Japanese title: Sen to Chichiro no Kamikakushi

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

In the last two decades of the 20^th century, Japan produced a plethora of animated films, videos and television productions. They are distributed around the world, in dubbed versions, and very popular with children and adolescents. Anime (pronounced ah-ni-meh, the Japanese abbreviation of animation) has totally displaced the live action cinema as the biggest earner of foreign exchange for the Japanese film industry. Young children everywhere sit glued to their television screens watching Pokemon and Sailor Moon; while adolescents and young adults have become cult followers of the more sophisticated sci-fi anime, set in a high-tech future. The sheer quantity, generic variety, vitality and artistry of anime are astounding.

In America and Australia, sci-fi anime productions like Akira and Ghost in the Shell have been most popular but in Japan it is the Ghibli Studio productions of Hayao Miyazaki that are the overwhelming favourites. His recent films Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away have outperformed the Hollywood blockbusters in box office receipts and topped the video sales charts as well.

 Unlike other anime productions, which cater to a particular age or gender market, Miyazaki’s films are entertainments for the whole family, enjoyed by all ages and both sexes. (In this respect they can be compared to Disney films.  In fact, Disney animators are great admirers of his work and Disney has acquired the overseas rights to his films.) They are wholesome entertainment, with no sex and less violence than other anime; they also display ethical and social concerns – thereby gaining the approval of parents and teachers.

Spirited Away scooped the Academy award for Best Animation this year, but it is not Miyazaki’s best film. Like his other films, it creates a richly detailed fantasyland and is stunningly beautiful. The central character, as often in his films, is a young pre-adolescent girl, a Miyazaki variant of the shojo. The feminine stereotype of the shojo (young woman) in Japanese popular culture can be excruciatingly cute. They are usually immature, between childhood and adolescence in age, pretty, and sexually innocent. They love animals, pets and babies, and are sensitive to the suffering of other creatures (human and non-human) whom they nurture and coddle. Miyazaki’s heroines display these characteristics but they are also assertive, adventurous and courageous – like the conventional male hero.

The heroines of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds (1984) and Princess Mononoke (1997) also display social commitment and a crusading zeal.

 Chihiro of Spirited Away is a disappointing heroine in comparison with Nausicaa and San. She starts off as an ordinary over-protected child and matures in character and judgement through the gruelling tests she is submitted to in the course of the film, but she does not display crusading zeal. Her motivations are largely confined to her own survival – and the survival of her parents. Though peopled with a rich variety of fanciful creatures, monstrous and charming, frightening and witty, this is a limited and shrunken universe, bereft of Miyazaki’s larger social concerns.

 Miyazaki studied economics and politics at university before he became an animator and he normally raises social, political and environmental issues in his films. In this case, he has made a film closer to the Hollywood type of children’s film (eg The Wizard of Oz), in which the young heroine undergoes a series of adventures and trials in a fantasyland remote from the real wide world, and thereby becomes stronger in character – gaining self-reliance, courage and stamina. Miyazaki has admitted that he made this film for ten-year-old girls, not adults.

Some people find the absence of social sermonising in this film attractive. Clearly the awarders of the Oscars did. I would recommend Nausicaa or Princess Mononoke as superior works; they are not only beautifully executed animations, with wonderful flights of fancy; they are also impassioned by strong feelings about environmental degradation, political corruption, military aggression, human greed, animal rights and the awesome power of nature. But that is an adult point of view. If you have a ten-year-old daughter or granddaughter, take her to see Spirited Away – for, despite my reservations, it is still much more inventive and painterly than the best Disney productions.

Freda Freiberg