Type in any movie or show to find where you can watch it, or type a person's name.

User Reviews for: Spirited Away

AndrewBloom
CONTAINS SPOILERS8/10  one year ago
[8.0/10] Words won’t do for *Spirited Away*. It is not a film meant for words. It is a film of images, of moments, of experiences. If you’ll pardon the expression, it is one of cinema’s most immersive films. There is a story here. Young Chihiro enters a magical world inhabited by witches, phantoms, and other whimsical creatures. She has some wild adventures and comes back more mature and equipped for her big life transition in the human world. But the story isn’t really the point of this movie.

It is, instead, to *be* in the spirit world along with her. It’s hard to summon a film with a better sense of place, a more lived-in setting, or a more dizzying yet inviting backdrop for the audience to hang around in for two hours. You can practically taste the sizzling morsels that lure Chihiro’s parents into hanging around a spectral marketplace long enough for disaster to strike or the dishes at the high tea at Zeniba’s cabin. You can practically feel the gunk of a stink demon cling to your skin and the relief of hot herbal water pouring over you as it does the young protagonist. You can practically smell the burning furnace or the steamy baths or the ocean breeze as they all waft through the picture.

In that, *Spirited Away* is a profoundly tactile, intricate, and above all sensory film. There is so much care imbued into every sight, sound, and frame. In the same way that movies themselves are a magic trick--a series of still images played fast enough that our feeble minds mistake it for motion--Hayao Miyazaki’s signature film works in the same terms. It is the suggestion of so many sights, smells, sounds, tastes, and textures that eventually, they cease to become artifice and start to feel hauntingly, palpably real.

That's my pet theory about why *Spirited Away* is so memorable and so salient in the minds and memories of its audience. Miyazaki and his team present a world that is undeniably fantastical, replete with ghosts, witchcraft, beaucoup magical transformations, and travel between various mystical realms and settings. His figures are exaggerated and often comic. And yet, all this wild and whimsy comes with a startling sense of realism in how it’s presented to the viewer.

The flow of so much liquid through a magical but workaday bathhouse, the cluttered colorful bric-a-brac that consumes so many corners, the swift flitting movements that young Chihiro makes her way through it all with, give the sense of this enchanted space as something true and genuine. Even in animation, our lizard brains recognize the level of detail, the accuracy realized in caricature, and we intuit this liminal space as some place real in a way few fictional settings can achieve.

Despite my ramblings and grandiosity, I mean it when I saw I don’t have the words to describe it all. The animation and design work here in particular is so virtuoso that it all but defies description. The film’s characters come in different sizes and styles, and somehow all still feel like they belong in the same world. The imagination on display in the designs of bulbous Yubaba, beastly-yet-benign No-Face, and the countless colorful denizens bobbing through the bathhouse is incredible. The animation is extraordinary, with flowing movements, kinetic sequences, and a certain weight and weightlessness that makes every character distinctive. And the backgrounds and “lighting” the film deploys make every random still frame seem like something you could print out and hang on the wall with the level of artistry involved.

The visuals here are sumptuous, even shocking, in a way that puts *Spirited Away* in the highest of echelons for 2D animation, and maybe even makes it peerless in that department.

Much credit also owes to the sound design and mixing team, who do no less an amazing job at bringing the spirit world to life. When Lin’s boat creaks against the waves, the ship itself seems more real. When the same sort of living soot mites from *My Neighbor Totoro* audibly skitter and huddle and rumble across the floor, they seem like genuine little creatures. When goop sluices in the halls or a rush of hot water douses its residents, the sounds make you feel like you're there. *Spirited Away* doesn’t neglect any part of the sensory experience, and beyond the lovely score and endearing touches like No-Face’s exhalations, the everyday sounds of the place are just as vital to the film’s creative success.

I offer all this praise with the admission that, for all its stunning imagery and nigh-unparalleled sense of place, I don’t really care for *Spirited Away*’s story or its characters.

I suppose that statement assumes there is a story. You can, charitably, say that the film has a plot. Chihiro is stranded in the spirit world. She labors and survives with the help of some generous new friends. She finds talents and courage she didn’t know she had. And in the end, she affirms who she is and emerges back in the human world ready to face its challenges. At a broad enough level, there’s a solid trajectory there.

But things just sort of happen in *Spirited Away*. It is more episodic, a series of loosely connected vignettes, than it is a propulsive story. Sure, an object Chihiro recovers after assisting a river spirit comes in handy when she needs to save her friend, and the contract she signs with the nasty proprietor of the bath house must be dissolved by the end of the film. For the most part, though, the events of the film seem random, more simply adjacent than feeding into one another. And the major happenings are often baffling, with confounding incidents going entirely unremarked upon, or otherwise being accounted for in awkward, shoe-horned-in exposition that doesn’t make the explanations satisfying.

The peak of that is the reveal that Haku, Chihiro’s standard anime boy crush/dragon, is actually a river spirit who rescued her as a little kid. Aside from a couple blink-and-you’ll-miss-it flashbacks, it comes out of absolute nowhere, and adds nothing to the story beyond a convenient shortcut of a connection between them to justify Haku’s kindness mechanically rather than through his good character. It’s emblematic of the “things just sort of happen; don’t worry about it” spirit of the film.

Charitably, that can work for a whimsical movie like *Spirited Away*. Chihiro is in a world she doesn’t know or understand. The fact that random occurrences interrupt her peace without warning or logic puts the viewer in her same shoes, left to be confounded by it much as she is. That, combined with certain cultural context I’m likely missing as someone not steeped in Japanese culture, can excuse much of the formlessness and apparent randomness of the film’s storytelling.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t excuse the characters. Chihiro is annoying as all get out with her screeching delivery. Haku is every young girl’s fanfiction crush with the standard issue dreamy face and haircut. Yubaba is every Dickensian master. None of the characters has any real depth. Often, their personalities seem to turn on a dime. They don’t have much beyond the most basic of motivations. And as a result, I don’t really care what happens to most of them. At best, the film can coast a bit on that relatable sense of being young and in a new place, scared but determined, and wanting to go back where you started. It imbues Chihiro’s plight with a depth the character herself can’t otherwise support.

But you know what? It also doesn’t really matter. I’d be lying if I said I was compelled at an emotional level by most of the characters (give or take Kamaji, the boilermaster, who is arbitrarily but touchingly kind to Chihiro). But I still enjoy watching the lot of them, if only for how they move, how they look, how they literally and figuratively bounce off of one another. None of the major players here has depth, but they have personality and character thanks to the exquisite craft on offer in the film, and given the tremendous achievements in that department, it’s more than enough.

In truth, that's what *Spirited Away* survives and thrives on. It is a movie much more about the vibes than the plot, and much more about what you saw and felt when experiencing it in any given moment than what your rational mind thought about it as a whole. The movie is inextricable from that experience, to visit this place with all its terrors and wonders, to sit on that train and watch the phantoms rise and depart, to stand in Chihiro’s mite-mended shoes and bite into her dumpling and look upon a horizon that is at once welcoming and foreboding.

I can’t pretend I’m able to articulate it. I don’t think that's what *Spirited Away* is meant for. It is, rather, a feast for the soul, bereft of sense but rich in feeling -- a bit of wizardry that whisks the viewer away with its young protagonist, and returns them both unable to capture the experience in feeble words, but duly awed by the experience.
Like  -  Dislike  -  30
Please use spoiler tags:[spoiler] text [/spoiler]
Back to Top