March 29, 2005

• Spirited Away

  Spirited Away in an Anime movie released by Disney. I've known about it for a while but didn't have a chance to view it until today.

  The heroine, whose real name escapes me, is a somewhat spoiled pre-teen. She and her family are moving to a new house. Trying to get there, they get lost. The father decides to drive on, up a dirt road. The road suddenly ends at an old building, which the father identifies as being part of an abandoned amusement park. While investigating, they smell food. They find an empty restaurant stocked with freshly prepared foods and the father and mother start eating, expecting to pay when somebody shows up. The little girl wanders off, crossing a dry riverbed to a building at the top of a hill. There a boy warns her to cross back to the human side of the river before the sun sets and enchantment sets in.

  Rushing back across the river, the girl arrives too late. The sun has set, the lamps have been lighted ... and her parents have been changed into pigs. Hogs, rather.

  The mansion on the hill is a bathhouse for the spirits, who begin arriving when the sun sets. It is run by a witch who is bound and obligated to hire anybody who asks for a job, which gives them protected status; if they don't get a job, the witch is free to destroy them any way she wants, usually turning them into pigs. When the little girl signs the contract to work, her name is taken away from her, after which she is called "Sen".

  The inhabitants of this little spirit realm are strange and often dangerous. They often change form. For example, the witch transforms into a giant bird several times. Sen learns to conquer her fears and to act in a loving, intelligent way, her goal always being to restore her parents to human form and escape with them.

  Despite being a coming-of-age tale, this story is not exclusively for kids. It is well worth watching.

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