As I watched Hiyao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away” for the third time, I noticed a quality that lives somewhere between generosity and love. On previous viewings, I was caught up by the sheer imagination of the story. But this time I began to pay attention to what was in the picture that didn’t need to be there.
It takes a long time to animate something, so many of its visual elements are simplified. Not so with Miyazaki: His backgrounds have more detail than reality itself; his canvas sprawls space liberally — it is all drawn openly — with meticulous attention. We may not consciously notice what’s in the corners of his frames, but we know they are there, and they reinforce the incredible precision of his fantasy worlds.
“‘Spirited Away’ is one of the greatest animated films ever made,” Roger Ebert wrote in 2003, and “its foundation is secure from being dug under by such faddish events as American popular culture.” It puts its faith in frame-by-frame drawing — Miyazaki began his career with that style — although he did allow computers for some things. Still, thousands of frames are drawn by hand.
Consider a scene where his young heroine stands on a bridge leading away from the magical bathhouse where much of the movie takes place. All that is actually necessary are characters involved in central action. But many of them watch from bathhouse windows and balconies — it would be easier simply to suggest them as vaguely moving presences; instead, Miyazaki includes many figures we recognize, all in motion.
And it isn’t repetitive motion (wherein animation shows a figure merely because it can). It is realistic-changing-detailed motion — most people watching will simply read those areas of screen as “movement,” but if we happen to look: Things are really happening there.
That’s what I mean by generosity and love. They care enough to spend the extra energy on parts of the frame that don’t matter. Look how much of the bathhouse you can see — it would have been quicker and easier to just show a bridge and a doorway. But Miyazaki gives his bathhouse the complexity of a real place, which has attributes whether or not the immediate story needs them.
The story of “Spirited Away” has been populated with limitless creativity — has any film ever contained more different kinds of beings that we have never seen anywhere before? Miyazaki’s imagination never rests; there is a scene where the heroine and her companion get off a train in the middle of a swamp, and in the distant forest they see a light approaching, which turns out to be an old-fashioned light pole hopping along on one foot, which bows to them and then turns and lights their way down its path before dutifully hanging itself above their gate when they arrive at their cottage. The living light pole is not necessary; it is a gift from Miyazaki.
His story is about a ten-year-old girl named Chihiro who — unlike the perky little automatons that populate many animated films — might best be described by her detractors as sullen. Yes, and also impatient and impulsive: She’s stuck in the back seat during a long drive to a house her folks want to look at, but her father loses his way in a dark forest, and the road seems to end at the mouth of a tunnel. They go exploring it, only to find that it leads to an abandoned amusement park. But at twilight some of the shops appear to reopen, especially a food stand whose scents billow into the cool air.
Her parents throw themselves eagerly upon the counter loaded with food, stuffing their faces. Chihiro is stubbornly disinterested; she insists that she’s not hungry. So they eat until they double or triple in size: They eat like pigs, and they turn into them. These are not parents from American animation — parents endowed with certain limitations of movement and range so as not to frighten a child (although come to think of it these particular parents will do just fine).
The amusement park reveals itself as part of a giant floating bathhouse — turrets and windows and ledges and ornamentation piled endlessly atop one another. A boy warns her pleasantly enough to turn back, but she’s too late; already the bathhouse has cast off from shore. She steps inside … and finds herself in what appears to be infinite space.
She can never seem to find her way out again. The boy tells her everyone must have a job; he sends her down through its weird plumbing toward Kamaji, an old bearded man with eight elongated limbs who runs things downstairs in the boiler room along with an apprentice girl. They tell Chihiro/Yubaba that if she wants work (a bathhouse boiler room being where most runaways choose first) she should see Yubaba, who owns the place. This is a fearsome old witch of infinite powers, who exhales plumes of smoke and a cackling laugh that could peel wallpaper.
This is only the beginning of Chihiro’s adventures. In what follows she will meet no more humans in the bathhouse, but will pass under Yubaba’s spell: The witch steals her name and gives her a new one, Sen; if she can’t get it back again she’ll never leave. One bewildering space leads into another within this strange bathhouse, whose population consists of an endless variety of bizarre life-forms. There are little fuzzy black balls with two eyeballs apiece that steal Sen’s shoes; looming semi-transparent No Faces wearing masks over their ghostly shrouds; three extraordinary heads without bodies that hop about looking angry and resemble caricatures of Karl Marx (an authorial touch so lost on most U.S. viewers that the audience at my screening, by now well-stocked with studio plants, was left to wonder why the man next to me was laughing so hard); there is a malodorous heap of black slime; a river creature whose body has soaked up piles of pollution like some rank buffalo-hide sponge.
Shape-shifting — common in Japanese fantasy — takes place here as well: The boy who first befriended her reveals himself to be a lithe sea dragon with sharp fangs.
And through all this goes Sen — Chihiro — making friends among some spirits and being shunned by others, threatened by Yubaba at every turn while figuring things out for herself along the way. She does not become “nice” or “good” or “sweet.” She remains determined simply to survive and save her parents (a fact made conspicuous by how rarely Miyazaki films ever let girls focus on anything besides their own self-esteem).
He created the film explicitly for 10-year-old girls, he said. Which is why it works so well for viewers of any age. Movies made for “everybody” are actually made for nobody in particular; movies about specific characters in a detailed world are interesting because they never try to cater to us — they are defiantly, triumphantly, themselves. As I watched it this time, I was more absorbed than by any film I’ve seen in a long time. That’s why “Spirited Away” grossed more than “Titanic” in Japan, and became the first foreign film to open in U.S. theaters with a gross over $200 million.
I had the luck of meeting Miyazaki at the 2002 Toronto Film Festival. The definition of “gratuitous motion,” he said through a translator, is that when you make things more complicated than necessary. Just because it’s called ‘gratuitous’ doesn’t mean it’s not necessary.” What non-Japanese speakers can’t glean from most of his films is that the man is funny as hell.
“We have a word for that in Japanese,” he said. “It’s called ‘ma.’ Emptiness.” He clapped his hands three or four times. “The time in between my clapping is ‘ma.’ If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it’s just busyness.”
But he does know some English-language jokes too: “A producer friend of mine went to Disney World recently and was very disappointed,” he told me through an interpreter. “He came back and told me, ‘Miyazaki, you wouldn’t believe it, but there were so few people there wearing Mickey Mouse ears!'”
I think that helps explain why those movies are more absorbing than frantic multi-million-dollar action thrillers of our summer movie-watching lifetimes: “The people who make the movies are scared of silence,” he told me. “So they want to paper and plaster it over,” he said. “They’re worried that the audience will get bored. But just because it’s 80 percent intense all the time doesn’t mean the kids are going to bless you with their concentration. What really matters is the underlying feelings — that you never let go of those.
“What my friends and I have been trying to do since the 1970’s is to try and quiet things down a little bit; don’t just bombard them with noise and distraction. And to follow the path of children’s emotions and feelings as we make a film. If you stay true to joy and astonishment and empathy you don’t have to have violence and you don’t have to have action. They’ll follow you. This is our principle.”
He concluded with this: “I’m interested in entertaining people, but I also want people to see these films as long-lasting gems.”
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