Spirited Away
(Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi)

Programme Notes

Directed by Hayao miyazaki

Magical is a word used casually about films like this, films about fantasy and childhood. Yet this one really does deserve it: an enchanted and enchanting feature from the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki which left me feeling lighter than air. It is a beautifully drawn and wonderfully composed work of art - really, no other description will do - which takes us on a rocket-fuelled flight of fancy, with tenderly and shrewdly conceived characters on board.

Before this movie, I was agnostic about Miyazaki and his world-renowned Ghibli studio; I couldn't join in the mass hollering of superlatives that greeted the release of his Princess Mononoke last year. That was striking and distinctive, but I found the kaleidoscope of visual images oddly depthless and psychologically uninvolving and the Japanimated moppet faces an acquired taste. Even now, my euphoria after seeing Spirited Away is soured a smidgen by reading comments by some of its more supercilious cheerleaders, who affect to adore it at the expense of "America" and "Disney": thus fatuously denigrating a great animation tradition to which Miyazaki is patently, and honourably indebted.

There are actually many Western influences and resemblances: Homer's Odyssey, Lewis Carroll, L Frank Baum and maybe even The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. But it's undoubtedly in a class and genre of its own: its alien, exotic qualities, all the more intense for a non-Japanese audience, are part of how extraordinarily pleasurable it is to watch.

Miyazaki begins with a very real picture of family life: a mother and father in the front of their gleaming Audi saloon - daddy gloats over his vehicle's four-wheel drive - are heading for a new home in the provinces. In the back, hunched and scowling, is little 10-year-old Chihiro, utterly miserable about leaving behind all her friends. An only child, whose hurt feelings are treated fairly brusquely by these well-to-do professional parents, Chihiro is scared by the feelings of loneliness that are creeping up on her. Forlornly, she clutches a dying bunch of flowers she has apparently been given as a farewell gift by her old friends, and is overwhelmed with grief and despair. "My first bouquet - and it's spoiled," she moans, discomfiting her parents with this precocious sense of her future, adult prerogatives.

Chihiro's family gets lost in a strange, secluded woodland. They park the car, and walk through a tunnel carved in a red sandstone edifice to emerge in what the father airily announces must be a deserted theme park. Chihiro watches in horror as they then tuck in to a buffet mysteriously laid out for them and turn into a couple of fat, slobbering pigs; Chihiro finds herself a wanted human fugitive in a divine bathhouse-cum-recreation-zone: "a place where eight million gods come to rest their bones". The crone priestess and proprietress of this psychedelic R'n'R area is Yubabu, whose employees must all sycophantically greet their god-customers: magnificent creatures of all shapes and sizes. She is obliged, according to her own rules, to tolerate Chihiro as long as she is prepared to do useful work. So she is made to scrub out a huge tub, preparing for the arrival of a noisome slime-monster, a Jabba the Hut lookalike. In all this, Chihiro is helped by her only friend, a slightly older boy called Haku; it is he who must teach her how to survive and restore her parents to human form.

There is just so much going on in this story that it's impossible to sum up. But it had me utterly involved from the very start, and that's down to the mind-bogglingly superb animation that, for me, had a human and psychologically acute element to add to the expected dimension of hallucinatory fantasy. It's this that makes the claim of "masterpiece" so plausible - that, and the wit, playfulness and charm that Miyazaki mixes into the proceedings.

Spirited Away is the result of organic, non-GM animation: everything is hand-drawn before being digitalised. Yet it has a dazzling quality that I have come to associate solely with the new generation of animators and FX stylists, a fleetness and lightness in the way it switches from the close-up on a deft little sight gag or a sweet character observation, sweeping out for a breathtaking panorama of an extraterrestrial landscape imagined with passionate detail and specificity. I can't think of a film that is so readily able to astonish and wears that ability so lightly and insouciantly.

Spirited Away couldn't be more different from, say, Shrek - another masterpiece that Ghibli enthusiasts patronise at their peril - and yet the out-of-this-world visual inventions of Spirited Away have the same gasp-inducing quality, but achieved without its hi-tech sheen and glitz. The scenes of Yubabu's palace complex seen at dusk across water, at sunrise through the mist, or in moonlight or sunlight made me purr with pleasure. And the compositions of Miyazaki's scenes in a bright flower garden are sublime in their forthright, untarnished innocence.

