30 Films That Made Me Who I Am - #24

Spirited Away

     So you take a wrong turn, end up in some sort of spirit world, and your parents eat food and literally become pigs.  What else to do than find a job in a bathhouse from an old witch (the same one that had your parents turned to pigs), all the while having your real name stolen from you and being given a name that's the Japanese word for 'thousand'?!  Yes, that's the plot of Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away.  It's weird, but not as weird as some Japanese things I've watched.  No sir.  No young cybernetic girls being trained by men to become assassins here!  (See Gunslinger Girl to find out what I'm talking about.)  No teenagers turning into nuclear weapons a la Akira!

     Miyazaki is one of the most wonderfully creative artists in the world today.  His films have a quality to them that make some refer to him as the Japanese Walt Disney, which is a claim he hates.  I don't think it fits either, though Disney has released most of his films to the American audience.  He's much more interesting than Disney, and his work isn't as subtle.  Maybe it's just a Japanese thing, as I've noticed most of their movies lack subtlety.  Spirited Away was actually supposed to be Miyazaki's swan song.  He decided to retire while making the film.  You can tell that he wanted this to be his masterwork, as it's pitch perfect and encompasses all that his work has been trying to say for years.  The films he's made since then, Howl's Moving Castle and Ponyo, have been considered as lesser works by most critics and viewers, though they are still seen as better than most family fare.  Indeed, his production company, Studio Ghibli, puts out better films than Disney does these days, including work done by Miyazaki's son, Goro.

    It's hard to talk about the movie, as it's so out there and I haven't seen it in a few years, due to it still not being available on blu-ray.  However, I do remember that I first saw the movie when I was 17, after seeing that it won the Academy Award for best animated feature in 2001.  Before that, I had only seen one Miyazaki film, and that was when Kiki's Delivery Service, which I don't count as one of Miyazaki's best films, came on the Disney Channel when I was sick a few years before.  To say I was impressed by the scope and oddness of Spirited Away would be an understatement.  I had never really watched any Japanese animated films at the time (the movie is not anime), but even after all these years, this is my favorite.  Like Pixar, Miyazaki puts quite a bit of environmental stuff in his films, which I'm always for.  This film has river pollution as part of it's plot, and other films like Princess Mononoke and Nausicaa have even more environmentalism.  Stuff you can't look over.  Miyazaki also profoundly loves childhood.  This is something Disney has never been really good at.  Spirited Away is a great coming of age film.  It's somewhat about Sen's transition from childhood to adulthood, and it's been compared to Lewis Carrol's Alice In Wonderland, which is a comparison I can kind of see, but again don't agree with.  This is so much more than a book of nonsense and rhymes.  There's an actual intelligible story here...  Even if I don't really remember exactly what it is. 

    People, even if you don't care for kids movies, (Which this isn't...  It's a family film.) you need to watch this.  It's a powerful, amazing film that everyone should see sometime in their life.  If you must pick one Miyazaki movie to see, make it either this or Princess Mononoke.  If you're disappointed, you may have no soul.