Love affairs, like many things, are subject to the laws of time and change. So I’m still a little blown away by the fact that I’m still blown away by a Japanese animation film on which I once bestowed six stars out of five. It was love at first sight. It still is love, on umpteenth sight.
Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away is 20 years old. I met it when it had its European premiere at the 2001 Berlin Film Festival, winning the Golden Bear for Best Film. Some months later it won the Best Animated Feature Oscar. Is it the best film I’ve ever seen? Quite possibly. Certainly the best animation film. Yes, I’d want it on a desert island. Yes, my life would be poorer without it. And I never, during 46 years as a practising movie reviewer, bestowed that 6/5 rating on anything else; or even thought to.
“What’s it about?” someone asked me the other day. Simple answer: “Everything.” It’s about childhood, growing up, life-changing events, wisdom, love, and good and evil. And more.
Mostly, the film is an explosion of artistic and storytelling invention, so rich in style and mercurial in mood-changes that we might call it Shakespearean. I’ll invoke other names as we go. Miyazaki may not have been “influenced” by them. But some works of imagination grow so big that they expand into, and seem to overlap or feed off, other authorial universes.
The film is partly about omnivorous realms and passions. Plot set-up: a little girl, Chihiro, strays with her parents into an abandoned theme park that contains a fully functioning bathhouse for the gods. The family has got lost looking for its new house in a new town.
The most scene-stealing of the gods seeking a wash are two all-eating monsters, the Stink God and the protean, poignant No Face. The second we’ll come to. The first is there to splurge us, in a Rabelaisian cameo, with Miyazaki’s environmental evangelism. Vast, grey-brown and squelchy, this god has eaten everything imaginable and vomits it forth, during his emetic cleansing, in a tsunami of old bicycles, scrap metal, household objects, rubbish . . .
You are what you eat. You pig out at your peril. Chihiro’s own parents, in the film’s first frightening-funny plot turn, become pigs after gorging at a mystery free-food stall — a reeking, all-meat smorgasbord — in the theme park. Tumbled into nightmare, Chihiro must now find work in the bathhouse to survive; not financially but spiritually. Meaning: in order to re-find herself and her real or new identity.
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She is befriended by Haku, a one-time river god who trebles as a flying dragon and worker prince. Confused? Get prepared to be. Multiple identities are key. Think The Magic Flute gone anime. The protagonist must battle her confusion and perplexity to understand who is who, who is good and who is bad, and what lies at the core of everyone she meets. Including herself.
Meet the other main characters who are multi-charactered. Yubaba is the sorceress who rules the bathhouse with an iron fist, big hairstyle and blue frock (Maggie Thatcher gone grand guignol). She has an identical, slightly kinder twin sister Zeniba. Then there is No Face, the kabuki-masked ghost who can gobble victims, assume their personalities for a short time, then spit them out, still living, to resume his normal, placid self.
Spirited Away is a story of education. “Look, there’s your new school,” says Chihiro’s mother in the first scene, as they drive through the town. It isn’t her school, of course. Or not yet. Her school will be this theme park, mouldering with history and heritage; and this Babel-sized sauna for the gods engendering questions of life, death and the beyond. (Some interpreters of Miyazaki’s movie hazard that it’s set in the afterlife.)
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Even Chihiro is multi-faceted. Fast-tracked into growing up by an emotional orphaning — pig parents being for this plot’s purposes non-parents — she then has her name stolen by Yubaba, one of this gorgon’s controlling ruses. Chihiro can be by turns bewildered, terrified, grief-stricken, hopeful, despairing, manic, determined, defiant. She’s a hugely appealing, intricately imagined heroine.
It’s not just the themes and characters in Miyazaki’s film that give it dynamism and enchantment. The form matches the content — a form so free-form that it flirts with the hyperbolic, sometimes the hilarious.
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The bathhouse is uproariously labyrinthine and many-dimensioned. (It’s Kafka’s “Castle” morphing into a manga version of Dante’s Hell.) The dramatis personae is bulgingly multitudinous. Transformation scenes tumble over each other. And farcical sequences of the overblown gods abluting themselves are intercut with tableaux of near-silent, lyrical poignancy like Chihiro taking her evening snack on a balcony overlooking the colossal plain far below. It’s a moment — just a minute or two — exquisite with twilight melancholy.
In the nearly-final sequence, that plain is entirely flooded. Our heroine train-rides across the eerie desert of water — we could be in a de Chirico painting gone Japanese — accompanied by a No Face more still and more eloquently gnomic than ever.
I won’t tell you her mission. Let’s just say that it resolves the story. And simultaneously it dissolves that story’s discords, vindicating or validating its embattled deliriums of style and invention, to discover the harmony that was there, like a dormant salvation, all along.
What has Spirited Away left us as a legacy in cinema? It may be that feisty, game-changing young heroines, operating in mystical, mythical or magical worlds, were a gleam in the eye of the coming epoch anyway. They were certainly given birth to, or given memorable life, in the hyper-popular Japanese animes The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006) and Your Name (2016).
And invented worlds reeling with visual invention? They haven’t been in short supply either in the past 20 years of fantasy-action cinema, from Tokyo or from Hollywood. It’s just that no inventor – I’d contend - has equalled the poetry, the wit, the controlling vision, the sometimes sheer heart-stopping beauty of Spirited Away.
Maybe Miyazaki’s masterpiece is better seen as a movie to crown his own career than to coronate future film-makers. He never followed it with a better movie himself, though there are marvels in Howl’s Moving Castle and even in Ponyo and The Wind Rises. But then Welles never surpassed Citizen Kane, nor Hitchcock Vertigo. What’s to say? Spirited Away is the great treasure of 21st-century animation, and we may still be saying that when the 21st century ends.
A 20th-anniversary collector’s edition DVD and Blu-ray box set is released on September 27