A beautiful, bizarre and completely compelling masterpiece, Hayao Miyazaki’s Oscar winning follow up to Princess Mononoke is a wonderfully dark fairy tale for all ages…
The winner of Best Animated Feature for 2002 literally Spirited Away the Oscar from the competition this year. That those competitors included such sugar coated, insipid and uninspiring works as Lilo & Stitch, Treasure Planet and Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron undermines what a triumph of animated film this is, perhaps the most deserving Oscar since Fantasia received an Honorary award in 1940.
This category - only in its second year - seems bound to be overrun with banal childrens films while foreign language animations, particularly Japanese, are excluded. The categories only purpose seems to be to acknowledge the amount of labour and money Hollywood pours into these ventures. Yet the company you’d most readily associate with such films nowadays, Disney, were responsible for the release of Spirited Away, dubbed but - uncharacteristically for them - uncut. Well, let’s not forget just how innovative they were 60 years ago…
The story begins when, while making their way to a new home, a stop to investigate what appears to be a theme park unwittingly traps Chihiro and her family in a strange nether world. The location of a bathhouse for gods and spirits. Her parents transformed into pigs, and under threat of being gobbled up herself, to escape back to our world Chihiro must leave the timid scared girl behind and become a strong, independent young woman. But first she needs a job!
On her journey she befriends a variety of bizarre characters, many of whom help and more often hinder. Haku, an older boy who also takes the form of a dragon - enchanted into the service of Yubaba, with her giant baby, who runs the bathhouse. Kamaji, the spider like engineer who keeps the bathhouse boilers going with the help of animated soot balls. (Kept in order under the threat of being turned back in to soot.) The Stink Spirit, who turns out to be a polluted River Spirit. And then there’s No Face, who desperately wants to please Chihiro and be loved in return, but only succeeds in causing havoc.
Writer/director (and much more besides) Hayao Miyazaki takes us beyond the looking glass of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, and into a world that seems to have more in common with the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. The intricate coexistence of hundreds of surreal creatures in a world that sometimes echoes our own, only to subvert them. A coexistence that seems beyond man, as Miyazaki subtilely warns (as he did with Princess Mononoke) of our need to look after our environment.
But the lesson Miyazaki really want to show us is there is no good and evil. No black and white. All the inhabitants, however harsh their actions, have a motivation for them more complex than that. Hence Chihiro’s journey ultimately is one of survival, and not judging other for their difference.
Though billed as such this is no childrens film. It’s content might even scare some younger viewers. It’s a beautiful, ground breaking work of animation that can be enjoyed all ages. Yet another example of Japanese Anime that shows just how powerful a medium Animation can be.
Perhaps it’s for that reason that Spirited Away is one of several films Disney are releasing from Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. Following the release of Princess Mononoke a couple of years ago (under Miramax), they will also include Castle in the Sky and Kiki’s Delivery Service. Could this be a move by Disney to claim a piece of the largest and most innovative animation pie in the world? Particularly when the majority of their output is so hackneyed and cliched, constantly retreading old successes (Re: Jungle Book, Dumbo, Peter Pan etc).
Miyazaki stipulated that Disney could only release his films complete, with an English language dub true to the original. A move that at least ensures that in return his films get access to the wider audience they so richly deserve, and the dual language facilities of DVDs even allow them to be seen in their original glory. But lets face it, if it was really about giving a film like this a larger audience why give it such a limited cinematic release?
Just compare the endless promotion for Lilo & Stitch with that for Spirited Away (when it finally gets released in the UK in October) and make your own mind up who has really had the last laugh.
DVD details
Distributor: Walt Disney (US)
Perfect transfer of the film accompanied by both the English and the original Japanese soundtrack. There are plenty of documentaries, though most the new ones will make you want to gag - thank you Disney!
(The Hong Kong DVD below is almost exactly the same, including the original documentary. Thankfully it misses out on all those dreadful Disney ones!)
