Best Films of the 2000s: Spirited Away (2002) | The Best Films of 2000s: This Guy Over Here

Spirited Away (2002)

Starring: (voices by:) Rumi Hîragi, Miyu Irino, Mari Natsuki
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Country: Japan
Genre: Foreign, Animation, Fantasy

My first reaction to the first viewing of this film was under all of the wrong circumstances. I was watching the American dubbed version (which I’ve since learned always to watch a film, animated or not, in its original language,) I was watching it under the belief that it was going to blow me away due to the hype-machine this film had behind it when it was released, and I believe I was also eating a pizza (delivery or DiGorno, my memory does not recall, but have also since learned to not eat pizza (or any other grandiose meal) during the first viewing of a film.) The result was mortification at the confusing and terrifying characters and the acid-trip like plot twists. Embarrassingly, I’m not even sure i finished it. Netflix: 2 stars… what was I thinking?

About five years later I knew my love for a well-made children/fantasy/animated film had matured into a fine appreciation, (mostly due to those geniuses at Pixar,) I decided to give Spirited Away another shot… foodless and with subtitles. The magic of the film almost immediately flooded to me. The story alone had such a child-like wonder to it that is so rarely achieved in other films. And maybe it’s just because of years of being saturated by computer-animated films, but the hand-drawn animation was breath-taking. It really added to the passion of the film, none of the often times sterile feeling of a computer generated film. But the thing that grabs me the most about this film is its story’s ability to go anywhere imaginable (and often times beyond.) The story isn’t bound by setting up its conflict at the beginning and sticking to a series of predictable scenes in order to trod its way towards its conclusion, but rather it slowly opens doors with infinite possibilities and somehow manages to use those conventions to shape the arc of the character and story. It starts at point A and heads for point B, but in between it visits point Q and point Z and point µ and point 56 and point œ.

To be completely honest, I’m a little jealous that films like this didn’t exist when I was a kid because I would’ve eaten it up. I still eat it up, but as a kid, I would’ve even wanted to own all of those crazy plushies.

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