I defy you not to be enchanted

Rating: 10/10 (29 April 2003)

I was surprised when "Sprited Away" turned out to be every bit as wonderful as everyone said it was  one of the world's rare "worth queueing for" films  because "Princess Mononoke" decidedly wasn't. Yet behold! And my partner, who's somewhat harsher than me in referring to Miyazaki's previous film as "Princess Monotony", was as enchanted as I was.
I don't know how Miyazaki did it, exactly. He's created an altogether fresh fantasy world that doesn't come across merely as an all-too-laboured attempt to create an altogether fresh fantasy world. Describe it in words, and it sounds self-consciously quirky enough to put anyone off: it's a bath house for the spirits on the site of what appears to be a disused amusement park, presided over by an eccentric, mean-spirited old wizardess who's mother to a brat of an infant ten times larger than herself, the fires of which (the bath house, I mean) are stoked by a many-armed spider of a man who animates the soot particles to work for him ... and so on. It sounds like too much, too forced; but it unfolds on the screen naturally and magically, as though the world had simply been lying there, waiting to be discovered. And we discover it in exactly the right way (Miyazaki is a master story-teller, although I'd never thought so until now), through exactly the right protagonist: a girl who grows believably from a timid and clumsy outsider entirely reliant on the help and goodwill of others, to a confident (but still, no doubt, frightened) insider, able to help others in turn.
Since this seems to be an issue, I should say that it was the dubbed version I saw. But I don't see why this should be an issue. I think that all the anime fans, in whose eyes Disney can do nothing right, who moan incessantly about how awful the dubbed version is, are having us all on. Don't get me wrong: I loathe dubbing. I think that, in general, subtitles are much to be preferred. But I also know that none of the arguments against dubbing, good though they are in general, happen to apply here. Dubbing is bad because it prevents the actors from really acting, from projecting their own words with their own bodies and vocal chords; but this can't happen in a cartoon in any case. Dubbing is bad because the match of mouth movements to words is never quite good enough; but this isn't live action, and it isn't even a Disney-style cartoon, with every sibilant, every quiver of the lip, lovingly captured by the animators in 24-drawings-per-second detail: Japanese animation is not and was never meant to be detailed in that kind of way, and I'll wager that the English soundtrack matches the lip movements about as well as the Japanese soundtrack ever did. Dubbing is sometimes bad because it's possible to dub something into a language that just doesn't fit, which MIGHT have happened here had it been an important part of the story that it take place in, say, Tokyo; but in fact it's set in an uncertainly located, almost surreal fantasy bath house; under the circumstances it doesn't matter in the least what language everyone is speaking. In short: just this once, you can go with the dubbed version (which, I might add, has been dubbed with both love and skill), and you needn't feel embarrassed about doing so.