Spirited Away

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Day 92 of 365 of my year long challenge Week 14: Miyazaki Week In honour of Hayao Miyazaki's upcoming 75th birthday, films that have inspired the world and films that have inspired the man. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What a way to finish 2015?! The first anime to win the Oscar for Best Animation, Spirtited Away seems to hold a special place in the heart of so many. It's a coming of age film that straddles the familiar and the fantastic, the old world and the new, and kids big and small. 10-year-old Chihiro (Rumi Hiiragi) is on her way to a brand new house with her parents (Takashi Naitō (Dad) & Yasuko Sawaguchi (Mum)). Along the way, her father takes a wrong turn but decides to explore the track. What the family find is a tunnel to what they believe is an abandoned amusement park. Rather than turn back and meet the movers, Dad drags Chihiro and her mother through the tunnel to an abandoned marketplace, where the adults find mountains of food. While her parents feast, Chihiro explores further meeting a boy, Haku (Miyu Irino) who tells her to leave. Finding herself trapped and alone, her parents have turned into pigs, Chihiro must find work in the bathhouse to survive until she can find a way to save her parents. Spirited Away is a stunning film to watch on so many levels. Like all of Miyazaki's work, and further to Studio Ghibli, there is true imagination, heart and wonder imbued in every inch of the film. Ostensibly a film for kids, this is a film that undoubtedly captures and delights adults too. If anything, Miyazaki's works should be watched at least once as a child to enjoy it in its purest and broadest sense, and many times more as adults so as to unravel their many levels and soak up every detail. Spirited Away is amongst the most visually gorgeous films I can possibly think of. The animation is crisp, vibrant and wonderfully expressive. The real world away from the bathhouse is simple, real and yet never boring. It is rich in its subtle and natural familiarity. On the other hand, the world of the bathhouse is alive with colour, energy and imagination. It is an expression of the old world populated with countless spirits, creatures and magical beings, each of which stand apart from the one next to it. The bathhouse is a vibrant world that highlights the very best of the genius' work. It captures the creativity and uniqueness of his imagination while maintaining elements of the very realistic and expressive style Studio Ghibli has become known for. Unlike anime elsewhere, time, detail and effort are poured into every frame so as to bring every rich and real detail to life. Even amongst its peers, Spirited Away and indeed all work of Miyazaki stand out and stand tall. In its simplest form, Spirited Away is just another coming of age story in the vein of Lewis Caroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Chihiro is a young girl who enters a foreign, fantastic and adult world, stripped of her past, and must form for herself a new identity. She begins the film whining, disappointed and ill-mannered but transforms over the course of the film into something more mature, understanding and in touch with a traditional past long since forgotten. It is this final idea that takes the film deeper, providing it with only one level of Miyazaki's usual social commentary. Ill-mannered and uninformed, Chihiro represents the new generation of Japan who has lost touch with the past. In this, it is the new versus the old, with spirits losing themselves to human progress and greed. Miyazaki branches from this with his go to themes of environmentalism and capitalism. The river spirit is mistaken for a stink spirit and cannot be cleansed until purified of humanity's junk, representing society's current disregard for the world they live in and share rather than control. Meanwhile, the bathhouse and its owner Yubaba (Mari Natsuki) are only interested in gold and wealth. This goes so far as to owning Chihiro's name and robbing her of anything but an ambiguous value. If anything, these themes and ideas which are handed to Chihiro are also a hopeful commentary on a generation willing to look back to step forward. While the bathhouse and Chihiro grow and change over the course of the film, only her parents remain as they began. This is the ultimate generational disconnect, with the generation of Chihiro's parents inhabiting in their totality capitalist greed, progressive greed and a cultural blindness to the past. These are the grandchildren of the war generation and they don't want to know about it. Regardless of what Miyazaki may be trying to say, Spirited Away is a more than magical adventure that sees a young girl transform into something greater. Surrounded by fantastic creatures, a stunning world and brought to life by a stellar voice cast, there are few films quite so captivating and brilliant as this. Alice may be the seminal girl in wonderland but Chihiro is the one that truly learnt from and experienced it. Reality and fantasy merge in Hayao Miyazaki's most well-known masterpiece and, in the spirit of the new year, is fitting as we the straddle the old world and new and begin anew.