Second to none, Spirited Away mesmerizes

Rating: 10/10 (31 August 2006)

I first saw Spirited Away somewhat 'in media res'; it was on HBO, and the first 10 minutes or so had already passed by. I had not seen any Miyazaki films previous to that, and didn't no quite what to expect as I saw a young Japanese girl wandering through a seeming ghost town. Now, most of the time I start viewing a film like this - missing, in this case, the initial exposition of Chihiro's journey with her parents from Japan to the spirit world - it takes a bit of time to reorient myself into the film's world, especially in a fantasy film.
It is to Spirited Away's credit that there was, in fact, no alienating feel - the environment, while somewhat abstract (little of the spirit world as a whole, or spirit world/real world relation is ever explained), is somehow familiar. Chihiro's journey is not complicated, nor overly sentimental, but endearingly earnest. Like Dorothy, she's just trying to get home, save her parents. The stakes are surprisingly small, yet for a girl of Chihiro's innocence, more compelling than contemporary Disney cartoons like Mulan and Hercules. Sure, the nation or universe isn't hanging on Chihiro's utterly personal quest, but to her - and I credit Miyazaki's subtle, uncomplicated animation of her character for this effect - it is everything.
Of course, Miyazaki's visual imagination knows no bounds, and Spirited Away is one of his most effective manifestation of encapsulating wonder. But it is not only the pleasingly sculpted yet somehow threatening spirits, or the way the character float through, not walk on, their world that give Spirited Away its texture; Other films, indeed, have more effectively conveyed a world in pictures, but Spirited Away has a pace that exposes the viewer incrementally to the festival, the baths, the spirits and the enduring myth more memorable than anything Disney has yet produced.
I am 21 years old, yet I felt like I was 6 when watching this film, as if the story was being read to me by my parents before bed. I was carried away by the pace of Chihiro as she travels along, and as she becomes ever more involved with this world - as the concerns of the parallel universe take over from Chihiro's single-minded objective - so did I. Why did this film have such an effect? Many reasons - the animation and the pacing, as I mentioned, as well as the strength of the voice acting (I unapolagetically recommend the dubbed version for an initial viewing; it is very compelling, and subtitles will distract you from the soft beauty of Miyazaki's vision), well-conceived non-human characters (Many of whom say nothing or almost nothing, but express themselves through incredibly well-directed mime) and a mythic realm worthy of novels.
Of course, the magic is probably only maintained because this is not a novel-like TV series, where every last corner of a universe is explored. Instead, Miyazaki gives us a bit of the world, just whetting our appetites enough without bombarding us with too much nonsense. But the effect isn't an oft-cited "leaves you begging for more", but a sense of fullness, completeness, in that this story neatly brings itself from beginning to middle to end, into then back out of again a world that is more peaceful, adventurous, entrancing, and lovely than the one in which we live - but, of course, ultimately where we do not belong.