released 05 feb 05 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* At the beginning of Hayao Miyazaki's animated movie SPIRITED AWAY, we meet a little Japanese girl named Chihiro, riding in the back of seat of a car driven by her parents as they move to their new house in the countryside. They take a wrong turn and end up in a mysterious sort of ghost town, which her father judges a derelict theme park.
It is not. As night falls, Chihiro finds herself surrounded by an emergence of spirits, "kami", and finds that her parents have been trapped in a curse. The site is a resort for kami, centered around a huge bathhouse run by the witch Yubaba. Chihiro is at risk there until friendly spirits manage to get her into the employ of Yubaba. Now Chihiro must try to cope with her life as a servant in the spirit world, fend off Yubaba's wicked tricks, and rescue her parents.
One of the first things that has to be said about SPIRITED AWAY is that is designed primarily for kids, but at the same time it absolutely proves the principle that any good work of fiction for kids should be perfectly intelligent and entertaining to adults. SPIRITED AWAY combines an engrossing story with a great deal of imagination -- it is somehow reminiscent of ALICE IN WONDERLAND without being specifically like it in any way, as though it were an Asian parallel of Lewis Carroll's vision -- and has superb production values.
One of the things that really impressed me was the smooth integration of conventional animation with computer-generated backgrounds. One of the problems with computer animation is that it tends to be done for its own sake, as if the production crew was saying: "Look! Look! Computer graphics!" -- but SPIRITED AWAY implements it without such self-consciousness, using it to render the bathhouse for kami in such vividness that I could almost smell the place.
Finally, SPIRITED AWAY really does have something to say that's worth listening to. I am the first to complain about heavy-handed "messages" in children's movies, most notoriously those in Disney films, but SPIRITED AWAY proves that having a message is a good thing as long as there's really something more to it than a smug platitude, and it actually helps the story instead of loads it down. Instead of beating the viewer over the head with a message, Miyazaki creates subtle parables, the most vivid being that of the creature they call the "No-Face". Incidentally, the No-Face might be scary to very young watchers, though to the extent he becomes violent all is right again in the end.
As I said, SPIRITED AWAY is a movie for kids. However, even if you don't have kids, it's still very much worth watching.