Anniversary Film Club, Sept 2017: Spirited Away

People talk about Jihiro/Sen as the hero of the movie, but we all know the true protagonist is the Radish Spirit right

So excited to rewatch this for film club! I'm gonna try and watch it with Iffy this weekend.

Is this a good place to start a holy war where us righteous subtitle people burn the English-dub infidels?

I don't understand why Chihiro's father drives like such a lunatic at the beginning. Is he supposed to be possessed already?

I understand that on some level it's about innocence and corruption, even though Chihiro may not fully understand all the implications of a bath house (though I maintain that the Radish Spirit is really just there for a bath). Also I think the environmental themes tie into this--rivers getting polluted, just as some of the adults get polluted e.g. her parents taking food that was not theirs to take. Sen is a hero because she isn't yet polluted by, say, greed for No-Face's (fake) gold. It's a romantic view of the nobility of children, but though romantic there's some truth to it--we all know when we're slipping; we know what we should be doing. Some people are more tuned into that inner voice ("Stay the course, billy--you're doing SUPER").

Beyond the morals of the story, though, are some fascinating characters. I LOVE Kumaji the boiler man, savouring newts and mixing impossibly obscure bath herbs. I want to know more about him, even though I know it's unnecessary and would interfere with the pace. We have to make do with what we have on the Daikon Spirit and Kumaji.

Oh I'm not one of those people who say that the movie is all about prostitution or child sex slavery. I still think there are undertones of sex--it's a place where the spirits pay for pleasure.  It's not all or nothing.  

Maybe parents driving like maniacs with their mouths open in a silent scream is supposed to be funny.

Rewatched this last night and paid particularly close attention to the radish spirit this time around. @billy I think the radish spirit might also be a shareholder or somehow involved in running the place—he’s hanging around the background for the whole movie and seems familiar with all the different levels—maybe he’s a favored regular?

The Dissolve had a couple of articles on Spirited Away a while back—here’s what I said back then:

I’d also note the sort of fairy-tale logic: Yubaba has to employ Chihiro and it’s like, “Oh, no big deal, that’s just the way this world is.” Big baby? NBD. Hungry guy with no identity? NBD. Really, the fact that Lin—who’s a great character, and a bit of an audience surrogate if you start out a bit annoyed at Chihiro (I can’t imagine watching this in at Chihiro’s age school because in some ways really too close to the sort of girl that annoyed me then, though now I really like the naturalism—the extra-girly running, for instance—and find her pretty understandable/empathetic)—is almost human seems to stick out.

Other vintage J-LL remarks:

I’d also add that fact that the soots immediately try to take advantage of Chihiro is a nice, subtle hint that the bathhouse isn’t the most welcoming place to work, even if you aren’t a human.



On the topic of river spirits, last night I also made a fairly obvious connection that I somehow missed before: Haku’s the spirit of a river that got channeled and decked over by development, while the bathhouse, refuge for the spirits, is located where nature’s taking over again after the economic failure.

A note on the music—I’ve since gotten into all sorts of weird eighties Japanese music, and Hisaishi was part the Mkwaju Ensemble, which was interested in percussive minimalism. Although Hisaishi’s scores are typically very European-sounding—probably even self-consciously European-sounding—Spirited Away allows him to indulge in some of that older, more percussive and repetitive stuff, adding a bit of alien-ness to the background. It’s a shame he couldn’t get that back for The Tale of Princess Kaguya, where the heavenly procession’s background music sounded like some kind of world music easy listening.

ganews The crazy driving’s definitely a Miyazaki thing—it’s worth noting that Lupin III, despite being the sort of franchise where you’d expect car chases, really only started featuring car-chase (and acrobatic, physics-defying car-chases) after Miyazaki started working on it and carried on after he stopped. Also very Miyazakian is the amount of detail—before you even see the outside it’s recognizably  a nineties Audi from the interior. I think the fact that it was an Audi also helps code the parents as kind of yuppie (or ruppie now that they’re moving out to the middle of nowhere?) and self-involved.