Spirited Away: Review

28th June 2024

Spirited Away: Review: By Christopher Patterson.

A Vibrant, Loose, Free, Yet Disorganized, Lazy, and Exhausted Film

Recently, I decided to binge watch Miyazaki’s filmography, and the one that caught my eye the most was Spirited Away. Spirited Away has always been, in my eyes, spectacular in how it lingers upon a rewatch. It is a film that demands attention and, in other parts, feels oddly and sadly content with itself all at once. In a sense, it is split. It’’s pacing, at least in its first and second half, is quite rushed, and the visuals are a wonder to look at and just adore, with some critique towards its repetitiveness thanks to its overused style, but then the third half comes and rips apart the script.

The writing feels suddenly more tired and loose, seemingly whatever goes. Though, unlike any other Miyazaki film to an extent, it commands consideration and thought. And upon consideration, it is a half-burnt candle. A film that feels like two ideas mashed up into a too-muddled mess. If I had to describe it further, it would be a story following a generic yet built structure in its first and second half and suddenly switching to a more modernist, pretentious, free-flowing, loose, and spiritual one that is respectable in its boldness but makes for a complicated discussion regarding its attempt at a film. Is it truly nonsensical or meritable?

Animating anything is not an easy job, and here is the work of masters proving just that. While the character designs do, to some extent, feel truly phoned in and half baked, with Ghibli following a character design style that grew stale from the second time they did it, the animation and how it flows overall are quite solid. No character just pops out of nowhere from shot to shot, and it all feels so smooth and natural and it feels as if a human did the actions the characters did here and it was animated over.

Though, as anyone would tell you, animation isn’t all an animated film, especially a Ghibli one, can offer.

If I had to draw a comparison with Spirited Away, specifically with its lead, it would be a modern Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in its protagonist and her curiosity and wonder, but also mashed slightly with Pan’s Labyrinth protagonist with her complexity matched with her calm yet exuberant personality. To be clear, comparisons such as this are more general since, to be brief, it all could be tied back to the classic Don Quixote, Homer’s The Odyssey and The Iliad, or The Divine Comedy. Like Alice, Chihiro is bored and curious. Though what makes them truly similar is in their conclusions, Alice, at least by the end of Carroll’s brilliant novel, is more steadfast and headstrong in her beliefs and also open to the unknown.

Throughout Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice is steadfast and almost judgmental, placing the rules she believes of reality in relation to all but growing from this, like Chihiro in a sense. She is spirited away. Alice is a realist who is open to becoming a more free person. In other words, she is more “whatever goes” than “anything can happen.” Life is beautiful like that. Chirchio, in a sense, maintains this freedom of curiosity by the end of the film with a level of complexity that is more blunt compared to Alice, which reveals someone who is headstrong yet free in her world. She is not held down anymore, to put it simply. In Pan’s Labyrinth, Ofelia is a model of Alice, yet in a different and more unforgiving and twisted fantasy and reality. In a sense, Chirchio, with these comparisons, represents a middle ground. Spirited Away’s characters are never flawed or evil in their motivation, but rather just go on with life.

Spirited Away, in many ways, is a coming-of-age film where we see Chirchio go through the cycles of growing up, such as wonder, curiosity, loneliness, realisation, peace, and commanding of oneself, truly in an almost-spectacular fashion that loses itself to the principles of where it bases itself. Film, or cinema.

Spirited Away is a film that goes too high to the sun and forgets how to fundamentally base itself as a film and becomes more of a mundane intertwined odyssey. You see this more in classic literature, where neatness, is thrown out for the sheer boldness and audacity of its content and scale. And while there are major flaws, usually this forgetfulness leads to characters just appearing randomly and plots disappearing without consideration; it is usually seen as transcending its flaws. Though, in my eyes, that is almost impossible. The flaws are there, just not to the same degree as the positives. Sadly, Spirited Away, in going too high to the sun, fell right down and crashed in many ways. Instead of spirited away itself, it crashed and, in some ways, almost regrew. But almost.

