Liz and I went to see Spirited Away, the story of a girl who finds herself in the spirit realm and must rescue her parents. What an amazing film. I'd only seen one of Hayao Miyazaki's movies before, Princess Mononoke. Like Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away is gorgeously drawn, with images that are beautiful and haunting (and, when necessary, terrifying). But while Mononoke was an epic, Hayao Miyazaki's latest is a true fairy tale, and that is high praise.

The story of Spirited Away is similar to The Wizard of Oz: an ordinary girl is transported to a magic realm, and must rely on the brains, heart, and courage that she didn't know she had, in order to get home. Chihiro shares some of Dorothy's spirit, but the rich and strange realm she enters is more like Alice in Wonderland -- a dream world with its own logic that must be obeyed, but which makes perfect sense taken on its own terms. (I was also reminded of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts -- the novel, not the Byrne / Eno album -- although Tutola's spirit world seems much more threatening). Like Dogdson writing his stories to amuse Alice Liddell (and her sisters), Miyazaki has made a movie for his "young friends":

I have five young female friends who are about the same age as Hiiragi-san [Hiiragi Rumi, the 13-year-old voice actress of Chihiro] and I spend every summer with them at my mountain cabin. I wanted to make a movie they could enjoy. That is why I started this film, and that is my true purpose. I felt this country [Japan, I take it] only offered such things as crushes and romance to 10-year-old girls, though, and looking at my young friends, I felt this was not what they held dear in their hearts, not what they wanted. And so I wondered if I could make a movie in which they could be heroines.

(Full interview here.)

The wonderful thing about Spirited Away (and it's a film full of wonders) is that Chiriho is an ordinary girl. She doesn't wake up one morning to discover she's got superpowers, or that she's really a wizard, or that she's really the key to the fate of the universe.

Until now, I made "I wish there was such a person" leading characters. This time, however, I created a heroine who is an ordinary girl, someone with whom the audience can sympathize, someone about whom they can say, "Yes, it's like that." It's very important to make it plain and unexaggerated. Starting with that, it's not a story in which the characters grow up, but a story in which they draw on something already inside them.

One of the most interesting things about Princess Mononoke was that it refused to have any villains. Characters did good and bad things, but for reasons more complex than their being "good" or "evil". Miyazaki does the same with Spirited Away. Like Chihiro (and Ashitaka in Mononoke), the audience must learn to "see with eyes unclouded by hate," to see both good and bad:

This film is an adventure story, although the characters neither swing weapons around, nor use supernatural powers in battle. It is an adventure story, but its theme is not a confrontation between good and evil. It will be a story of a girl who was thrown into a world where both good and evil exist. She gets trained, learns about friendship and devotion, and survives by using her wisdom. She finds her way out, dodges, and comes back to her old daily life for the time being. However, it is not because evil was destroyed -- just as the world does not disappear, (evil does not disappear). It is because she gained the power to live.

(Full interview here.)

I don't know enough about Japanese culture to say that it's generally opposed to our Manichean, good-versus-evil worldview. But at a time when our leaders clearly have this way of looking at the world, its refreshing to see a story that shows things can be more complicated than that, and that wisdom is more important than righteousness. If you have the chance, go see this extraordinary film.

M E-L posted this on October 22, 2002 10:50 AM

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