Indiana Jones sequences. His beautiful children’s movie called My Neighbor Totoro is a charming and deeply affecting look at how a child’s imagination helps her endure a time of private fear and sadness. And his epic fantasy Princess Mononoke is a powerful, sprawling epic about the need for humankind to respect and live in harmony with the environment. This theme runs throughout Miyazaki’s work, and it’s a theme that people of all faiths should call their own. (Remember, God said “Subdue AND REPLENISH the earth.”)

Spirited Away is different in many ways. It combines the playful spirit of Totoro with the weighty mythologizing of Mononoke, but it goes in new directions as well. You also get the feeling that Miyazaki is having some kind of creative re-awakening. There is an enthusiasm and a busy-ness in this film that makes me wonder how much coffee he was consuming while he worked.

It’s ironic that Disney Studios have bent over backwards to help bring Miyazaki’s vivid features to American screens. Miyazaki’s work tends to show up Disney films as simplistic and predictable. John Lasseter, the creative force behind the Toy Story films, is a Miyazaki fan and has devoted himself to making this English-dubbed version something extraordinary. I have nothing against subtitles, but trust me… you’ll be grateful that you don’t have to read them here. You wouldn’t want to look away from this animation for a moment.

THE STORY

Here’s the story, as briefly as I can paraphrase it:

A little girl named Chihiro (voiced by Daveigh Chase of Lilo and Stitch) gets lost in a wonderland of ghosts and monsters while searching for a way to break the curse that has transformed her parents. I don’t want to tell you any more about her quest–one of this film’s chief pleasures is its ability to surprise the audience.

Chihiro’s journey leads her into confrontations with a wicked witch named Yubaba. But Miyazaki is never one to set up a simplistic face-off between good and evil. He knows we all have good and evil within us, and thus his “villains” have moments of kindness, and his heroes do things they regret. Chihiro finds herself obligated to work for the wicked witch, if only to gain access to her imprisoned parents. Her only friend in this world is a “prince charming” named Haku who has mysterious powers. Haku helps secure Chihiro’s safety even as he goes about his own dirty work for Yubaba. Eventually we come to hope that Chihiro, her parents, and Haku will both eventually break away from the harsh tyranny of Yubaba. The secret lies in discovering their true identities, which Yubaba has stolen.

Chihiro’s job is to work in the Bath House, a massive fortress where ghosts and spirits come to be “rejuvenated.” Slaving away like Cinderella in the cellar, Chihiro infuriates her co-workers with her humility, servitude, and refusal to turn greedy and power-hungry. And yet, her virtue wins her powerful and influential friends who will play important parts in her quest.

Sound complicated? It is. This film is almost as long as Princess Mononoke… 125 minutes… but it is faster paced and stuffed with subplots that echo old fairy-tales of the Grimm variety. Where Mononoke was dark and ponderous, feeling more like a historical epic and an environmentalist’s message than a fantasy, Spirited Away feels like Miyazaki’s attempt to beat Disney and Lucas at their own own games of high adventure and whimsy. There are enough bizarre creatures here to make the Star Wars cantina look boring. The boundless invention of Miyazaki’s imagination startles me at every turn.

Chihiro’s “supervisor” is Kamaji, a mustached man with multiple arms who rules over a crew of tiny “sootballs”. While the old man with many arms runs a machine of levers, pedals, and wheels to keep the boiler burning, these little wide-eyed black marbles carry lumps of coal for the furnace down in the Bath House boiler room. This room provides the context for some of the film’s most memorably hilarious scenes.

Outside the Bath House there’s a marvelous dragon who wriggles like an eel through the sky and through the water, white as lightning and snarling through a whiskered wolf’s muzzle. Inside there are enough wild and crazy beasties to fill a dozen Disney films. Three bouncing bearded green-skinned heads hop about the house, rolling their eyes, like curious babies. The wicked witch’s baby is a giant roly-poly nightmare who shakes more than a rattle when he moves around. The Bath House is visited by all manner of special guests, including a stink-demon who is at once the most disgusting and fascinating animated monster in recent memory.

Yubaba stands among the most memorable big screen wicked witches of all time. She’s wider than she is short, her head making up half her body, with her Medusa-like tendrils of white hair bound up in a bun and her cronish snout bulging out before her like a weapon. Voiced with relish by Susanne Pleshette (Good grief! That Susanne Pleshette?), she snarls ad cackles and glowers her way through the film, a masterpiece of character design and the closest thing the film has to a true villain.

As usual, Miyazaki is as excited about his marginal supporting characters… or perhaps MORE excited about them… than he is his own heroes. One little comic relief duo nearly steals the show in the last 45 minutes. Someone somewhere is going to make toys connected to this film… count me in as a collector.

I am still enthralled with the Bath House and its many layers of activity and personality. This will be a film worth seeing several times to catch as much as possible. My only complaint is that the film’s final confrontation is resolved too easily, with zero tension whatsoever. But it’s short, and most of the major problems have been solved by that time anyway. Plot in this film is secondary to exploration and visual invention.

IS IT A GOOD MOVIE FOR KIDS?

