Rachel and I watched a very nice film last night called Spirited Away. This is the Amazon.co.uk review:
The highest grossing film in Japanese box-office history, 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 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 instructs Chihiro to request a job from Yubaba, 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. 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. –Charles Solomon –This text refers to the Theatrical Release edition.
What can I say about this film? Rachel and I are big fans of animations like all the Disney Classics and Pixar productions, so Spirited Away was quite a big departure from this genre of films. It was beautifully made – very scene was full of detail and flowed beautifully. You honestly cared for the characters in it. What it boiled down to was a love story between two young children, Chihiro and Haku who came from different worlds and were joined in the evil world of Yubaba, the nasty sorceress who runs a bathhouse and turns anyone who doesn’t work for her into pigs. Chihiro, the heroine of the story, comes along and turns the whole bathhouse upside down by her simple love and trust for the vulnerable (the most endearing being the sootballs) and by the lengths she’ll go to save Haku.
Disney films in comparison seem rather fake and commercial, more showy. Spirited Away is animation at its best, and I would recommend it to any fans of the animation genre, just to give them a whole new perspective on animation.
