Posted: 09/26/2002

Spirited Away

(2001)

by D. Patrick Seitz

This much-hailed anime out-Seinfelds Seinfeld in showing just how deftly a plot can be avoided…

Hayao Miyazaki has left me scratching my head.

His Spirited Away is a fine movie, and its plot credits the audience with oodles more intelligence than 97% of the animation out there, but I didn’t think that it was all that and a bag of rice cakes. To hear the critics sing its praises, you’d think the main characters outline a cure for cancer that anybody possessed of a 5th grade education could fashion out of household items.

I appreciate that it’s the first animated film to pick up the Berlin Film Festival’s “best picture” award. I know it’s the first film to earn $200 million before opening in America. I thank it heartily from knocking “Titanic” off as the most popular film in Japanese movie-going history.

I just don’t know what about the film caused those things to happen.

I feel like the biggest party in the world is going on in the apartment above my ceiling, and I’m only hearing the faintest thumps from the sub-woofers. If only I knew the caliber of celebration ten feet above my head, oh, the good times I could have. Instead, I look out the window at the street and wonder why there’s no curbside parking to be seen for blocks and blocks.

It leaves me in something of a quandary. I wasn’t throwing my feces at the screen like some simian round-eyed devil, asking for some good ol’ straight-to-video sequel of more traditionally Western Disney fare. I really enjoyed Princess Mononoke, which is also a Miyazaki film. I think I’m a smart enough guy to “get” a movie like Spirited Away…if only I knew how much there was to get in the first place.

Did I like this film because it’s good? Or because it’s different from the animation to which I’m accustomed, all of it steeped in Western values and slavishly devoted to what will prove a sure sell to the kiddies? If my regard for this film springs from my own ignorance, why are the Japanese so in love with what must seem infinitely more familiar to them?

As that doesn’t make any sense, I have to assume that Spirited Away is inherently good. But is it that inherently good? I no longer trust my own judgment on the matter.

The plot? Just your average “young-girl-and-parents-take-a-shortcut, girl-et-al-end-up-in-weird-abandoned-amusement-park, parents-turn-into-pigs, girl-loses-name-to-witch, girl-forced-to-work-in-bathhouse-full-of-spirits” film.

The 131 minutes roll by in a beautiful kaleidoscope of odd locations, freakish characters, and minor quests, but there’s nothing really tying it together. Chihiro’s (voiced by Daveigh Chase of Lilo and Stitch) given raison d’aetre through the film is to try and rescue her parents…turned into pigs, and slated for a cameo at the dinner table sooner or later…and find a way home, but there’s no real urgency to it. There’s no connection made between the child and her parents before they’re parted early on in the film, when they were in the process of moving to a new house. There’s no emotional ante in saving the parents, and there’s no established home to which she can return. Saving her parents almost comes off more as an act of filial devotion than anything else (which, given the film’s place of origin, just might explain it).

The true test of whether or not you’ll enjoy Spirited Away seems to be your reaction to tales such as The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland. If you tend to like stuff like that, Spirited Away will probably be right up your alley. If you’re not too big a fan of that sort of surreal, young female coming-of-age, fish-out-of-water story, Spirited Away might leave you scratching your head even more vigorously than it left me scratching mine.

Having to schlep out to wherever it’s playing is something of a hassle; the El Capitan seems to be the only choice anywhere near me (using “near” somewhat loosely), and I don’t know how large a movie-going area that one theater is expected to accommodate. Still, I suggest you give Spirited Away a shot. It’s a beautiful film, and one of the largely least predictable things you’ll watch in a long time.

…and after you do, e-mail me and let me know whether I’m ignorant or not. Really. I mean it. I need to know if I’m too dense to see the emperor’s new clothes, or if everyone’s jaw is hitting the floor over the size of Miyazaki’s creative package.

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