Spirited Away

ByThe Plaid Adder
Comments:plaidder@mindspring.com

We both really liked Princess Mononoke, which is why we were excited to hear that the same director had a new film out. We both agreed afterwards that we liked Mononoke better, but that Spirited Away is still pretty good. For a rich, inventive, unusual, and often HIGHLY creepy and disturbing visual imagination, nobody but nobody has this director beat. Spirited Away also features an unusually well-realized child protagonist whose perspective is crucial to the film's undeniably potent emotional effects. It shares a lot of the same concerns that inform Mononoke, namely the poisonous influence of a voracious and consumerist modernity, the relationship between enviornmental and spiritual destruction, and of course a heterosexual friendship/romance between two good-hearted but often overwhelmed children. As in Mononoke, there's a refreshing acknowledgment of the fluidity of good and evil, and characters who are introduced as villains often turn out to have redeeming qualities. So that's all good. What Mononoke had, that Spirited Away doesn't, is a plot.

OK, that's a little harsh. Spirited Away does have a plot, and what's more it's a classic familiar to us from a lot of children's literature. Chihiro, the protagonist, is moving to a new city and a new school, and she's not at all happy about it. On their way to their new home, Chihiro and her parents take a wrong turn and wind up in what her father identifies as an abandoned theme park. Chihiro, having perhaps read Ray Bradbury in translation, realizes immediately that something is very wrong with this place, and tries to get her parents to leave; but being pigheaded materialistic adults, they don't listen to her, and by the time night falls, Chihiro and her parents are all trapped in a strange and terrifying otherworld. It's up to Chihiro to rescue her parents and get the three of them back to the real world, after which experience, of course, moving to a new school isn't going to seem that bad after all.

The film does a fabulous job with Chihiro, not only in terms of her characterization but her perspective. Her transition from terror to pluckiness to eventually becoming confident with this new universe is affecting and convincing, and throughout she remains a child rather than a miniature adult. There's a wonderful 'real kid' moment about halfway through the movie where, after her first horrifying night in the otherworld, her friend and soon to be love interest Haku finds her and gives her some food to keep her strength up. She starts eating, and also just starts bawling, and for the next few minutes, as Haku tries to comfort her, she just keeps eating and sobbing at the same time. Her confusion and concern about good manners--how does one show proper respect for adults, when the adults are, say, a six-armed tea-guzzling spiderlike creature operating a gigantic blast furnace?--are strongly reminiscent of Alice in the Wonderland books, and a big part of her appeal.

The plot, actually, is also very much in the tradition of Alice in Wonderland, or even more so, Through the Looking Glass: it's more episodic than coherent, and although Chihiro does learn to play the game, the rules do not necessarily make sense, and are always subject to change. Exposing this plot to logical scrutiny would be very, very bad for it; the only reason it works is that you're so caught up in Chihiro's experience that you can't get outside to question it. In the end, the only rules we could come up with were: make sure you only take what you're entitled to, and it never hurts to do someone else a good turn. Problematic as #1 can become, they're both nice wholesome morals, for kids and for adults.

All this wholesomeness, however, is balanced out by the realization of the universe, which is seriously freaky. As Chihiro becomes more familiar with it, we learn to appreciate it and even find humor in things that used to be profoundly disturbing. Initially, however, it's intensely unsettling, and I've been trying to figure out why. I think a lot of it has to do with fluidity. Many of these spirits are both recognizably humanoid and strangely amorphous; and many of them don't have fixed forms at all, growing and mutating beyond anyone's control. Nothing and no one stays put in this universe; and in fact, the sorceress in charge of it all rules mainly through the threat of transformation. Once we get used to this, it can be played for humor-- and it is--but there's something about it that really gets under my skin, as it were.

Anyway, the bottom line is that the weakness of the plot should not prevent anyone from going to see this movie; the strength of the other elements transcends that, and in the end what matters is the experience of having been taken into this universe. Nightmarish as a lot of the imagery is, this film does have a heart, and is able to deliver that poignant heartwarming feeling without getting sticky and saccharine about it. And if I were Kobashi the boiler room attendant, I would give it six thumbs up; but as it is, I must content myself with two.

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