This remarkable film - finally released here two years after it was made - first entranced European audiences at the Berlin film festival. It is available in two versions: the Japanese original with subtitles, or, if you really want, dubbed with American voices. To those who prefer a dubbed version, I can only say that like screwtop wine, it might turn out to be all right. But why compromise the pleasure of this film with an error of taste as silly as that? Spirited Away is fast and funny; it's weird and wonderful. Mostly wonderful.

Shinto daydreams

Spirited Away is the most successful Japanese film ever. Chicken Run's Nick Park pays tribute to its creator

Friday August 1, 2003 The Guardian

Hayao Miyazaki has a style that is pure and rich. His films work well in the west because, although they are very Japanese, they manage to avoid being "manga", which is something that has tended to alienate western audiences.

Spirited Away is the story of a little girl, Chihiro, who enters a spirit world. Travelling with her parents to their new home in the countryside, they take a detour to explore an old-fashioned Japanese bath-house, which is actually a bath-house for spirits. Her parents are transformed into pigs, and she is trapped in a world of supernatural creatures.

Miyazaki's work is reminiscent of Tintin. His simple graphic style and attention to detail reveal great imagination: the smallest movement on the girl's face conveys a whole series of emotions. When Tintin creator Hergé drew cars, ships or planes, you could see a love for the subject itself. You see that with Spirited Away. There is a love of the process of animation. Each shot is composed and looks gorgeous.

Miyazaki is as concerned with atmosphere as he is with action. Spirited Away has shots of grass being blown by the wind, of lovely clouds. They bring back childhood memories of lying and staring at the sky and letting your mind wander. We are allowed to look at a scene and take things in. It's a slow film; it might be thought that children in the west would find it hard, but I don't think we should underestimate young audiences.

Miyazaki says that many of the bizarre images come from his childhood memories of traditional Japanese culture, and of the spirits and stories from the Shinto religion. The film is full of weird ideas, like a giant baby who turns into a mouse, a scary old lady running the bath-house who has a giant head, and the three heads bouncing around who are her bodyguards. It is genuinely frightening without ever being bombastic.

Miyazaki starts by lulling us into a false sense of security. Chihiro's parents look western, and they are driving a modern car, but then they turn into pigs and everything becomes very strange indeed. There is a creature with six arms that operates the furnace of the bath-house, and a spirit called No-Face who tempts people with gold before eating them. It is almost like a Freudian nightmare, yet you never know if the creatures are good or bad. Even the scary old lady with the giant head turns out to be all right in the end.

I've always been a big fan of Rupert the Bear, which frequently had unexpected references to Japanese culture; there is a lot of origami and Japanese towers - pagodas - in the woods where Rupert has his adventures. One character is a little Japanese girl whose father is a magician. I don't know if Miyazaki is aware of Rupert the Bear, but there are strong parallels. The frightening characters of Spirited Away are reminiscent of the kind of creatures Rupert would bump into in the woods, such as Raggady, the stick monster. Arthur Rackham's illustrations have a similar quality. Somehow, children's book illustrations from England and Japanese cartoons have influenced one another.

I find Miyazaki refreshing precisely because so much commercial animation is lacking in imagination. Mainstream animated movies are dumbed-down and sanitised: they make the world in their own image rather than exploring the limitless possibilities that are out there. A lot of films now have such a strong commercial agenda riding on top of them that you can almost hear the meetings that have taken place. And you know that the meaning comes before the idea. What is this character about? What have they learned? What is their motivation? The joy of animation comes last.

Success brings with it pressure to conform. I always thought that success would lead to freedom, but the opposite is true: more people get involved and committees make decisions, and it becomes a fight to stay free. My colleagues and I have to constantly remind each other that we must keep our own view on the world while making films. With Chicken Run, we learned how easy it is to be influenced by outside forces, but you mustn't lose the heart and soul of what you are doing. Spirited Away is the most successful Japanese film of all time, yet it is very idiosyncratic, and personal. Miyazaki has managed to make his success work.

Spirited Away is a meander through a bizarre world. The mainstream wants linear story structures, character arcs and epiphanies, but Miyazaki doesn't bother with any of that. He has a different starting place. In animation, ideas start with doodles and you arrive at visually interesting things that way: I can see that Miyazaki was doodling three heads bouncing around, and he then found a way of incorporating them into the story. Miyazaki reminds me that it is always good to plunder the depths of the childlike imagination and in doing so, he helps me get back to where all my work comes from in the first place. Spirited Away has a childlike view of the world, which I think is necessary for people working in animation, and it is very sophisticated. He asks the question: "What if?" That, for me, is where it all starts.

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