Many seductions of ‘Spirited Away’

Trippy, surreal animation flick offers marvels


Chihiro in Hayao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away"

By David Elliot
SPECIAL TO MSNBC.COM

  
     
  Oct. 3, 2002—  There is a force of visual rapture in “Spirited Away.” Kids can gape, but you can also feel some adults in the audience going into giddy sync, as if tapping into their childhoods — or nostalgic feelings for childhood dreams that now get a heightened playback.

       MAINSTREAM AMERICAN ANIMATIONS are often so tightly bound to generically rigid plot schemes that the innate fluency of cartooning curdles. Hayao Miyazaki, who made this movie, goes in the other way — his story of a girl unsettled by moving to a new home, who stops near the sea with her parents and is swept off into an island fantasy world, is all flux and froth and freedom.
        Miyazaki pays a price. The film is so fanciful, it bubbles into a kind of “anything goes” domain of make-belief. But it’s a tsunami of visual seductions, and few viewers will worry that the story is nearly shapeless.
        He combines elements from his past hits, like the “dust bunnies” of “My Neighbor Totoro” and the terrifying wolves of “Princess Mononoke,” hurling them changed into a catalog of new inventions. At the center is a huge, sea-bound bathhouse that is like a Japanese fort, temple and factory climbing toward never-never land.
       
SUSPENDS REALITY
       The heroine, Chihiro, sees her parents, who become gluttonous at a surprise feast, transform into pigs.

       She moves like Lewis Carroll’s Alice through the huge structure and finds all sorts of amazing inhabitants: bugs who haul coal to a furnace, a monstrous sumo-like baby hidden under pillows, a warty granny who rules the place like a queen witch, a hero boy who transforms into a sea serpent pursued by flying fish who flutter into paper cutouts, and so on.
      It’s the trippy surreal, a top-this suspension of reality. Miyazaki’s cartoon team elaborates its familiar marvels of texture and wind and water, with aquamarine depths and vertigo perspectives, and (most beautiful) an old-time train that streamlines on watery rails. They can make you forgive and even enjoy the cornball humor, blandly Eurasian facial types and some Americanized voice-overs (what Japanese child would ever call her parents “you guys”?).

David Elliot is the movie critic of The San Diego Union-Tribune. © 2002 by the Copley News Service.

  
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