Sunday, August 01, 2004

Decided in this hot weather to hide inside with the curtains drawn and the fan on, so watched Spirited Away and thoroughly enjoyed it. I haven't seen a huge amount of anime, just the few bits and bobs that get a 'proper' release here, Akira, Princess Mononoke, Ghost in the Shell and a few others, including the Animatrix of course. The thing I've always noticed about those films is the way time goes off-kilter, long scenes riffing on one idea when a western counterpart would move on worried that they were loosing the interest of the audience, I'm thinking of the scene in Mononoke when that moose-spirit thing (bear with me, it was a while back I saw it and I didn't particularly care for it) got shot and it's body turned into a jelly that was going to take over the wood, or something. We then get about twenty minutes or so of very little plot going on while it expands everywhere. Compare that to the generally breathless pace of The Matrix from "whoah, deja vu" until pretty much the end of the film.

Anyway, Spirited Away looked like it was going to be like that as I put the disc in the machine and saw it was a minute shy of two hours. But it is pretty solid in story development, no artistic posing at all. I must admit I watched the English version, I was tired and didn't want to squint at subtitles.

Moving with her parents to the suburbs Chihiro is rather annoyed when they insist on exploring a deserted theme park near their new home. However, when the parents get turned into pigs she has to get a job working at a bathhouse for spirits and otherwordly creatures until she can work out some way to defeat the malevolent owner Yubaba and restore her parents.

The thing I thought while watching was that if they were ever going to make an animated version of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman then they should get these folks to make it. The bathhouse full of spirits, some of who look suspiciously like the bastard elder siblings of certain Pokemon characters, seems a stylistic echo of Morpheus' castle of odd dreams and nightmares, while the story is classic Alice in Wonderland or, to evoke Gaiman again, Coraline. The film constantly wrongfoots your expectations about what it's going to be, haunted house, The Water Babies, fighting evil outsiders... In a way the 'real' central and important plot of the story doesn't really start until at least two-thirds of the way through, but if at any point you feel bored then you're probably an evil soulless being and/or Alistair Campbell. This is one of those films that get described as 'enchanting' but is fun for all the family.

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