Spirited Away 2002
I was glad to see this movie has been released to theaters again. I never had a chance to go see it when it was around last fall, but it got very good reviews. It’s showing at several theaters right now.
I’ve never been a big fan of Japanese animation. The herky-jerky motion and the faces with tiny features just don’t seem very realistic. Spirited Away combines a lot of different types of animation but still has that look. At least the voices are better than you used to get in Speed Racer, Star Blazer, and all the after school cartoons from Japan that followed.
This is very creative and there are some good elements, but it has a hard time distancing itself from Pokemon or Yugi-Oh: a series of monsters put on display not really doing very much.
There’s a good story at the center of Spirited Away as a little girl is separated from her parents and enters a spirit world of various benign monsters. She is befriended right away and that friendship gets her through her ordeal. She earns respect by being nice and trying to help. It’s a worthwhile story and avoids the typical good vs. evil story line of most Disney films. I’ll give them credit for that.
But it’s just a weird movie. There are scenes of vomiting monsters. There are a lot of squishy monsters, most of whom don’t say anything. And there is a very large naked baby (who wears an apron that covers his front, but certainly not his back). There is a bleeding dragon that splatters blood all over the place. There are just a lot of weird things and they tend to go over the line of “different and interesting” to “macabre and gruesome".
If you like this movie, you will probably want to see it over and over again. With repeated viewings I think you could enjoy some of the side aspects and appreciate the characters a little more. People (Roger Ebert in particular, a big anime fan) gushed over the rich animation. There is some nice animation here. Better than a cut-rate Disney movie, but I thought still well short of something like Beauty and the Beast or even Monsters Inc. Certainly it benefits from some of the traditional Japanese elements that are incorporated.
I’ll give it a B for being pretty and different with a good story on the one hand, but grotesque and Pokemon-like on the other.