Several critics are saying the film is too complex for children, and too scary. For small children, yes. They’ll be lost in the intricate plot, and the monsters will scare them. But for older kids, frankly, I disagree. 8 years and up should be fine.

I suppose some children may be a bit troubled at the hard-heartedness of Chihiro’s parents. Families are usually peaceful, appealing contexts in Miyazaki films, but here the parents are reckless and calloused to their child’s pleas. Chihiro is thus the loneliest hero Miyazaki has introduced, and she is put through the wringer. Is this really so unusual, though? Most Disney heroes are orphans—think of poor, mournful Penny in The Rescuers, or the Lost Boys of Never Land, dreaming of having parents. Some old fairy tales portray tyrannical parents who enslave their own children. Chihiro’s parents aren’t monsters—they’re just fools.

I think kids should be challenged to think through what they’re watching, and this is a story that provides great opportunities for discussion with grownups. I grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons like most kids, but the day that a neighborhood librarian recommended that I attend a special showing of the animated version of The Hobbit was a day that changed my life. Not only was my seven year-old mind challenged by the “heavier” substance of The Hobbit, but I found myself swept up in concern and care for the more developed characters and the higher stakes of the challenges. The amount of imagination on display—granted, more Tolkien’s inventions than the animators—left other cartoons seeming somehow flat, unsatisfying, insubstantial. I quickly ran to Tolkien’s literature. A couple of years later, the animated version of Watership Down—a far more “grownup” production than the Hobbit film—had me confronting serious questions about life, death, war, sacrifice, and the afterlife. I was only 10.

Spirited Away is at times frightening. It also tackles very serious questions, offering visual parables about the impact that human meddling has had on the environment. It emphasizes the importance of an individual’s virtue, and affirms that the smallest of characters can make a big difference. It offers powerful displays of sacrificial love. And it has the guts to portray “villains” who are redeemable if the heroes show them not only tolerance but also compassion and kindness. It is far more likely that viewers will come away impressed by these things than that they will find the details of their religious faith challenged.

Many Christian media film critics will condemn this film as “occultic.” To that remark, let me say this: Miyazaki comes from a culture that is steeped in Shinto mythology and beliefs about the spirits of nature and of the dead. So of course, his story reflects such traditions and beliefs. But he is not “preaching” such ideas. He is treating them as myth, as fantasy, and using them to illustrate lessons and morals that Christians will find quite similar to their own. While the film does not portray any “God” or benevolent force ruling the world, it does affirm the importance of selflessness, sacrificial love, humility, friendship, compassion, and courage. Spirited Away is not any more evangelical about Shinto than Alice in Wonderland is about opium addiction. People of any faith can read these characters as symbolic, and the story reflects powerful truths.

One spirit in particular—No Face—seems to bring things into sharp moral focus wherever he goes. He appears at first to be gentle and friendly. But he becomes more and more mysterious, shifting between gentleness and violent destructive behavior. We eventually observe that he is a lonely spirit, seeking approval. When he is around greed and evil, he responds with greed and evil. When offered a picture of friendship and unconditional love, he calms down, seems regretful, and seems to try a better path. Chihiro’s patience with him and her kindness reminded of how Christ patiently endures my own tendency to become self-absorbed. He waits patiently, always offering love, forgiveness, and direction to a better way. No Face is left stupefied by Chihiro’s virtue. We come to hope that he will abandon his rampage in the Bath House and follow Chihiro to a better life. This is just one of many such parables within a vast tapestry of stories.

ANIMATION RAISED TO HIGH ART

All in all, this is an absolute must-see on the big screen. The colors are incredible, from shots of the magical streetcar that skims across the sea, to the ornate gardens, to intricately painted murals in the Bath House. It’s like going to a museum where the watercolors are under a spell.

And by the way, the audience at the screening I attended was almost entirely adults, and they laughed and cheered. There was a charged excitement in the room that I have only felt a few times in my moviegoing experience… that feeling that everybody here has absolute confidence that the master at the controls is going to serve up two hours of surprises. You know when the animator’s name comes up at the beginning and the grownups cheer like kids on a sugar-high, well, it’s going to be something special.

And special it is: This is as essential as any of Miyazaki’s films, and may indeed be his most elaborately imaginative work yet.

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Writer/director – Hayao Miyazaki; United States director – Kirk Wise
English language adaptation – Cindy Davis Hewitt and Donald H. Hewitt
Music – Joe Hisaishi
Producer – Toshio Suzuki (Japan) and Donald W. Ernst (United States)

Walt Disney Studios. 125 minutes. Rated PG.

WITH THE VOICES OF: Daveigh Chase (Chihiro), Suzanne Pleshette (Yubaba, Zeniba), Jason Marsden (Haku), Susan Egan (Lin), David Ogden Stiers (Kamaji), Lauren Holly (Chihiro’s Mother), Michael Chiklis (Chihiro’s Father) and John Ratzenberger (Assistant Manager).

Tags: Literature

This entry was posted on Friday, April 25th, 2008 at 9:03 pm and is filed under Film Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.