A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi)

Date Viewed: 9/29/02

Details:

English voice talent: Daveigh Chase (Chihiro or Sen)

Miyu Irino (Haku)

Suzanne Pleshette (Yubaba and her twin sister)

John Ratzenberger

David Ogden Stiers

Written and directed by: Hayao Miyazaki

Score: +

The Review: "Anime" (undefined in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and more's the pity): the generic term used for Japanese animation, influenced from the French. This is a category of animation about which I am poorly informed and only starting to appreciate; take this into account.

This is the latest entry from the creator and director of Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind and Princess Mononoke, among many others. (Even in my ignorance, Nausicaa has been a grail of sorts for me for many years, a film with a sordid production history, and one that I've not yet found in video format; if Spirited Away is any indication, I must resume this search urgently.) Called an "art film" by some, simplistic animation by others, Spirited Away (via Disney and Studio Ghibli) is at times beautiful, enthralling, cute, appealing, and artistically well-integrated. Although nominally a trek into the unknown through a (surprisingly) quite public portal into the spirit world, it becomes a quest to redeem and rescue the young girl Chihiro's parents, caught unawares in a world beyond their imaging.

The animation quality is average (albeit improved over some earlier Miyazaki films like Princess Mononoke), but the imagery is simply wonderful, in the original sense of the word: full of wonder! Miniature, quirky, and amusing stone statues of gods and spirits that litter the landscape half-buried in the dirt; a vast inland sea created by rain, but threaded across it is a rail line just below the water-line along which one can walk and appear to be walking on water; dragons that have neither wings nor tempers, that bear a strong resemblance to both an undulating underwater reptile and the canonical Chinese dragon; an eight-legged bathhouse engineer and boiler-man who commands friendly fuzzy coal sprites; and living, breathing spirit figures of all shapes, sizes and personalities, including a ghostly No Face who constantly steals scene after scene while remaining silent.

This film is absolutely jam-packed with novel themes, breathtaking scenery, curious plot twists and turns, fascinating characters, curious almost throw-away details, and fabulous and engaging artistry used to illustrate some very unusual gods and spirits. Perhaps this is a mythos that Japanese children grow up with and find familiar, or perhaps it is Miyazaki's personal ficton, but either way it is illustrative of how animation can outfit imagination and give rise to strange wonders.

One of the curious aspects is the observation that the concept of good and evil is not as polarized as one has come to expect from the formal exaggerations of typical plot and film. Most characters have both good and bad aspects, but are not wholly one or the other. The ethics and morality are not slippery, just complex. It's similar to what Susan Cooper's characters observe in "Greenwitch" (1974, part of her "The Dark is Rising" sequence): "It would have been much easier to face an uncomplicated monster." And complicated these characters indeed are. The evil witch Yubaba who runs the bathhouse has a twin sister who is almost a mirror image personality, but Yubaba has a whole collection of motivations and reasons for her behavior that, while not justifying it entirely, helps explain it and defuse some of the contrast, in turn becoming almost sympathetic. For all this ambiguity, the attitudes of the characters are not at all grey, but simply take a long time to tell.

Unusual, different, unpredictable, visually stunning; recommended.

(12-Oct-02)

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