For those of you who are unaware I have been attempting to get to Japan since 2020, and have been booked to go twice. For reasons that I am sure everyone can work out I have been unsuccessful, but I am hopeful that 2023 is the year. I am so confident (or at the very least hopeful) that I will be going this year that I have decided to do a whole series focusing on Japanese and counting down to my flight date. They are going to be short form and I’ll be running the gamut of eras and genres, and watching both films I have seen before and have never seen, but I felt I should at least explain why the titles are like they for the first review. And it also only made sense to kick it off by focusing on one of the more prominent Japanese films in the west, Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2001).
Spirited Away is an undoubted masterpiece and is one of the heavy hitters of not just Japanese animation but also Japanese film in general, and to this day remains second in the highest-grossing films at the Japanese box office. But its influence and reach were not limited to its own shores, as it also was a huge film in the west, going so far as to win the ‘Best Animated Feature’ award at the Oscars. To the best of my knowledge, aside from the Pokémon series, it was my first introduction to Japanese media and film, and it has remained a favourite. It is almost a perfect film in my eyes. The main thing to point out is that the imagination in creating this world and bringing it to life is insane. The design of the bathhouse setting and the array of characters are superb and help create an environment which is beautiful yet strange, but also a world you would love to explore. And it is all brought to life with brilliant animation which helps bring this world to life, with the action scenes being especially memorable and wonderfully animated. The one aspect of the film that stops it from being a perfect film for me is that it feels like it isn’t particularly bothered about its own narrative, and because of this, the ending feels rushed and unsatisfying. But this issue is really minor. The rest of the film is so creative, beautiful and otherworldly that I find myself getting lost in the adventure and the world without much caring about where it is going a lot of the time. Every time I return to this film it isn’t for the narrative, it is for this world and I adore it. I can’t recommend it enough, and if you would like to watch it yourself it is currently streaming on Netflix.
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