Spirited Away is comparable to an artist who shows power and elegance in parts that shine as pure genius and deserve consideration, but as a whole, it is not just half cooked but burnt in an oven on top of another oven on top of a pile of cut-out second hand fantasy books. Small, great ideas amount to a disappointing result. It is even more comparable to a generic debut novel in its substitute of great potential and success in small pieces. Spirited Away is a film that needed a better editor to simply cut the boring slop and indulgent meditations on the basic concepts of life and growing up and be more concise and beautiful. Except, in a way, that is Spirited Away.

Indulgent. Agonsing. But also, there is beauty in these damages. True beauty. Without these critiques, like so many classic novels, this film wouldn’t be itself. The beauty found in Spirited Away can be seen in the scene where Chirchio cries while eating, hitting the realization that she is all alone and has to figure it out on her own. Nothing is said, but rather shown. While Spirited Away highly overuses this simple concept of show not telling like it’s going out of style yesterday, it’s best used here where it feels mostly spaced out.

Never has a film felt like it attempted to say so much but let itself down so often. At its core, Spirited Away solely speaks to growing up and the areas of it. But what else? At its core, Spirited Away is more shallow than most coming-of-age films from the 1980s you can find. It’s boring in its excessive abbreviations and showing of life itself through Chirchio, for instance, working and doing mundane tasks. In those scenes, it feels as though Spirited Away attempts to shed light on how peaceful and mundane life can be. It is a representation of finding oneself, yes, but a repetitive, eye-rolling love letter to the artificial existence it also reveals. One of the major, fundamental, and absolute issues of Spirited Away is that it attempts to show life in a manner that it proves may be impossible to ever film, especially in animation. Reality.

Remember every moment of life. The simple ones and the hard ones. Think of what you can remember most. Not your graduation, but the quiet moment with your parents, huh? It is the mundane that captures the authenticity, some would say, of human existence. Not the big ones, but the small ones. Spirited Away attempts a lot—a fun fantasy, a growing-of-age film, great animation that speaks words on its own—but at its core, it attempts an almost Proustian demonstration in its look at life’s small moments as a human being and their journey through life. Growing up. Yet, it is not long enough to ever fulfil or even contain itself. Spirited Away is a film that is wickedly inspiring to any artist in that it represents a level of sheer individuality and versatility that is unspoken. It even shows the power of thought through the many mounts of creative imagination on display, even if slightly derivative and generic.

Even more, it challenges what and how a film can be. Are all films meant to be individually seen, case by case, without a definition of quality? In a sense, looseness is pure freedom, and freedom is a quality that cannot be properly communicated in the form of discussion. But no. For all that Spirited Away is free, it is all no bite. It is a work that is felt by someone who just discovered to live life like they did when they were children, in other words, doing something new every day. But they forget to be themselves and hide a shadow or projection behind it. Spirited Away continually feels slowed down by the creator’s lack of true vulnerability on display. Instead, it feels as though they freed themselves from the art, rather than the art being a part of themselves taken to show the world. Like a personal story hidden behind the fantasy that the creatives feel too vulnerable to fully reveal.

Meandering can really go unexplained. Simply put, in Spirited Away’s case, it’s what makes and breaks it. For so many scenes in Spirited Away, it feels as though the plot is stopped for simple and random adventures in which Chirchio either feels like an observer or a commander of her own accord. If I had to describe her journey, it is one of aimlessness that is meant to get a target that is as loose as the world is but as freeing as she will want it to be. Yet, even as it ends, it all feels lost. Her journey was one of a child to an adult in its many meditations, but she feels as though it starts back at square one once again with the thought of one step when it went up the ladder in its many scenes.

