It occurs to me, as I move through the Stacker list, that the non-English films most represented here may be Japanese. Most of that comes from the work of director Akira Kurosawa, and he has one film left on the countdown. But then there’s the work of animator Hayao Miyazaki, a man whose work is celebrated just as much as Kurosawa’s. Miyazaki, probably the best known of the founders of Studio Ghibli, is known for his often engaging stories involving themes like pacifism and environmentalism, often with female protagonists. So, it makes sense that his representation here is with Spirited Away, an altogether delightful experience that I have seen more than once compared to The Wizard of Oz.
Why The Wizard of Oz, perhaps the greatest live action family film ever made, is not on the Stacker list, I have no idea. But I’ll take Spirited Away as a more-than-worthy substitute.
The film opens with a very upset young girl, Chihiro (voiced, in the English dub I watched, by Daveigh Chase), moving to a new town with her parents. Her parents are, in many ways, rather typical parents who seem to think she’s overreacting and they can take care of what they need to. Now, before we get too far, I will admit right here and now that I am not overly knowledgeable about modern Japanese culture or Shintoism, but I would say there does appear to be a strong influence of the latter on the film while the former is probably present in how Chihiro’s parents see some obviously suspicious stuff, driving off the road as they do en route to their new house, finding a wall with a single opening behind an ominous statue in the middle of the woods, and after discovering what they assume is an abandoned amusement park, sitting down to eat a whole lot of food left seemingly unattended at a stall. Chihiro finds the whole place scary and wrong, while her parents keep insisting they can and will pay for the food when someone shows up to ask for payment as her father has both cash and credit cards.
But it turns out this is food for spirits, and Chihiro’s parents turn into pigs. Chihiro, by refusing to eat, is still human. From here, it becomes something of a chore for her to stay that way.
By the by, Chase’s voice role here is not her only work with Americanized translations of a Japanese film as she was also the terrifying ghost girl in the American remake of The Ring.
Regardless, as night falls and the spirits come out to do what they do, Chihiro finds herself stuck where she is and might even fade from existence were it not for one spirit that looks sometimes like a white dragon and sometimes like a boy roughly her age. This is Haku (Jason Marsden), and much of the film revolves around the power of love that Chihiro and Haku have for each other. What sort of love is never actually defined, but there’s love there. I’m not sure I would qualify it as romantic either way, only that Chihiro, before the film is over, will free Haku from a spell the witch Yubaba (Suzanne Pleshette) cast on him while he will show her how to survive in the spirit world she’s trapped in where many spirits and gods seem to outright fear her at first.
That survival, both from a visual and storytelling perspective, is where I found the film shines the most. Whether it’s Yubaba or her identical twin sister Zeniba, also voiced by Pleshette, zipping through the air at high speeds with their MODOK-esque physiques or the odd No-Face (Bob Bergen) and his gluttonous transformation, or just the stream of garbage that Chihiro, renamed “Sen” by Yubaba when she “takes” the girl’s name, manages to pull from a polluted river spirit, there are a lot of visual delights and touches. As for the story, it’s one that is in many ways as old as time, but it is still used because it works: Chihiro has to grow up and find some courage.
It’s an obvious path, but it’s a good one. Chihiro starts the film afraid of everything, but she’s the one who has to treat the polluted river god. She’s the one who has to reach a magical treatment down Haku’s throat when he, in his dragon form, is severely injured trying to steal something valuable from Zeniba on behalf of Yubaba. She’s the one who has to demand a job from first the multi-armed Kamaji (David Ogden Stiers) in the boiler room and then from Yubaba, a witch she’s been told is more likely to turn her into an animal as anything else. And it’s she who has to take a spirit train with only No-Face, a chubby mouse that was once Yubaba’s giant baby, and bird turned into a fly for company as she goes to return something to Zeniba, and the only other time she even saw Zeniba was when she changed Yubaba’s bird and baby into their other forms.
Funnily enough, Zeniba’s spell was only temporary, and the baby and the bird could have changed back earlier but chose not to. That’s actually an interesting point to be made here: I have a hard time pointing to any of the cast as truly evil. Yubaba comes closest, but when the film is over, she seems to be all bark and no bite. Yes, she does turn Chihiro’s parents into pigs, but they were acting like pigs when it happened. Yes, she sets a test for Chihiro to pass to get her parents turned back, but the girl passes it easily enough, and Yubaba doesn’t seem to be that put off when Chihiro calls her “Granny,” something that Zeniba had personally requested. The spirits were more afraid of Chihiro when she first arrived than anything else, and even the grumpy ones like Kamaji seem to come around to seeing her as a friend or someone to look out for. For example, Kamaji during his first meeting with Chihiro is largely dismissive, telling her to get lost and let his soot-spirits do all the work, but by the end, he’s cheering along with everyone else when she gets to go home. No-Face seems to learn moderation because Chihiro is the only one who seems to be willing to listen to him (even though he doesn’t really speak). Even Yubaba’s giant Baby Huey-esque child Boh (Tara Strong) seems to prefer Chihiro’s company over his own mother’s, though Chihiro is the one who actually took Boh outside the nursery. The frightened-of-everything Chihiro probably wouldn’t have pulled the garbage out of the river spirit, but then again, she was also the only one tending to the being in the first place.
It is perhaps appropriate that Chihiro not only remembers her prior association with Haku, but that the film ends with her going, not to somewhere familiar, but to a new house she has never seen before with her parents, neither of whom remember anything that happened. Part of the point of Spirited Away is to show some courage when going to new places, meeting new people, and having new experiences. Chihiro just had to spend time in the spirit world to be able to do that.
NEXT: Spirited Away uses a bit of the Japanese concept of Ma, which relates to open spaces. The next film has a lot of open spaces, but that’s what happens in the desert as I move on to 1962’s Lawrence of Arabia.
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