Spirited away was quite the interesting movie having being the first movie of Miyazaki that I had ever seen. Although I had seen it before, it was many a years ago so watching it again was almost a completely different view for me. A movie about nightmares and the dreams where we get taken so far away. Having the feeling as though we're all alone with no guidance or supervision, pretty freaky. The movie is based on a 10 yr old girl that is immersed into a completely new environment with unfamiliar sights, people, and surroundings. Eventually the story moves on to how the family go into a tunnel and find a ghost town and this is where the main story begins. Miyazaki once again demonstrates his creativity in this movie by the weird things he comes up with. Parents that become pigs, working in a bath house with a spider like boss, and the importance of memory. In addition to that, Miyazaki's typical character change is once again present in this film. Like in Princess Mononoke how Mononoke changes from having a complete hatred towards humans, by the end of the film she is although not completely changed, but at least her hatred is lessened and she's more accepting of humans and their existence. In this movie, Chihiru or Sen once she begins to work as the bathhouse, we see her change from the negative, spoiled, bratty attitude change into a courageous, honest, and very brave person. She works in the bath place slaving for a stink god and for a 10 year old, that's quite the feat. She has to take care of the son of Yubaba which owns the bathhouse she's working at even though the kid is a greedy obnoxious baby. All these changes are something that Miyazaki tends to put into his films. A change of character creating a change of feel for that character. We see something different in the character(s) instead of their first impression on us and we come not to judge them right away anymore and look for what they're going towards or running after.
Along with the type of character development that Miyazaki employs in his films, there's also once again his imagination that we can see is very apparant in the movie. In Spirited Away, there are these interestingly strange, supernatural, and even bizzare things that Chihiru encounters and deals with. The interesting thing about this is that some of them actually look like old japanese relics of mythology that I have seen in videos, documentaries, and things of that sort. Even then, the creatures in this movie are pretty unique. Like the floating mask faced (pretty big face) ghost that becomes friends with Chihiru, the river god dragon, rolling heads that the baby turned into. It seems as though even in the movie, Miyazaki has really brought about transformation of characters to be a fairly predominant level. Chihiru experiencing the life of Sen, which was to her a nightmare she never would have though to go through. For being only a 10 year old girl, she goes through what seems like hell but comes back to tell about it but changes in this process.
3 comments:
I agree that Miyazaki basically tells us to, "not judge a book my its cover." Because every antagonist that he reveals to us, isn't really an antagonist and eventually becomes friendly. Good review.
This film was also the first Miyazaki film I've ever seen. As you said, his creativity and imagination appears so strong, that he has a separate mind of his own when it comes to creating films. The characters he makes are usually out of the ordinary, which creates a good plot to make a great story. I hope you enjoyed this film, as I believe this film was the deepest story that he has created, personally.
I never thought about how she changed. I guess i should have caught that since I've seen the move at least 3 times. I agree with Waylon's comment, now I think about it, all the characters changed.
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