So why did Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Pan’s Labyrinth work in their fantasy as to where Spirited Away largely fails? It’s quite simple; the reason is in the understanding of the day of one’s life. Carroll and Del Toro felt as though they had a strong grip on how the world worked in their universes. Simply put, Caroll’s world was odd and mystical, but once Alice awoke from the fantasy, a dream, the world was back to normal, and Alice was herself but slightly different, making it feel like a dream, and it felt like just an odd but mundane day in one girl’s life. In Del Toro’s case, it’s bold and makes that clear, with Ofelia’s world feeling like any day could change everything since it takes place in a war and the fantasy could all be a way for Ofelia to deal with her situation and it is placed with consideration for interpretation.

Chirchio, on the other hand, has Alice’s simplicity and mundanity, yet, in such a short time, we are meant to believe she has lived through a whirlwind of mundane and life-changing situations in terms of all she gets caught up in and overcomes it maturely, and then after she is meant to go back with her parents casually. It is an abundant loss of innocence in that it is not maturely felt. In Alice’s case, maturity was a simple and narrow field, but here Chirchio feels as though she lives a lifetime of things from growing up in a world, symbolically, and yet she returns as the same person in personality, just slightly happier. It’s a disrespect to itself that becomes clear. It’s a feeling that simple change takes big evolution, but it’s how the evolution is produced that makes the flaws clearer.

Chirchio’s adventures, compared to Alice’s, felt more related to adulthood, and how she handled them felt slightly unrealistic and too fast to ever feel authentic. In other words, it feels as though Chirchio has overcome far too much to go back to reality. It is like one stopping their childhood to live an entirely different life than going back to their childhood and developing a sense of believability in its authenticity of showing someone growing up. But rather, it’s actually showing some weird fantasy. It’s comparable to an adult looking back on their childhood and saying how they grew up so fast and overidealized their youth rather than telling the truth. It is fake and based on years of retrospectives. That is what Spirited Away is. It is not raw, but rather unnatural.

This is all not to even discuss the splitting, mentioned earlier, in quality present. The first and second halves are not the best, but they are respectable in their almost formulaic design and journey for Chirchio, yet the third half feels widely all over the place. If I had to describe why, it would be the consequences of the overuse of showing, not telling. Spirited Away is a film that is far too indulgent in never using its words to a point where it can feel far too shy and less of a film by a master and more of a film by a shy film student or someone who has seen far too many pretentious art films that have no dialogue.

The biggest jump-the-sharp moment in Spirited Away is where Chirchio runs from No Face, and suddenly the horror stops for a more meditative atmosphere. This comes to the train scene, which, to me, represents where the film lost itself. Where previously the film felt centred in its world and drama, now we journey far, and in a sense, these quiet moments haven’t been uncommon, but it is how it develops and the resolution felt that seems only half accomplished. Its purpose seems obvious yet draughty. Out of all the moments for indulgence, here is the precise area that feels unwarranted. Here, there should’ve been excessive indulgence, yet it feels taken away for quietness.

Quietness is a feature of Miyazaki that is overused to the point where dialogue would do much better. When one choice is overused to the point of predictability and annoyance, it makes all these moments fraught with nonsense. My issue with this quiet moment is that it feels so clear that Miyzaki has a formula: quiet moment that families can relate to and now its art. And here it comes in full circle, in bad fashion. Here, Miyazaki takes the cards out of his deck and reveals that his film is not authentic but rather superficial and feels ashamed of itself. It is a film in which humanity can be acquainted with an observer, never a doer.

Spirited Away is a film that I would describe as a work of cinema that is too hyper-stimulated in its many characters and world than it should be. It is a film that loses itself to its own narrative and to its own themes. It can be compared to a work feeling distant from the creator, yet it is built with vulnerability to make it combative as an experience. It feels shallow and lost for the most part.

VERDICT

Spirited Away is a burning labyrinth of characters and exploration that go nowhere but downhill in their coherency and overall design once examined. Yet, despite its many downfalls, it is respectable in its continued attempts to deliver a fantastical experience that, while proving sour, is worthy of high discussion and respect for the effort.

2.5/5

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