BIG'S BIG MOVIE LIST

     I always have been and always will be a big fan of animation in pretty much any form. Merry Melodies was a regular part of my day-to-day as a youth and along with Hanna Barbara, Nickelodeon and pretty much any other animation studio that I could get my peepers on, a love affair was formed that continues even today, as I continue my decade-long relationship with the Adult Swim network and their bevy of cartoons. Disney rounded out my animation experience by bringing fairy tales and epics to life with their incredibly detailed and aesthetically brilliant catalog.

 

     The only area I have ever been slightly gunshy with has been the anime genre, a Japanese style of art and animation that has seen steady popularity in the states for years. While anime at its best is awe-inspiring, something about it—perhaps a cultural component-- never truly made me incorporate it into my animation menagerie. On occasion, however, a film like Miyazaki's “Spirited Away” comes along to tug on my sleeve and say “you really owe it to yourself to see this”

 

      Spirited Away is a whimsical step into another world where breathtaking art and anthropomorphic animals abound. Our main character, Chihiro, is a young girl in the throes of melancholy as her family arrives at their new home in the Japenese country. A wrong turn brings the family of three to an apparently abandoned theme park (many theme parks rose and fell in the 90's in Japan, as their economy took a downturn near 2000) When her parents find a restaurant full of delicious food and no staff, they tuck in with the intention of paying later. Chihiro refuses and wanders off, meeting a boy Haku who tells her she is in danger. When she returns to her parents, they have eaten everything in sight and have been transformed into pigs! As the sun goes down, the theme park begins to come to life and Chihiro finds herself trapped in a town inhabited by spirits, gods, and talking frogs. Chihiro must find work in this new world, rescue her parents from becoming someone's meal, and find a way to return to the real world.

 

     At first glance, this film seemed to me to be a children's fairy tale, possibly an adaptation of an old Japanese bedtime story or a fable. Some elements and scenes of the film seemed oddly specific but devoid of greater meaning. This led me to think that this otherwise gorgeously animated film was “more sizzle than steak”, providing pleasant things to look at but little in the way of content. After revisiting a few key scenes and reading up online, I found that I was way off base. The story has the feel of a fairy tale, yes, but at its core its a metaphor for coming of age, as our young protagonist is thrust into a new world that she is not prepared for, all the while learning and maturing into a young woman so subtly that I didn't even notice it at first. The bathhouse Chihiro starts working at is also a greater metaphor for the ills of society and Japan's then struggling economy.

 

     Aside from what I felt was a “rushed” denouement, this film really is pretty incredible. It really cannot be overstated how beautiful the animation is, between hand-painted backgrounds depicting a dream-like wonderland to the intricate wrinkles and emotion of a character's face to the level of detail applied to liquids and fluid dynamics, you can tell the animators slaved over this film and probably loved every minute of it. Miyazaki makes every effort to fill the story and the screen with life, adding and emphasizing many things that have little to do with the overall story, but give the world within the story much greater depth. This comes at the cost of pacing, as the story slows down to show the audience all of the painstakingly crafted environments and creatures conjured for the film, but it is a worthwhile cost to pay. Where most animated films attempt to limit the amount of superfluous animation, Ghibili (the animation studio behind Spirited Away) went the opposite direction, and the end result is a work of art that is almost universally adored