Beautiful

Rating: 10/10 (21 September 2006)

I'm not really the sort of person who sits through a movie with a list of mental check-boxes that I need ticked before I can say I enjoyed it, or would give it a "10". We all have these little checkboxes and are mostly unconscious of them while were watching a movie, but can become painfully conscious of them when the movie leaves them unticked (no plot... grrr NO tick in little box... patronising exposition... grrr, NO tick in little box) and a lot of people who need certain of these boxes ticked will be annoyed by Spirited Away. It's plot is meandering and "join the dots" at best and its characters, when viewed objectively, are actually somewhat skewed, either too peculiar or too saccharine to relate to.
But *I* don't care.
I'm the sort of person who can forgive any number of flaws if there's anything in the movie resembling genuine imagination, particularly if it's used in a meaningful way. Sometimes only one sublimely imaginative moment will satisfy me and make the film something that I will love and treasure forever however bad the rest of it is. For this reason, I love the whole of, for example, "The Dark Crystal", however dated it seems and stilted and wooden the dialogue, because it just DRIPs with dreamy originality.
*Every single scene* in Spirited Away seems to throb with a unique magic, it's a continuous *string* of these sublimely imaginative moments. To me, it has exactly the timeless wonder of Alice in Wonderland. And, amazingly, because writing a new fairy story is always very difficult, on an inexplicable fairy-tale logic level, it all rings true, hangs together and makes sense! Everything in this movie seems at once alien yet hauntingly familiar, like a particularly vivid and startlingly colourful dream. I felt, as the story unfolded, as if I had already seen it and loved it when I was a very small child, and had simply forgotten it.
SPOILERS My favourite sequences are: 1. Just after Chihiro and her parents walk through the archway into the sun-drenched Field of Smiling Stones and the music seems to lift off the ground like a dandelion seed in a soft breeze. I have spent many happy days on islands of the coast of Scotland in the summer that felt just like that, awake yet dreaming, bright and beautiful.
2. The water train sequence, which was strange and delightful. (That house on the tiny bit of land not much bigger than the house itself reminds me so *very* strongly of places I visited as a child on holiday in Scotland that I can hardly help but love it.)
3. The Cleansing of the River God, which was wonderful! SPOILERS END One warning, this movie might be frightening for very small children. My 5 year old nephew found it a bit too spooky in places (but loved it), even though he laughed all the way through even the scariest bits of "Twilight Zone The Movie"...
Not *really* a kids movie, a movie for the kid inside adults...