I think that how often you see normal movies would be proportional to how much you liked Spirited Away.  There are lots of quiet moments in the film.  Characters sitting peacefully, or watching a train go by, or looking out the window of a moving car.  Moments where you just look along with them, contemplating the silent beauty of nature.  It's sort of the antithesis of the average Hollywood film, where directors feel that every instant must be filled with mad cap action.  Comparing Spirited Away to something like Shrek or Toy Story is almost impossible, even though they are all animation.  There's never anything in the Pixar films to think about, and never any time to do so even if there were, since they cram every second with action or comedy or wacky dialogue.  Spirited Away has probably 1/10th the events of other animated features, and the events it has are not 10x as impressive.  However the quiet moments, in between the event scenes, are not boring or wastes of time.

My initial point is that critics will probably like this better than "real people", mostly since critics sit through so much slam-bang action crap that a movie that takes its time and is peaceful and intelligent will be such a breath of fresh air to them.

There are lots of really great scenes and characters, but the overall plot is sort of wandering and episodic.  There is an ongoing quest, in which Chihiro, the young girl who is the center of the movie, is trying to find a way to turn her parents back into humans, after they turned into huge sows due to greedily-consuming a feast prepared for the spirits.  Through her pure heart and kind but steadfast nature, Chihiro makes friends and strange allies (animated balls of soot?) and and while engaging in some side quests, stays more or less on the path to rescuing her parents.

There are an amazing amount of interesting characters in Spirited Away.  The apparent "bad guy" is Yorubaba, an old witch with an enormous head, but she's not really bad, in the end, and she may or may not be pretending to be her identical twin sister, who is apparently good. Yorubaba runs a bathhouse for the spirits, and is forced to give Chihiro a job there when she (Chihiro) refuses to take no for an answer.  The bath house is vividly depicted in very realistic fashion.  We see the mechanisms for heating and delivering hot water, the dozens of rooms, hundreds of employees, guests and their rooms, bosses, favoritism among the workers, and more.  All of which gives a nice feeling that this is a real place, operating on its own rules. Rather than just being some sort of haunted funhouse created solely for the hero of the movie to enter it.  In the bathhouse there are weird spirits by the dozen, including a huge hulking radish spirit (who looks like a sort of bipedal Jabba the Radish), "No face" a disembodied black shape that wears a tribal mask, a stink beast that oozes waist-deep slime, a boy who turns into a sort of dragon, rolling decapitated human heads who may or may not serve Yorubaba, a six-armed furnace operator, princely-frogs, and many, many more. None of these creatures is a freak or out of the ordinary here; they are all just various types of spirits, living and working peacefully with all the others. 

Characters change greatly during the film also, something I like.  Most movies everyone is exactly as you first see them, physically and emotionally, the whole time.  Chihiro's parents are the first casualty, being transformed into huge hogs, but we also see a boy who changes into a somewhat uncontrollable dragon, a giant human baby who is turned into a fat rat, a human-headed bird who is turned into a mosquito, and Yorubaba herself, who can turn into a bird that's nearly as ugly as she is in human form.  Beyond the physical changes, the characters change and adapt.  Yorubaba seems a frightful villain at the start, but is revealed to be more of a shrewd businesswoman with a meddling sister.  Other spirits seem to be angry and cruel, but all are shown to have personalities and be nice enough people, once you get to know them. 

The movie is very much anime.  Not so much in the visual style, (no giant-eyed shouting caricatures with eyebrows floating over their heads) but in the archetypal characters and images, the sense of space and time and the contemplation amidst the chaos. In most anime that's largely due to time and money constraints; anime usually has to rely on a few gorgeously-drawn stills, and take long looks at them, since they don't have the budget to do all the in between frames.  Spirited Away has the money, and does the inbetweens, as well as the gorgeous background images and character design.  They did the timing and space by design, rather than necessity.

There are no songs in the movie, other than over the credits.  There is music, but almost always quiet background tunes.  There are certainly no singing characters or musical numbers.  There are some cute little animal sidekicks, and they have their own personalities, but they don't sing about it.  Thank god, that's the main reason I've not seen a Disney cartoon in about ten years; I just can't take fricking coffeepots and lamps and squirrels singing Elton John songs.

So while I don't see it quite like this:

To say that Miyazaki's intelligent, painstaking, hand-crafted anime is magical, dazzling and brilliant is an understatement - it's incomparable, ingenious and inventive -just watch for a win at Osca-time!

I did enjoy the two hours.

I actually feel more positive while I'm writing this, a couple of weeks later, than I did immediately after seeing it.  I now remember the brilliant scenes and creatures and lovely peaceful scenes, and don't so much remember the slower parts and less-interesting sections.  I'd like to see it again on DVD once it's released.

February 11, 2005

Having seen this film several times now on DVD, and enjoying it more each time, I have to say that it's a masterpiece. I love the characters, I love the space and time and flow of the story, and I love the world its set in. Truly a wonderful film for the whole family, as they say. 

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