#21 Spirited Away

In Summary

For anyone unfamiliar with Studio Ghibli, Spirited Away is delightfully weird.

A young girl, Chihiro, moves to a new town with her parents. Just as they are about to arrive at their new home, they take a detour to find themselves at what appears to be an abandoned theme park.

Chihiro's parents are then transformed into pigs, leaving her to find a job in order to convince the witch-mistress of a bathhouse for spirits to free her parents from her spell. Along the way, Chihiro befriends a strange, obsessive spirit with no face, a bird, a giant baby and a boy who is also a dragon.

The rules upon which Spirited Away operates are delightfully bewildering from a Western perspective. There is a matter-of-factness to the magical and fantastical turns this film makes. It manages to combine spiritism and magic with industrialism and urbanity.

Although nominally a children's film, there is a darkness to Spirited Away that you wouldn't get in an equivalent Western animation. There is a sharp strain of judgmentalism that can be quite disturbing. The parents are punished for gorging themselves on food, Chihiro is punished for her naivety by losing her name.

However, the darkness within Spirited Away is all with an underlying message of the importance of being kind and respectful to all walks of life. Our heroine has to humble herself before she can achieve her narrative goal.

A Memorable Quote

Once you do something, you never forget. Even if you can't remember.

Things You May Not Know

• Director and writer, Hayao Miyazaki, never writes scripts ahead of creating his films, instead allowing the plot to develop as he storyboards each scene.
• The jumping lamp when Chihiro arrives at Zeniba's house is a nod to Pixar.
• The English-language dub required the insertion of several lines of dialogue in order to explain things - like what a bathhouse is - to a non-Japanese audience.

One of the Greatest of All Time?
Spirited Away is an excellent introduction into the world of Studio Ghibli. Made in a completely different cultural context to Western animation, Spirited Away is all the better for it.

A wonderfully unabashed film, Spirited Away delights in its strangeness while avoids falling into the realm of tweeness. This is a film that will live with you long after you've finished watching it.