Miyazaki's Classic

Rating: 8/10 (5 December 2011)

We caught the next in the continuing series of Hayao Miyazaki?s animated children?s movies playing at our town theater this weekend. ?Spirited Away? is considered his masterwork and features his classic themes including environmentalism, a plucky young girl, witches and other magical creatures and the consequences of an older generation?s greed. Unlike other of his films there is no backdrop of war in a fanciful land but rather a move to the suburbs by an ordinary family. Chihiro, who is renamed Sen by the evil witch Yubaba, must face the mostly hideous other-worldly creatures of what appears to the outside world as an abandoned amusement park in her quest to return her parents to their original species. She is befriended by the Miyazaki?s compulsory flawed but brilliant wizard, in this case called Haku. Unlike his other films, there is a non-magical (muggle?) female lead called Lin who also aids Chihiro. As usual the animation is amazing and is made frightening by surrealistically outsized facial features on the evil Yubaba and her ridiculously sized baby. Conversely, the six-armed boiler-tender called Kamajii is disturbing because of a fluidity of his movements which give the impression that we might be OK to go ahead an evolve a few more limbs. Most impressive is a train which travels through the lonely, flooded plains which surround the bathhouse and the other station stops. The train is peopled by ghostly passengers rendered as dark silhouettes who slowly depart until only Chihiro and her small party of creatures remain. This sequence is the most truly dream-like I?m seen on film. Chihiro eventually rescues her parents and reclaims her name by rejecting conventional reactions to seemingly evil characters and understanding what is causing them to behave the way they do. In one sequence she removes a literal gigantic tangle of junk from a river spirit which all the rest of the cast avoids due to his smell. In another, she rejects the gold gobbled up by the rest of the cast when offered by a character called ?No-Face.? After No-Face goes berserk and his gold turns out to be an illusion she lures him out of the bathhouse because she understands that the greed of the staff is causing him to tear the place apart. Finally, when Haku returns dying and in dragon form from Yubaba?s twin sister, Chihiro pulls out of him the golden seal he stole which is killing him. ?Spirited Away? received a 94 on Metacritic putting it 11th all time. It was also, apparently, the biggest money making in Japanese film history. I?m not sure I would rank it quite that high but it does an amazing job of relating its story of environmentalism, pacifism, and understanding through pictures that transcend the language barrier.