September
6, 2004
We’re
living in a Golden Age of Animation right now. The form has evolved
and matured over the course of the past twenty years, and now we
are reaping the benefits. Earlier
this year, we saw the excellent French movie Triplets of Bellville,
a great mixture of Gallic culture and Spike Jones records. In America,
Pixar has had great popular and critical success, with Monster,
Inc. and the two Toy Story movies being their best
to date. There’s Richard Linklater’s Waking
Life; there’s Satoshi Kon’s Tokyo
Godfathers and Millennium Actress; and there's
Mamoru Oshii, whose Innocence
is about to be released here.
At
the core of it all lies Studio Ghibli, which blazed the trail and
set the standard for everything to follow. Hayao Miyazaki’s
1997 Princess Mononoke topped
$150 million at the Japanese box office (the top-grossing Japanese
film typically draws around $30 million), following up a whole string
of masterpieces. Now comes his 2001 movie, Spirited Away,
the very best of the current crop of animated features.
This
is one of the sheer joys of the movies. I go to the theatre and
pay eight bucks so I can see a grand sense of imagination, those
creative flights of fancy that are all too rare. It’s a thrill
to see the work of filmmakers who are truly creative, and Spirited
Away has it in spades.
Essentially,
this is Miyazaki and Ghibli’s bold contribution to children’s
literature, an Alice in Wonderland or a Wizard of Oz
for the Japanese set. The plot involves a ten-year-old girl named
Chihiro who, in a sense, falls through the looking glass, becoming
ensnared in the realm of the spirits. Stubborn, whiny, a little
“suburban” (I did not say "American"), she
nevertheless starts to discover those talents, hidden inside, waiting
to be released.
The
bulk of the movie is set in a Japanese bath house and draws heavily
from their vast cultural heritage, their history, their religion,
their mythology. In a sense, this is all a plea to the audience:
remember who we are, and who we were. This is a deeply nostalgic
film that seeks to reawaken its audience to its true identity, before
Japan becomes nothing more than skyscrapers, bloated consumerism,
and broken-down theme parks.
This
is a common Ghibli theme, actually, and it’s closest to Isao
Takahata’s 1994 movie, Pom Poko,
but Spirited Away is far more luminous, more colorful,
more detailed. This is a joyous, optimistic film at its core, packed
with details and surprises at every turn. The bath house welcomes
visitors of every shape and size, radish gods and giant birds, small
talking frogs and dragons. The soot sprites from My
Neighbor Totoro are here, working in the boiler room and
feeding coal into the furnace, under the supervision of a crotchety
old man with spider arms.
There’s
a terrific moment early on, when Chihiro wanders in, looking for
work (any visitors wishing to stay must find a job). After stumbling
around, she inadvertently carries a heavy block of coal dropped
by one of the soot sprites, taking his place. When the others see
this, they look at one other and then, one after another, drop their
own coals in turn. The old man starts shouting, but the sprites
crowd around the girl in united defiance. It’s all wonderfully
silly, like a comic Spartacus.
There
are a terrific cast of supporting characters, including a young
woman who takes Chihiro under her arm (the same two-sister setup
you see in all of Miyazaki’s work); a mysterious boy named
Haku, who’s carrying a few secrets, a giant baby who gets
turned into a mouse, and a black-cloaked ghost called No-Face, silently
clad in a mask straight out of the Noh theatre, who especially figures
in heavily in the movie’s second half.
The
best of the bunch is Yubaba, the witch who runs the bath house.
She a visual delight herself, a turn-of-the-century grandmother
with an enormous head and sour disposition. She isn’t necessarily
a villain per se; she “evil” in that Joan Crawford,
Mommy Dearest sort of way. Miyazaki has no patience for
simple-minded melodrama, anyway, and prefers an antagonist who is
more complex and follows a certain code.
Spirited
Away really represents the great filmmaker at the peak of his
powers. You see all of his skills on display, from a number of action
sequences, to slapstick comedy, to old-fashioned Hollywood romance,
to those quiet moments that Ghibli does so well. There’s an
important scene – probably the best set-piece in the whole
picture – that involves a giant, pulsating “stink god”
and becomes a meditation on environmental pollution. It's an epic
set-piece that probably captures all of Miyazaki's gifts at once.
Here's
another great moment that perfectly exemplifies this.
It’s the scene involving Chichiro's train ride across what
seems like an endless ocean, populated by shadows of working-class
humans, on their way to the afterlife. It’s a slow, reflective,
almost silent moment; a quiet pause in the action that evokes Ozu
and Ray’s Apu Trilogy. A moment of pure visual poetry
that would never be caught dead in a Hollywood studio picture.
I
like Chihiro; she's a great character, full of surprises and determination.
We are presented with a character who shows more depth and growth
than the young women in American movies. She's the center by which
everything hangs on; she's our representative in this fanciful,
mythic world, learning some of the harsher lessons of life in the
process. We can identify.
Spirited
Away became Japan’s most successful movie ever, topping
$200 million at the box office before acquiring endless awards and
honors around the world. It also resulted in a long-awaited Oscar
for Miyazaki, thanks largely to Pixar’s John Lasseter, who
pretty much shoved it down Disney’s throats to get it released
here.
Can
you believe that? Thankfully, the great movies have a way of finding
their way to the people if you just respect them enough to give
them a chance. Sprited Away is a truly great fantasy, and
one of the finest films of recent years. |
