Movies into Film
Spirited Away
Directed by Hayao Miyasaki
Japan/USA, 2002
BATH & WAY BEYOND
Encountering No Face in Spirited Away (Disney)
The longest, most sustained sequence in the animated Japanese film Spirited Away details the taking of a bath by a very dirty creature. The director, Hayao Miyazaki, luxuriates in the build-up to such a seemingly simple action, teasing us with foreboding well before we glimpse an unwashed beast en route to a bathhouse. By the time this seeker of cleanliness (its features encased by goo) plunks into a cavernous oval of water, and as we’ve watched an inexperienced young handmaiden (the movie’s heroine) put through her paces simply to procure a bar of soap, the entire event—utterly superfluous to the film’s central story—has acquired significance out of all proportion to itself.
It’s this fallacy of design that makes Spirited Away a gem. If it were an American movie, the filmmakers would fall all over themselves to rationalize and account for every object of wonder. Miyazaki, as in his earlier film My Neighbor Totoro, skips right over narrative chores and lets the images transmit their own indelible logic.
Slate’s David Edelstein remarked that Spirited Away might be viewed as an allegory of the business world. And it may. Yet you don’t need to theorize to enjoy the erupting cascade of whimsy, vulgarity, and humanity that the picture melds together (it sports some of the best jokes about obnoxious babies since City of Lost Children); Spirited Away works beautifully with no meaning whatsoever.
On the train in Spirited Away (Disney)
For example, we repeatedly spy a passenger train coasting on an open sea, the track submerged by a few inches of water. The bathhouse gardens rest near the edge of a cliff and from the perspective above, the train below clacks off with no land in sight. Later, some of the characters board that train, and seated inside are somber, ghostly commuters of downtrodden middle-class visage. Who are these beings? Where did they come from? Where are they going? Refreshingly, Miyazaki never tells us.
The English-language voiceover of Spirited Away enshrines the absolute high point of Suzanne Pleshette’s less-than-brilliant career. As Yubaba, an evil witch who rules the bathhouse, the former Emily Hartley goes hog-wild in a performance that recalls the off-screen vocal palpitations Mercedes McCambridge supplied for The Exorcist. And I would be remiss not to swoon over the vibrant colors that Miyazaki and his crew of animators bring to flowering life. Early on, the sights of stately pagodas and of a deserted farmers market piled high with food cut straight to the heart of why otherness never loses its charm. – NPT
December 2002
Movies into Film
© N.P. Thompson, 2004
npt [at] moviesintofilm [dot] com