Spirited Away to an Otherworldy Realm

After completing his epic anime Princess Mononoke back in 1997, Hayao Miyazaki announced his retirement from moviemaking. But as Japan's most celebrated anime auteur, Miyazaki couldn't pull himself away for long. His new creation, Spirited Away, premiered late last year, barreling over box-office records at home just as Mononoke had done four years before. Its subsequent film festival showings were met with showers of critical acclaim and, having arrived on Manhattan screens just last week, the movie seems to have already cemented itself in the minds of many as another brilliant work in Miyazaki's oeuvre. Disney is releasing a dubbed version nationwide (which Pixar's John Lasseter helped supervise), but head to Loews 42nd St. E-Walk to enjoy the lone subtitled print being made available.

Spirited Away's fantasy-adventure places at its center Chihiro (voice of Daveigh Chase, from Lilo & Stitch), an anxious, awkward ten-year-old girl. Sullenly sprawled out in the backseat of her family car at the movie's opening, she's traveling with her parents to their new country home. A dead end leads them to explore what seems to be an abandoned, dilapidated amusement park, and soon after, Chihiro finds herself separated from her parents and trapped in an otherworldly realm--a spirit world in which her only chance of survival entails becoming one of the servant girls in a towering bathhouse for the gods. Shadowy, floating biomorphs usher in visitors, and the exotic spa spiritually replenishes a clientele that's a veritable pageant of bizarre, grotesque deities and sprites. The boiler room, Chihuro's first destination, is staffed by Khamaji, a sedentary beast whose eight arms flit from task to task. Protecting Chihiro from the bathhouse's wicked, giant-headed proprietress, Yubaba, are Haku, a shape-shifting boy, and the spunky, streetwise maid Lin.

But the play of the fantastic and the lyrical rendering of landscape and texture held my interest more than Chihiro's Bildungsroman. Miyazaki's atmospherics rely on a delicate handling of light and fluid--photorealistic mist, smoke and rain, the ruby glow of Japanese lanterns at night--and also his detailed matte backgrounds, incorporating lovely marble, burnished gold, and lapis lazuli accents in the bathhouse interiors. His most impressive characters have a wonderful physicality. A corpulent "radish spirit" breaths with slow deliberation and seems to be built from sacks of wet dough, and a "stink spirit" is embodied as a mass of cascading slides of sludge, exuding heat, odor, and steam. But at the opposite end of the spectrum, Miyazaki occasionally reveals a minimalist talent. When he pares down his forms, there's a stark elegance and emotional directness: the tiny, furry insect-like creatures carrying coal in the boiler room (calling to mind the soot spirits of My Neighbor Totoro); the simple way a black-ink Japanese character is magically peeled from a piece of paper, floating up to a hand above; a flying squadron of folded strips of white paper; the omnipresence of large, expressive, unblinking eyes.

While anime is glutted with homogeneous cyber-noir, Miyazaki's orientation has always been more mythological than technological. Spirited Away is an eclectic collage in which Japanese folklore, iconography, and architecture are juxtaposed with the modern-day and the purely imagined--Buddhist pagodas and ancient teahouses, high-speed trains and elevators.

But for all the film's fitful visual beauty, it still suffers from a story that caroms from being episodic and meandering (not in itself a flaw) to being weighed down by lines and lines of expository dialogue. Especially near the end, the demands of Chihiro and Haku's undernourished love story and the introduction of further plot complications involving a new character lock the proceedings into an unconvincing rush.

Miyazaki's own temperament keeps him from moving beyond a certain blandness. Mononoke proved how didactic and leadfooted his ecological advocacy could be; at least here he inserts the matter more obliquely (a sewage clean-up job, a reference to expanded real estate development). His thematic concerns revolve around children's innocence and dreams, but his presentation of them often comes invested with a sense of purity and simplicity that too often veers into misty, facile idealizations, sentimentality, and a soggy New Age spirituality. His sensibility remains too wholesome, too unwilling to tap into more interesting aspects of childhood desires. Spirited Away has been tagged as Miyazaki's Alice in Wonderland, but the movie is pure fantasy, without even the most gently surrealist current running through it. In place of Wonderland's whimsicality are cuteness (the Japanese aesthetic of kawaii) and a middle-of-the-road "respectability." Certainly the movie never approaches the qualities--mischief, frenzied intoxication, gleeful madness--giving life to the popular surrealist imagination that course through the animated masterpieces of Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Jan Svankmajer, and the sadly neglected silent Polish filmmaker Ladislaw Starewicz, among many others. Spirited Away offers further confirmation of Miyazaki's great visual imagination, but also makes one acutely aware of his stunted ideas.