Love stories, like many things, are subject to the laws of time and change. So I'm still a little mystified to this day that I'm still mystified by a Japanese animated film I once gave six out of five stars. It was love at first sight. It's still love, at the umpteenth sight.
La città incantata (Spirited Away) by Hayao Miyazaki is 20 years old. I met him at the 2001 Berlin Film Festival, where he won the Golden Bear for best film. A few months later it won the Oscar for best animated film.
Is it the best movie I've ever seen? Most likely. Definitely the best animated film. Yes, I would like it on a desert island. Yes, my life would be poorer without it. And I've never, in 46 years of film reviewing, given that 6 out of 5 rating to anything else; nor have I ever thought of doing so.
THE WHOLE
“What is it about?” I was asked the other day. Simple answer: “Everything”. It talks about childhood, growing up, life changing events, wisdom, love, good and evil. And more.
Above all, the film is an explosion of artistic invention and fiction, so rich in style and so mercurial in mood swings that it could be described as Shakespearean. Miyazaki, however, may not have been "influenced". But some works of the imagination grow to such an extent that they expand beyond measure that they seem to overlap or feed on other authorial universes.
The film is about kingdoms, spirits and omnivorous passions. A little girl, Chihiro, gets lost with her parents in a fully functional abandoned theme park with a large public bath complex called Aburaya. The family got lost there looking for a new home in a new city.
Among the spirits that roam the bathroom, the most spectacular are two omnivorous monsters, the stinking monster and the protean and tormenting No-face. We will come to the second shortly. The first is there to make us aware, in a Rabelaisian cameo, of Miyazaki's environmental evangelism.
YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT
Vast, grey-brown and drab, this monster has eaten everything imaginable and vomits it up, during its emetic cleansing, in a tsunami of old bicycles, scrap metal, household items, garbage…
You are what you eat. You binge at your peril. Chihiro's own parents, in the film's first scary and funny twist, have become pigs after gobbling themselves at the theme park at a mysterious free food stall.
Plunged into the nightmare, Chihiro must now find work in the public bath to survive; not financially but spiritually. That is: to find herself and her true or new identity.
He befriends Haku, a river spirit who transforms into a flying dragon and a worker prince. Confused? Prepare to be. Multiple identities are the key to the film.
Think about Il flauto magico in anime version. The protagonist must fight her own confusion and perplexities to understand who is who, who is good and who is bad and what is the basis of everyone she meets. Including herself.
LTO MULTIFORMITY
The other main characters are multi-characterized. Yubaba is the sorceress who rules the bathroom with an iron fist, with a big hairdo and blue dress (Maggie Thatcher in version big puppet). She has an identical, slightly kinder twin sister, Zeniba.
Then there's No-Face, the kabuki-masked ghost who can swallow his victims, take on their personalities for a short time, then spit them out, still alive, to immediately resume his normal, placid appearance.
La città incantata it's a coming of age story. “Look, here's your new school,” Chihiro's mother says in the first scene, as they drive across town. It's not her school, of course. Or not yet.
His school will be the stale theme park and that biblical-sized sauna inhabited by spirits that raise questions about life, death, and the afterlife. (Some interpreters venture the hypothesis that Miyazaki's film is set in the afterlife).
THE FACETS
Chihiro is also multifaceted. Accelerated in growth by an emotional orphanage, she then has her name stolen by Yubaba. Chihiro can alternately be baffled, terrified, pained, hopeful, desperate, obsessive, determined, defiant. She is an enormously attractive, intricately imagined heroine.
It's not just the themes and characters in Miyazaki's film that give it dynamism and charm. The form corresponds to the content, it is such a free form that it borders on the hyperbolic, sometimes on the exhilarating.
THE LEGACY OF SPIRITED AWAY
What did he leave Spirited Away in legacy to the cinema? It may be that the feisty and revolutionary young heroines, frolicking in mystical, mythical or magical worlds, were nonetheless a gleam in the eye of the age to come. They've certainly been thought of, or given memorable life, in hyper-popular anime like The girl who jumped in time (2006) and Your Name (2016)
What about the invented worlds that rack their brains with visual invention? There has been no shortage of fantasy-action cinema in the last 20 years either, from Tokyo or Hollywood. It's just that no inventor, I argue, has equaled the poetry, wit, vision control, sometimes heartbreaking beauty of Spirited Away.
Perhaps Miyazaki's masterpiece is best interpreted as a film that crowns his career rather than crowning future directors. He himself has never done a better one, although there are such wonders Howl's Moving Castle (Howl's moving castle), Ponyo and Si raise the wind (The Wind Rises).
But Welles never got over it Fourth power (Citizen Kane), nor Hitchcock The woman who lived twice (Vertigo).
Spirited Away è the great treasure of XNUMXst century animation, and maybe we will say it again when the XNUMXst century ends.
Article taken from: Nigel Andrews, Still blown away by Spirited Away, “The Financial Times”, 21 September 2021
