Spirited Away: A Children’s Child Movie For Kiddie Kids
A lot people
talk about Lord of The Rings as being “magical”
and getting really into that world a loving being there. I guess since I live in Canada we’ve got
coniferous forests lying around all over the place and so it just doesn’t seem
like something special to me. So a
forest with short people running around it wasn’t really all that entertaining
to me. Don’t get me wrong, I like lots
of short people. I like Tom Cruise and Shakira in different ways.
And trees have been pretty good to me, it’s just most of that fantasy
hobbit stuff doesn’t blow me away. But
you know what does? Spirited
Away.
This film
creates a magical magic world full of the types of things that I am generally
obsessed with such as oversized animals, old-fashioned trains, and things that
don’t normally fly flying, traditional Japanese architecture.
According
to IMDB, an internet database of movie-related shit, this is one of the 250
most popular films among people who go to this website and assign star values
to films. They also say it is the
highest grossing non-American film of all time.
I guess if I’d known that the first time I saw this it might’ve got my
expectations a little high, but I didn’t.
But I think I did know that this was a wholesome family-oriented movie
and not one of those risqué Japanese cartoons that are aimed at adults. And I think I enjoyed it more, because when
the lead character, Chihiro, gets forced into working
at a bathhouse I probably would’ve gotten uncomfortable anticipating whatever
kind of rub-n-tug shit they’d make her do.
Don’t
get me wrong, this bathhouse is pretty fucking evil. Child labour aside, what kind of company
threatens to carve up your parents and serve them as pork chops? Not even Wal-Mart would do that their
employees. They try to sorta make excuses for the CEO of this bathhouse by showing
that she is a stressed-out single mother.
Her infant child is about five times her size, so I feel for her. I mean, labour must’ve been rough, but still,
there’s no excuse for cannibalism.
Also,
at one point this pervy sounding dude dressed like an
Eyes Wide Shut party guest starts lurking around in the bushes and if I
hadn’t known this was a family movie for kiddie
child-kids I probably would’ve been more scared for our hero. This movie follows Chihiro
as she navigates this crazy world learning all sorts of lessons. Well, actually, for the most part the lesson
is always to make yourself helpful, but I don’t really
know if we should be telling kids to try and be helpful to cloaked mumbling weirdos who they see skulking in the bushes. I guess Japan is a safer country and
all. Talking to strangers
aside, if I’d slipped on the wrong condom and landed on the wrong syringe while
playing in the park as a child my heart would’ve been pumping ten types of AIDS
blood before I could do long division.
But this is Japan and a magical kids movie, so
the masked dude turns out to be a magical character who teaches Chihiro more lessons about being helpful.
Like
most people here in North America, I own the DVD that has been put out by
Disney/Pixar. You get this introduction
by this guy, John Lasseter, who scolds you, telling
you to be grateful for the film you’re about to see. I’ve seen a number of special introductions
on many DVDs over the years. My favorite
is still on this movie Kontroll where a senior
manager for Budapest’s metro system comments on how much he loves the movie and
how he feels it is metaphorical and not a representation of people in his line
of work. Then there’s
other more typical ones like Omar Sheriff just reflecting fondly on having been
in Doctor Zhivago and stuff. But this is the first one where the guy has
actually made me feel undeserving of the film I was about to see. In fact, I was kinda
scared he was going to change his mind and just not let me watch it. I was also expecting him to show up again at
the end and rhetorically ask “Now wasn’t that the shit?”
Anyway,
I am grateful for Lasseter bringing this movie to my
culture. The chat board talkbackers over at IMDB like to really abuse this guy for
his ‘butchering’ of this and other anime films through creating an English
language audio track that dramatically changes the events. He apparently mangles these films by committing
such atrocities like when a sign written in Japanese appears on the screen he
has somebody read that shit out loud so that we who do not speak Japanese know
what it says. I mean, holy fuck, that just kills it, right?
I
sorta wonder how many of these people making these
criticisms are fluent enough in English and Japanese to make an accurate
critique of how the dialogue compares.
They all seem to advocate the subtitles over the English audio track,
but can’t you mistranslate something in subtitles just as much as you can with
dubbing? I have this inkling that these
purists are taking these hardline stances merely as
posturing based on hearsay. But I could
be wrong. Anyway, I watched it in
English and this alternative story that John Lasseter
made up based on Hayao Miyazaki’s images made sense
to me and was enjoyable.
So
I really love this magical movie. It is
full of magical magic that I think childs
and children alike can enjoy with their parental unit(s) or with a masked dude
they met in the bushes. It sure makes me
want to make myself helpful.
You’d
better be grateful for this review.
And if you are grateful for this review, read some
others:
The Wachowskis are on Speed.
Here’s a film that is a
very lucky #7!
Coz we can’t get enough
unicorns!
Dream on!