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In Praise of…. Spirited Away

I cry.  Every time.  I just do.  Sorry.  It takes a lot to make me cry; traditionally my only three triggers are the lunar landings (because: man on the moon!), the fall of the Berlin Wall (seriously!!) and, yes, the Lion King.

But Spirited Away makes me cry too.  In a good way.

For anyone unsure, it’s a film by the Japanese studio Ghibli, which I want to call a cartoon, were it not that ‘cartoon’ in my culture usually implies anthropomorphic cats, space ships, things going boom!  Well – no.  It used to imply that.  This was in the days before Pixar came along, and we all wept buckets during the first ten minutes of Up, when animated characters took us through a journey of love-life-death in almost total, stunning silence.  It was before Wall-E and wonderful bits of subversive fun like The Incredibles which still is, to my mind, one of the greatest superhero films ever made.

Before THEM, however, way way back in 2001, was Spirited Away, the absolutely stunning story of a girl who wanders by accident into a mystical, bewildering world of Japanese spirits and gods.  Trapped in a giant, magical bathhouse where the gods come to relax, her parents transformed into pigs and her only hope of salvation lying in courage and compassion for others, Chihiro, the heroine of Spirited Away is, I’d argue, one of the greatest heroes of cinema.  She conquers adversity, not through martial skill or even much in the way of cunning, but by bravery and respect for others.  Witness the could-be-terrifying No Face, a god without any real identity which takes on the aspects of the people around it.  In the bathhouse, this creature is first generous, because Chihiro is generous to it.  Then its generosity turns into greed and gluttony in the face of the world around it, and it is only through Chihiro’s fearlessness and kindness that the situation is salvaged.

At first it seems like this character could wander into damsel-in-distress tropes; certainly at the start of her story she needs help from a mysterious-boy who (spoiler) could well be a dragon.  But by the end, it’s Chihiro who saves the boy, and then – even better – walks away from him and his world.  Boys are not required to validate her happy ending.

Even leaving aside this wonderful character and her transformation from terrified-and-trapped to totally-awesome, the film is just beautiful to look at.  From the grandeur of the giant bathhouse to the strangeness of the gods which materialise out of shadow from a ferry into figures both beautiful and grotesque; to the battle of dragon vs. paper angels through to one of the most beautiful parts of all, in my mind – a train journey through an endless ocean of shadows and ghost-stations.  Spirited Away is just lovely to look at.

Lastly!  As if all of this wasn’t enough for you to go see, the film even slips in a political consciousness.  There is a great deal about the aesthetic that is richly Japanese, but the issues of environmentalism and consumerism that bubble up like mud from a slime god (more sorta-spoiler!) are global and oddly poignant as they’re seen through Chihiro’s eyes, and through the prism of this frightening, beautiful, magical world.

I never dare say ‘this is my favourite movie’ because my tastes fluctate wildly depending on whether I need cheering up, calming down, want a story, a thriller, a chase, a heart-break, a heart-warm – whatever.  But within that strange, intangible land that is ever-changing taste, Spirited Away remains one of my favourite films through the years, and across my particular moods.