Spirited Away DVD review
April 19, 2003
Last month at the Academy Awards one of the best (and most deserving) wins of the night was in the Best Animated Feature category where the Japanese animated fantasy “Spirited Away” won over such popular American fare as “Lilo & Stitch” and “Ice Age”. It was a sweet victory for a film so good it could have easily been nominated in either the Foreign film category or in the Best Picture category, and come to think, it probably should have. But fans of director Hayao Miyazaki’s brilliant and sweet adventure rejoiced in the solitary Oscar, and now can rejoice even more because on Tuesday American distributor Disney did the film right by providing a nice double disk, wide screen DVD transfer.
Disney finally realized how precious the film was after its Oscar triumph, and only recently re-released it into 800 theaters nationwide after poorly distributing it to limited cities last year. Thankfully they caught on, and have put out a worthy DVD, which features both the original Japanese language sound track, and the very honorably dubbed American version, overseen by long time Miyazaki worshipper John Lasseter of Pixar. The handful of extras focus on the animation and sound recording of such an immense feature animated film.
“Spirited Away” is the most recent masterpiece in Hayao Miyazaki’s distinguished career. For those unfamiliar with his work, Miyazaki is the leading animator of Japanese anime features, who, working with a close staff at his Studio Ghibli has produced some marvelous films including, among others, the classic “My Neighbor Totoro”, the fun “Kiki’s Delivery Service”, and the epic “Princess Mononoke”. The man is beloved by critics, but especially by fellow animators who marvel at his amazing imagination and workmanlike work ethic, laying out all of his films in storyboards and proceeding in hand animation, rare in the computer age of animation.
With “Spirited Away” the auteur has outdone even his best work. It is a film of many parts; a fantasy, adventure and comedy, that all takes place in a world that somehow is grounded in reality but features creatures that are obviously fantastical and mythological. In one scene the hero, Chihiro will be flying on the back of a dragon, or getting a spa ready for a humongous mud spirit, but could just as well be back in reality on an old forgotten trolley or roaming the halls of an abandoned train station. The world in “Spirited Away” is at once fantasy, but at the same time deeply rooted in Japanese economic reality, both the modern post-‘90’s recession, and the ancient worlds of the bathhouse (i.e. brothel) or what in Japanese literature is more commonly described as “the floating world”.
This is made clear in the first scenes. Chihiro, a ten-year-old girl, is sulking in the back of her family’s car as they approach their new house in a totally new city. They get lost and end up at the foot of a long, mysterious tunnel. “The wind is pulling us in,” says a scared Chihiro, reluctant to advance into the unknown dark. At the end of the tunnel is a run down, abandoned amusement park; “they built these in the early ‘90’s, when the economy was good” says the father. Eventually, the realism of the broken down economy turns into a fantasy parable of the old society as Chihiro (whose parents have been turned into hogs) ends up working at the secret bathhouse, that at night is a place for all of the spirits of Japan to come and unwind, much like the Samurai did at the brothels of the floating world.
The house is run by a menacing witch, Yubaba, who takes Chihiro on only if she signs over her name (which gives Yubaba ultimate power) and calls herself Sen. Yubaba is an awesome figure; a small body with a huge head, long nose and gray bouffant hairdo. She’s mean, but isn’t really a villain, she runs the bathhouse like a real madam would run a brothel, professionally, as the customer is always first.
Sen (as she is now called) has a friend in Haku, a kind boy under the spell of Yubaba to do her dirty work, but has enough will to help Sen out of jams, with his alter ego as a flying dragon. Sen (and this is where the heart of the film lies) loves Haku like a brother, they have a shared unspoken past and he holds the philosophy to her and her parents’ freedom. “If you completely forget your name you’ll never find your way home,” he warns her to remember the name Chihiro.
As in all of Miyazaki’s great films, “Spirited Away” is peppered with imagination and memorable supporting characters. One of them is Kumajii, the boiler room man, an amazing figure that is kind like a grandfather but grumpy just the same for spending his whole life in a boiler room. He has eight arms, a huge mustache, and tiny, adorable soot balls (from “My Neighbor Totoro”) as workers. The boiler room is one of the many magical sights Chihiro finds at the bathhouse.
All of the spirits standout as well, like the Radish spirit, a big, white, fat sumo wrestler of a spirit, if a sumo wrestler looked, well, like a giant white radish. There is a wonderful sequence where Sen deals with a stink spirit, a gross, oozing brown glob that turns out to be a water spirit, the highest and most prestigious of them all, under a ton of pollution. Miyazaki mentions that all of his characters in someway are inspired by his real life, and this incident comes out of a day when, as a boy, he and some friends were cleaning a river full of garbage that just kept on coming.
The most important spirit of the film is called No-face, a semi-invisible spirit, in a black cloak with a white mask, that Sen lets into the house, not knowing that when it feeds it grows large and angry. The No-face has tons of gold that the workers jump through hoops to please for but with greed comes ugliness as the creature becomes a monster, terrorizing the bathhouse, when all it really wanted was to please Sen, whom it loves. Throughout the film Miyazaki puts in these double-edged swords, where one side only wants capital, while another misunderstood party only wants to be liked. As in Kenji Mizoguchi’s classic “The Life of Oharu” a character has to throw around gold to get any attentions paid his way.
Aside from the overflow of imagination in the characters, “Spirited Away” is blessed with a beautiful look. Long shots of colorful flower gardens and glowing never-ending water landscapes are common, but darker visions of pigpens and the underbelly of the everyday machinations of the bathhouse easily balance out the picture.
It has been said that there are no throwaway moments in a Miyazaki film, every frame is a painting worthy of it’s own gallery exhibition. Like the great Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu, Miyazaki chooses every shot with precision care. He’s not afraid (much like Ozu) to hold on something seemingly inconsequential (like an intersection or a statue) for more than four seconds making every shot meaningful.
The extras on the DVD showcase the often grueling task of making such a detailed animated film. The best of the extras, a 40 minute Japanese TV special (the film was a huge hit in Japan, becoming the all time box office money maker) documenting the whole process of making the film, from storyboards, to first animation, to voice recording and musical scoring. Miyazaki and his young staff at Studio Ghibli worked long hours and by the end of principal animation they were exhausted. In the documentary the gray haired director comes off as a warm, jolly company man, cooking for and joking around with his much younger staff of animators, who are often in awe of just being in the company of such a renowned master. It is not secret that he is widely respected by all.
The animators diligent work has paid off a thousand times over and we are the lucky ones for it, for “Spirited Away” is not only Miyazaki’s supreme achievement, it’s one of the great animated films of all time.
by Adam Suraf