Spirited Away (2001)
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
A young girl, Chihiro, becomes trapped in a strange new world of spirits. When her parents undergo a mysterious transformation, she must call upon the courage she never knew she had to free her family.
22 connections found
View:
22 films that influenced Spirited Away
What critics say influenced Spirited Away
Melding bits of Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz with Eastern-angled spookiness and an outré sensibility that borders on the indescribable, Spirited Away is fiercely original in every respect.
If the children's literature section of your neighborhood bookstore was shuffled up and animated, with painterly sophistication and a Grimm eye for the bizarre, The Phantom Tollbooth and The Wizard of Oz landing on top, the result might look like Spirited Away.
In the tradition of "The Wizard of Oz" and "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," "Spirited Away" is about a girl who overcomes her fears when plopped into a strange world and takes control of her fate.
Once inside, however, she loses track of her parents and begins an adventure that echoes everything from "The Wizard of Oz" to "The Never-Ending Story" to "Alice in Wonderland."
The story echoes "Alice in Wonderland" and "The Wizard of Oz" as it follows 10-year-old schoolgirl Chihiro (voiced by Daveigh Chase) when she and her parents move to a new city.
Strange, beautifully-animated, moving film that’s like a combination of Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz (alongside many other references) yet, at the same time, it’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.
There are enough bizarre creatures here to make the Star Wars cantina look boring.
It’s like putting the Jedi-knight pop mysticism of Star Wars next to the Wudan spirituality of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon .
And perhaps only the Cantina in Star Wars can match this film's bathhouse as a sight for soaring eyes unable to believe the sheer number of unusual creatures sauntering through the place.
In a historical context, Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira introduced the concept of anime to a larger Western audience than ever before, and John Lasseter's Toy Story proved that computer animation was a viable creative outlet, while Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale's Beauty and the Beast became the first animated feature to be considered for a Best Picture Oscar.
John Lasseter (creator of Toy Story), along with Donald Ernest (producer of Aladdin) and Kirk Wise (director of Beauty and the Beast), oversaw the English translation.
The most popular film in Japanese history has been imported by Disney, which has commissioned this English-language version lovingly supervised by American animators John Lasseter (“Toy Story”) and Kirk Wise (“Beauty and the Beast”), both of whom owe Miyazaki an enormous artistic debt.
Two American animation luminaries â?? Pixarâ??s John Lasseter and Disneyâ??s Kirk Wise (the director of several animated features, including Beauty and the Beast ) â?? were recruited to convert the Japanese version of the movie into one for English-speaking audiences.
In recording sessions directed by Kirk Wise ( "Atlantis," "Beauty and the Beast"), Chase and her fellow voice-talents (Suzanne Pleshette, Jason Marsden, Susan Egan, David Ogden Stiers, Lauren Holly and John Ratzenberger among them) have inhabited their characters so well that this film never suffers the kind of distracting awareness of an awkward translation that plagued the 1999 U.S. release of Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke."
It’s a story rife with familiar influences, from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to Japanese folklore and, of course, Studio Ghibli’s now expected coming-of-age elements.
It is, at heart, just another plot-light parade of grotesques in the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland model, but given life with fuller characters and grander fantasy than most of that genre's numerous examples would dare to reach for.
In the tradition of "The Wizard of Oz" and "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," "Spirited Away" is about a girl who overcomes her fears when plopped into a strange world and takes control of her fate.
Advertisement
John Lasseter (creator of Toy Story), along with Donald Ernest (producer of Aladdin) and Kirk Wise (director of Beauty and the Beast), oversaw the English translation.
This English version was Executive Produced by Pixar¿s Executive Vice President and Director of Toy Story and A Bug¿s Life, John Lasseter.
The most popular film in Japanese history has been imported by Disney, which has commissioned this English-language version lovingly supervised by American animators John Lasseter (“Toy Story”) and Kirk Wise (“Beauty and the Beast”), both of whom owe Miyazaki an enormous artistic debt.
To many aficianados — including director John Lasseter of the Toy Story movies, who oversaw the preparation of Spirited Away for its American theatrical release — Miyazaki is possibly the greatest animation filmmaker of all time.
John Lasseter, the creative force behind the Toy Story films, is a Miyazaki fan and has devoted himself to making this English-dubbed version something extraordinary.
As impossible as authorship is on any commercial film, it’s trebly so for animation -- who could divine the difference between John Lasseter’s Toy Story 2 and Peter Docter’s Monsters, Inc.?
Its world of wood spirits and bucolic sorcery is actually closer in spirit to folk tale films such as Kobayashi's "Kwaidan" than to the culture of Disney's "Alice in Wonderland."
On a purely artistic level, Who Framed Roger Rabbit was a brilliant, groundbreaking combination of live action and animation, and Brad Bird's The Iron Giant was simply the best animated film of recent years.
Spirited Away is unquestionably the best animated feature since Brad Bird's The Iron Giant - itself something of a Miyazaki favorite, and it's not hard to see why.
