Spirited Away

Saw the movie Spirited Away last Friday. It's the latest film by Hayao Miyazaki, the genius who also created Princess Mononoke.

It's a beautiful film, and it's highly recommended to anyone who's interested in Anime at all (or to anyone who enjoyed Mononoke). The computer animated sequences are seamlessly integrated into the traditionally animated sequences, and there are simply some astonishing visuals.

The plot is neatly summed up by the trailer; for those of you disinclined to download the trailer, a young girl gets separated from her parents and gets sucked into a parallel world of spirits, and, with the help of assorted characters she befriends, has to find her way back to the "real" world.

The character design is amazing; from a spidery old man to assorted spirits to a gigantic spoiled baby, there's a tremendous amount of creativity and care in the creation of the characters who populate the film. They contribute tremendously to the familar-yet-utterly-alien feel that the spirit world has; Miyazaki has taken familar types and expanded, contorted, and elongated them to the point of grotesqueness, then cast them in his movie.

More interesting is how the spirit world is presented: it's a huge, massive, independent universe with its own history and infrastructure that we only see a small part of. There's a train (don't ask) that runs through the spirit world; at one point, before the little girl gets on the train, a character tells her that she'll have to get off at a particular stop, then adds, with a sigh, "you'll have to find your own way back; the train used to run in both directions but doesn't anymore." And from that point on, the matter is dropped.

That's a huge departure from your average American (or western) fantasy movie (or novel, for that matter), where everything is explicated and fully explained. A western fantasy would have made something like the one-way train a major plot point; Miyazaki simply treats it as a detail of a larger world that we never get to explore. The movie is full of things like that, little details and gracenotes that create a fuller, larger world.

The voice acting is nicely done; someone spent a lot of time making sure that the English translation actually matched up with the characters' mouth movements.

The film isn't as thematically complex as Mononoke, and it's more episodic; but one suspects that Miayazaki wasn't trying to make a statement movie. It works on many levels; it is at once an adventure movie, a meditiation on identity, and a sly, subtle comment about industrialization and the environment.

Note: this really isn't a children's movie. Maybe for older children, 10 and up, but I suspect that anyone younger will be bored.