Spirited Away (LOST IN THE MOVIES podcast #13)

The whimsical, sometimes unnerving but still soothing mood of Spirited Away feels like a good way to kick off 2021 as my podcast returns from its holiday break...plus it was Hayao Miyazaki's eightieth birthday last week. With the Ethan Hawke series over, I will now be discussing random films every couple weeks, with Lost in the Movies continuing to be interspersed with Twin Peaks Cinema and Left of the Movies entries every three months; the details are discussed on this episode. In the fall I will take a new approach, beginning to open up Lost in Twin Peaks on a daily/weekly basis (the long patron episodes will be divided up into more bite-size segments) and spinning Twin Peaks Cinema and Left of the Movies into their own monthly feeds. I also hope to start covering a new release every month, and I already have a theme in mind for the non-new release Lost in the Movies episodes throughout 2022 (think of which film celebrates its forty-fifth anniversary that year for a clue - no, not Eraserhead, although I do plan to release an episode on that '77 classic this year). As for Miyazaki's masterpiece, this is a shorter review than usual - a light meditation on the themes and atmosphere of the movie (another review, based on my first-time viewing, is linked below). I hope this encourages you to send in your own thoughts on Spirited Away, so that I can share them in future episodes.

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LINKS FOR EPISODE 12

Spirited Away (2008 essay), by Joel Bocko (Lost in the Movies)

MY RECENT WORK

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A Tale of Two Expectations: visual tribute to Great Expectations & images from a return to Twin Peaks (1 of 2): The In-Between Years and a Detour into Lynchland

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Episode 74: Twin Peaks cinema - Rashomon (+ Twin Peaks Reflections: Leland, Albert, Donna, Twin Peaks and Deer Meadow sheriff's stations, The One-Armed Man/Season 3 Part 17 & more)

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Lost in Twin Peaks #23: S2E15 (Slaves and Masters/"Episode 22") & Lost in Twin Peaks #24: S2E16 (The Condemned Woman/"Episode 23"), Part 1 & Part 2

Spirited Away

A little girl lies in the backseat of the family car, fidgety and irritable. It's moving day and she doesn't want a new home, or a new school. When her parents stop to explore an odd tunnel in the neighborhood she frightens easily and asks them to turn around. She is no precocious adventurer, and this is not director Hiyao Miyazaki's earlier animated opus My Neighbor Totoro in which imaginative youngsters bring magic and excitement to everyday life. No, this film is Spirited Away and Miyazaki has something more intense and even more fantastical than Totoro in mind. And to make it work, he introduces Chihiro, his 10-year-old heroine as a somewhat irritable brat, whose own father calls her a "scaredy-cat." Suspicions that the oncoming fantasy of Spirited Away will be a mere dream of Chihiro's are quickly dashed, and we get something grander instead, a world much larger and more frightening than Chihiro can handle at first, but one which she will adapt to and eventually flourish in.

If the film sounds preachy or its coming-of-age arc conventional, don't worry. Chihiro's growth is achieved subtly without overt message-mongering, but even if it wasn't, the film is so full to the brim of whimsical, magical invention that it would hardly matter. The world of the film is a huge sauna devoted to the rejuvenation of spirits, real, personified - if that's the right word - spirits that is. They include leaping, chirping big yellow birds, greedy little frogs that get zapped and frozen in the air when someone needs to make an escape, and a shy-seeming black cipher with a mask who turns into a devouring demon. Staffing the sauna are a variety of lumpen forest critters, a foreman with eight arms (whose employees are enchanted, and surprisingly lovable, dust bunnies), and a woman with a head two or three times the size of the rest of the body (she looks like a Pez dispenser pounded flat). Words fail but the images speak for themselves -- see the movie and be awed. And I didn't even mention the "Radish Monster" who doesn't look like a radish but seems to weigh about seventy tons. His huge girth and hapless expression (unblinking eyes and ever-gaping maw) make the scene in which he pins Chihiro in an elevator hilariously uncomfortable.