If I may be allowed a little hyperbole, Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away joins and surpasses that selective group, becoming an animation landmark as monumental as Disney's 1937 breakthrough Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Advertisement
His first film, The Castle of Cagliostro, is a hilarious action adventure that inspired some of Spielberg’s Indiana Jones sequences.
Fans of anime, the classic tradition of Japanese animated film, already know Miyazaki, the acknowledged master of the form whose landmark works include “The Castle of Cagliostro” (1979) and “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988).
This is a shame because he also directed “Kiki’s Delivery Service” and “My Neighbor Totoro” (reviews of both which can be found on this site) – two of the best children’s movies I have seen in a very long while.
As conceived by the great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki ("Princess Mononoke," "Kiki's Delivery Service," "My Neighbor Totoro"), "Spirited Away" is an incomparable blend of solid storytelling and endlessly imaginative visuals.
Miyazaki is best known to American audiences as the creator of Princess Mononoke and My Neighbor Totoro.
Japanese anime, the cartoon medium of which Miyazaki ("Kiki's Delivery Service," "My Neighbor Totoro") is one of the masters, has long been a cult item in America, though never especially popular at the box office.
Instead, Miyazaki takes the story and with it crafts a world of unbelievably elegant mythology: so finely-tuned and multi-faceted is Miyazaki's skill-set in crafting this narrative that the story seems as if it were a descendent of tradition rather than of the present (it's a style that he worked with to good effect in My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service, although the visual anachronisms in the latter film often threatened to unbalance the strategy).
Much closer in tone to "My Neighbor Totoro" than "Princess Mononoke," "Kiki's Delivery Service" can be recommended to younger viewers, but should not be missed by anybody with an eye for Miyzaki's outstanding sensitivity.
Miyazaki will probably be best known outside Japan for his “Princess Mononoke” effort a few years back.
While there were some gripes about the manner in which the dubbing and distribution of Miyazakiâs previous feature, Princess Mononoke , were handled here, more care has been taken for Spirited Away.
As conceived by the great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki ("Princess Mononoke," "Kiki's Delivery Service," "My Neighbor Totoro"), "Spirited Away" is an incomparable blend of solid storytelling and endlessly imaginative visuals.
Miyazaki's previous picture, the heavily promoted "Princess Mononoke," was a visually elaborate, often astonishing fable released by Disney-owned Miramax and aimed at an art-movie market, which had little interest.
If you haven't yet seen any of the films (among them the great Princess Mononoke and the greater My Neighbor Totoro) by Japanese animator-cum-savior of the medium Hayao Miyazaki, the sad fact of the matter is that you're missing out on the most magnificent combination of animation and storytelling (and these days the two are too often separate and unequal) since Walt Disney first put pen to paper some 80 years ago.
Melding the child’s-eye view of Kiki’s Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro with the dark, spiritualist overtones of Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away takes Chihiro, its young female protagonist into an enormous bathhouse for wayward spirits, where she’s mystified, occasionally enchanted, and often threatened, most notably by the tyrannical Yubaba, who resembles John Tenniel’s drawings of the Queen of Hearts -- if her head inflated to equal size with the rest of her body.
The enchanting, fantastic "Kiki's Delivery Service," by Hayao Miyazaki, the Steven Spielberg of anime, is a particular favorite of mine.
As conceived by the great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki ("Princess Mononoke," "Kiki's Delivery Service," "My Neighbor Totoro"), "Spirited Away" is an incomparable blend of solid storytelling and endlessly imaginative visuals.
As tends to be the case with Hayao Miyazaki's films, Kiki's Delivery Service boasts a striking visual sensibility that is, unfortunately, slowly-but-surely rendered moot by an uneventful, deliberately-paced narrative.
The life of a little girl amounts to a hill of beans in the crazy world of "Spirited Away," a spectacularly inventive animated film by Japan's Hayao Miyazaki ("Princess Mononoke," "Kiki's Delivery Service"), a man who knows how to fill a screen with wonder.
Much closer in tone to "My Neighbor Totoro" than "Princess Mononoke," "Kiki's Delivery Service" can be recommended to younger viewers, but should not be missed by anybody with an eye for Miyzaki's outstanding sensitivity.
See in conservationist and warrior (Princess Mononoke) Princess Nausicaä a young girl with an animal familiar and powers of flight (Kiki's Delivery Service) at odds with a militaristic airborne oppressor (Porco Rosso) who makes a habit of kidnapping princesses (Laputa: Castle in the Sky), all the while maintaining an innocent flirtation with a heroic boy (a trope discernable in all of Miyazaki's subsequent output).
Hes the protagonist of Porco Rosso, a very special animated film from Hayao Miyazaki, who also created Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away .
If it's more ambiguous, ultimately, than a Kiki's Delivery Service , it's far less sober and difficult than its predecessor or Porco Rosso .
On a purely artistic level, Who Framed Roger Rabbit was a brilliant, groundbreaking combination of live action and animation, and Brad Bird's The Iron Giant was simply the best animated film of recent years.