SPIRITED AWAY
(Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi)
Daveigh Chase, Jason Marsden,
David Ogden Stiers, Suzanne Pleshette
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
Studio Ghibli
I am cursed with a number of recurring dreams. These dreams are stimulated by any number of things, from Bad Cod to Deadline Stress (ahem). Frequently, I find myself on the other side of the world, often with a pretty girl (which is how I know it's not real), and no memory of how I got there. The dreams normally last for a few minutes, usually ending with me realising that I'll have to take an aeroplane home - whereupon I wake up, screaming.
No matter how many times I have this dream, I find that I buy into it every time (despite being utterly terrified of flying). I find that I get lost in the reality of the dream.
Hayao Miyazaki has these sorts of dreams. Spirited Away is proof positive of this. Like his earlier film, Princess Mononoké, Spirited Away is a story of love saving the day, of the triumph of good people against monsters, magic and spitefulness.
Pitched slightly younger than Mononoké, Spirited Away is seen entirely through the eyes of a child. And, indeed, the plot could have come from any small child's dream: a young girl, Chihiro, is drafted into the service of a nasty old witch when her parents inadvertently eat the wrong thing (half a restaurant). The girl loses her name to the witch, befriends a curiously familiar weredragon, and is sent to work in a magical bathhouse, staffed by various castes of frog-people (and an elderly spider-demon, plus his assorted sootybug helpers), until she…you get the picture.
The above description covers more or less the first half hour of the film. You won't notice the time fly.
Love is at the heart of Spirited Away, as it is in Princess Mononoké. Chihiro loves her parents, and doesn't want to lose them, so she does everything in her power to get them back. The story plays off a childlike fear of being abandoned in a strange place. At the beginning of the story, Chihiro and her family are travelling to a new town, leaving all their old friends behind. Chihiro has to get used to the idea of being a stranger in town, as well as being the new girl at school. The fear of being alone in the unknown is a constant weight on the shoulders of the main character.
Spirited Away is a sumptuously animated film. Eminently suitable for all ages, it is a refreshingly meaty work. Unlike some other animated movies I could mention, it refuses to talk down to the viewer, making other movies in its class look bland by comparison.
The character designs are enchantingly familiar, but brand new at the same time. There's a little bit of everything in there, from Henson to Sendak. The dream logic of the story means that, without having to put any thought into it, you'll immediately understand the hierarchy of the spirit world. My favourite character is the macrocephalic Yubaba, the Thatcherite witch who runs the bathhouse, and employs Chihiro. Her head is bigger than her body, and she has a huge wart in the middle of her forehead. She flies around the place like a rocket-powered magpie, with her petticoats billowing, and her gargantuan nostrils flaring. She's great.
I'm half-convinced that Miyazaki and his team have some kind of psychic brainspade machine, tapping into our collective unconscious. I know this because I've dreamed some of these creatures before, from the radish demon to the ancient river spirit. Whatever gestalt they're plumbing, Studio Ghibli do a fantastic job. The music is equally breathtaking, and proves that you don't need a half-talented teenybopper
pop song to make an animated movie work.
Miyazaki's film is one long summer dream, and just like my dreams of far-off lands and romantic liaisons, you'll be so completely hoodwinked by the sights and sounds of Spirited Away, that you'll forget that you're watching a film - an animated film at that - with its own curious internal logic.
Like Miyazaki's earlier work, Spirited Away will purge you of your modern cynicism, if only for a little while, and remind you of a time before hormones and mortgages, when all that mattered was loving your mum and dad, and running around in the sun.
Review text (C) Matthew Craig
Originally published in the pop culture magazine Robot Fist