Spirited Away
June 15th, 2009 | 77 views | Posted by in DVD, Blu-ray & Digital Video
Spirited Away (2001) [Studio Ghibli]
From one of the most celebrated filmmakers in the history of animated cinema comes the most acclaimed film of 2002. Hayao Miyazaki‘s latest triumph, filled with astonishing animation and epic adventure, is a dazzling masterpiece for the ages. It’s a “wonderfully welcoming work of art that’s as funny and entertaining as it is brilliant, beautiful, and deep” (Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal).
SPIRITED AWAY is a wondrous fantasy about a young girl, Chihiro, trapped in a strange new world of spirits. When her parents undergo a mysterious transformation, she must call upon the courage she never knew she had to free herself and return her family to the outside world. An unforgettable story brimming with creativity, SPIRITED AWAY will take you on a journey beyond your imagination. “To enter the world of Hayao Miyazaki is to experience a kind of lighthearted enchantment that is unique to the world of animation” (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times). It’s a fantastic tale the whole family will want to experience over and over again.
The highest grossing film in Japanese box-office history (more than $234 million), Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (Sen To Chihiro Kamikakushi) is a dazzling film that reasserts the power of drawn animation to create fantasy worlds. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Chihiro (voice by Daveigh Chase–Lilo in Disney’s Lilo & Stitch) plunges into an alternate reality. On the way to their new home, the petulant adolescent and her parents find what they think is a deserted amusement park. Her parents stuff themselves until they turn into pigs, and Chihiro discovers they’re trapped in a resort for traditional Japanese gods and spirits. An oddly familiar boy named Haku (Jason Marsden) instructs Chihiro to request a job from Yubaba (Suzanne Pleshette), the greedy witch who rules the spa. As she works, Chihiro’s untapped qualities keep her from being corrupted by the greed that pervades Yubaba’s mini-empire. In a series of fantastic adventures, she purges a river god suffering from human pollution, rescues the mysterious No-Face, and befriends Yubaba’s kindly twin, Zeniba (Pleshette again). The resolve, bravery, and love Chihiro discovers within herself enable her to aid Haku and save her parents. The result is a moving and magical journey, told with consummate skill by one of the masters of contemporary animation. MPAA Rated: PG (“Some scary moments”) –Charles Solomon
Spirited Away Review
Released on July 20th, in 2001 in Japan, “Spirited Away” stayed in theaters for almost 10 months, breaking all the previous box-office records in Japan, including that of “Titanic” and “Princess Mononoke” by the same director Hayao Miyazaki. With this astonishing film about a girl’s spiritual journey, Mr. Miyazaki again showed that he is one of the best directors living in the world. This animation film was also awarded prestageous Golden Bear Prize in Berlin Film Festival, and that is not a surprise at all, after you see this movie.
The film’s story traces a girl’s strange and fascinating life in another world, where her parents are accidentally and magically transformed, and she has to survice herself and return to her own world. To do so, this pudgy-faced little girl Chihiro, now deprived of her name by a greedy witch Yu-baba, has to work at the baths where gods and sprites all over Japan come to take a rest. Chihiro’s life is full of wonderful (and often hard, even terrifying) things, and through her experiences she learns how to live, gaining the true will and power, changing from a sulky girl languidly lying on the backseat of a car, into a lively and truely courageous girl.
That’s all you have to know: you don’t need to see its trailer (English version trailer is a bit misleading), and just watch this masterpiece. Though there is a character called “Kao-nashi” (meaning “Faceless”), who out of loneliness does something harmful to the place; and there is an episode about a very stinking monster who turns out something very different, there are no villains, no heroes, and no so-called actions. And another strength of the film comes from its designs of the baths. It is based on a mosaic of Japanese and Western traditions (the witch’s office looks obviously Western while Chihiro and other female workers room is inspired from the texitle factory girls’ residence 100 years ago) Incredibly, some part are even from Chinese style.
The story, some say probably rightly, goes slower in the latter half (of the film that runs more than 2 hours), but “Spirited Away” never lets you down. It’s time for any American audience to know Miyazaki’s name, and that animation films are not meant for only kids, but for adults.
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