After making Princess Mononoke (1997), director Hayao Miyazaki, one of Japan’s most celebrated artists, looked forward to retiring after a prosperous career. But a guy who’s pushing 60 is not always ready to leave everything behind. One day he met the daughter of a friend and suddenly got the inspiration to write yet another film. It was to become Spirited Away, the movie that finally made Japan’s Walt Disney famous worldwide. With some help from American executive producer and Pixar genius John Lasseter, the film was released with excellent American dubbing to great acclaim, going on to win the second Oscar ever for Best Animated Feature.

It starts with a family moving to a new home. Ten-year-old Chihiro is not very happy about her parents’ decision and spends the journey sulking in the backseat of the family car. After driving into the woods they get lost, but find a tunnel. Chihiro and her parents get out of the car and reach the other end of the tunnel where they find a desolate theme park and plates of food. The parents start eating, but Chihiro doesn’t feel like joining them. She has a bad feeling about the place, and when she leaves her parents for a stroll she turns out to be right. Chihiro runs into a boy, Haku, who warns her to get out of there. However, when she goes back to her parents, they’ve turned into greedy pigs who can’t stop eating the food that’s been served to them. Horrified, Chihiro finds Haku again but realizes that she’s becoming transparent. He offers her food from his world and tells her that she must eat it or disappear altogether. Chihiro is now trapped, and Haku informs her that the only way for her to survive is to convince Yubaba, the witch who runs the huge bathhouse that’s at the center of this place, to hire her for a job. After some persuasion, Yubaba agrees to do it, but steals some of the characters that make up Chihiro’s name and renames her Sen. Now, the girl must not only come up with a way to save herself and her parents, but she must also never forget her original name (which is easier said than done) or else she’s forever stuck in Yubaba’s world.

Not your traditional Disney movie, huh? There are no songs, no archetypal sidekicks. The story is never predictable and doesn’t turn any characters into clichés. Instead, director Miyazaki incorporates greed and environmentalism as themes into his script. And he manages to get away with it. Those sequences are entertaining and wondrous in their own right because they’re almost dreamlike; one can’t help being fascinated by watching the spirit called No-Face devour creatures who become obsessed with his ability to produce gold at will, or that whole scene where the bathhouse receives a being that is so polluted no one recognizes it as the river spirit. Those experiences are indeed very amusing (and incredibly imaginative), but they become even weightier because of their symbolic meaning. The style is traditional anime, which for me has its upsides and downsides, but you can tell how much work there is behind the creation of the locations, and Mr. Miyazaki is no stranger to using CGI as a way of making things look smoother.

The story is just as bizarre as, and probably also inspired by (besides that girl the director knows), “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”. It’s a long movie, perhaps a tad too long, but it doesn’t take long for viewers to become engaged in Chihiro’s plight. What I love about Spirited Away is not only the wealth of details in this intelligent saga, but director Miyazaki’s sense of imagination at the age of 60.

The YouTube clip shows the trailer.

Spirited Away 2001-Japan. Animated. 125 min. Color. Produced by Toshio Suzuki. Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Music: Joe Hisaishi. Voices of Rumi Hîragi (Chihiro), Miyu Irino (Haku), Mari Natsuki (Yubaba/Zeniba), Takashi Naitô, Yasuko Sawaguchi, Tatsuya Gashuin.

Trivia: Original title: Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi. Suzanne Pleshette, David Ogden Stiers, Lauren Holly, Michael Chiklis and John Ratzenberger contributed their voice talents for the American version.

Oscar: Best Animated Feature. Berlin: Golden Bear.

Published 2007-09-11 10:36