Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away” was one of this week’s choices from Netflix and it was great. Netflix gives it a rating for kids over 10 because of some scary moments. I sat to watch it with H.o.p., waited for the supposedly scary moments but there weren’t any that weren’t well-cushioned and were worked seamlessly into this beautiful fantasy. It’s been compared to “Alice in Wonderland” but it has far more in common with Japanese writers such as Haruki Murakami. Like a lightweight child’s version of Haruki.
The tale concerns a 10 year old girl whose family is moving. Uprooted from the familiar, she is apprehensive. On their way to the new neighborhood, she and her parents come upon what her father says must be an old abandoned theme park and via it our protagonist is transported into a surreal world where she is placed at risk of losing her identity, and in order to escape she must undergo a series of fantastic adventures circulating around a bath house where the spirits of things come at night to be refreshed. During the course of those adventures she does a good bit of growing up through the lengths to which she’ll go to help those she loves. In so doing she also ends up assisting a giant, tyrannical baby to progress outside its nursery, and helps tame the voracious appetite of No Face, a lonely monster that befriends her, becomes also tyrannical but is whittled back down to manageable size. And all somehow accomplished with very little judgment taking place on these “monsters”. Chihiro (the heroine) is too involved in her mission to judge. The monsters follow her along and attempt to thwart her from her tasks in their bid for her attention–and while in most films you would have the protagonist doing battle with these symbolic spirits, little Chihiro instead not only permits them to accompany her but treats them with compassion, simply not allowing them to interrupt her mission. In a Disneyesque fairy tale they would radically change aspect, but in “Sprited Away” these spirits are what they are and are just reformed to live in moderation, not allowed to take over the run of the bath house, and even some helpful qualities discovered along the way.
What a wonderful story for a child. And the animation is both breath-taking and as entertaining and amusing as any I’ve ever seen.
H.o.p. and I watched it twice through and he fell in love with it. He wants to keep it and I’ll buy him a copy, it’s an essential. Marty occasionally wandered through before going down to the studio and I said don’t watch, don’t watch, you have to see it from the beginning.
H.o.p. and I ended up discussing the film most of the day as he kept asking questions about it.
Earlier, I had been doing some reading of different books on Auschwitz, trying to decide which couple to at least pick up from the library. Only a movie as good as “Spirited Away” could cut through those horrors and restore a little light.
One of the books I’m interested in reading is “We Wept Without Tears: Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz” by Gideon Greif.
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