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Spirited Away

Reviewed: March 2003
Rating: (4/5 Squirrels)
Summary: Japanese anime. A young girl is transported into a magical world of incompetence when her idiot parents go through a suspicious tunnel near their new house. Suprisingly (or not) there is a TERRIBAL DISASTAR and the girl, named Chihiro, must defeat the wicked witch of the west so that she may use the enchanted shoes to go home. Or something like that. Rated PG.

Haha, this will be a failure of a review, not only because it's been more than a week since I actually saw the film, but because since I'm not a 'fessional media person I have to steal screenshots from other web sites. Nevertheless.

'Spirited Away' is a film that happens to be 1) a cartoon and 2) japanese. It's rated PG in the US, which has one unfortunate side effect - children come to see it. Now I have nothing against children, I know the human race wouldn't get far without them, but when children come to see a film, the trailers get exponentially worse. No more can you rely on seeing the new X2 trailer or Jennifer Aniston pondering the state of her breasts, instead you get this. "The Lizzie McGuire Movie." Based on the trailer, the pinnacle of comedy on this earth is 16-year-old girls falling over and embarassing themselves. Take a look at the IMDB page for it; read the message boards; find a sharp object; slit your wrists. This review will continue by pretending that 12 year old girls do not exist as a movie-watching demographic. If we could all just play along, I'd be grateful. Thanks.

So, uh, Spirited Away. Since this is a movie about children, it starts off with the typical "omg parents are so stupid!!!1" moments that can really be done without now that they've been done a million billion times in other movies. While on their way to the new house, Chihiro (the star of the movie, who curiously WILL NOT PUT ON HER DAMN SEAT BELT even if this refusal results in her leaving the car via the window) and her parents take a short cut. Cue standard "haha, you are a man, you always get lost, men are such failures" "haha, shut your face you hag" jokes. This is not a promising start, but don't worry, it gets better from here. Chihiro and her parents go through a suspicious wardrobe (sorry, tunnel) and are transported into the land of Narnia (no, a disused fairground). All seems well until the greedy idiot parents eat some food they find lying around and turn into pigs. Suddenly the fairground is full of nightmare things with horrible glowing eyes - oh noes, they have stumbled into a MYSTERIOUS WORLD OF SPOOKY DOOM where NOTHING IS AS IT SEEMS.

Chihiro meets Haku, a young lad with hair issues, who becomes her friend and 'shows her the ropes' of this new land. Many mysterious things are said and done for no clear reason; I'm told these make a lot more sense if you actually know something about japenese mythology. Imagine watching Aladdin without knowing that genies live in lamps and give you three wishes when you release them; while it probably wouldn't spoil your enjoyment of the film, you might be wondering why Robin Williams was painting himself blue and hanging around in caves, and trying to find out exactly what kind of crack the writers had been smoking.

OK, let's not go through the entire plot here. Suffice to say: This is not a typical disney movie (although it is 'done for' in the US by disney). The amount of horrific cuteness is far below the 'eyeball clawing out' level, and when it does intrude it's amusing enough to get away with it. This is not really a film to take children to, certainly not young ones, unless you want them to be having nightmares about the disembodied heads in the closet and No Face under the bed for the next week. (Of course, if you actively want to turn your children into serial killers, this may be the movie for you.) The art is excellent; no doubt I'm missing a million obvious things because I'm not steeped in japanese mythology, but I found it quite disturbing and very enjoyable to watch. One thing that didn't impress me was the animation; it seemed to be standard movie / cartoon fair. The sequences that involved computer-generated scenes were very obvious; the generated stuff moved totally smoothly and was quite flawless, whereas the characters still appeared to flicker on at the usual cartoon 15 frames per second. Note that the animation wasn't bad; I just expect more from something that's otherwise as professional as this. You shouldn't have to do tweening by hand any more, people, so stop using your damn amigas for graphics work and step into the 1980s.

So to summarise: I rate this film 4/5 squirrels. It was a very enjoyable couple of hours, with only a couple of flaws that I've mentioned above. To get 5 stars? Make the animation perfect and change the start of the film so that I don't want to strangle Chihiro's parents with my bare hands... oh yes, and what the hell is with Chihiro's cheekbones? It looks like someone stuck knives into her face just and then beat her with spoons.

Regardless, most enjoyable. Thank you disney for actually releasing this film in normal cinemas; do this sort of thing again in future, kthx~~~

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