Spirited Away, BFI Film Classics, Andrew Osmond, reviewed

Published: 05-28-2020, ISBN: 9781838719524

Imprint: British Film Institute, available from Bloomsbury here

Spirited Away, directed by the veteran anime film-maker Hayao Miyazaki, is Japan’s most successful film, and one of the top-grossing ‘foreign language’ films ever released. Set in modern Japan, the film is a wildly imaginative fantasy, at once personal and universal. It tells the story of a listless little girl, Chihiro, who stumbles into a magical world where gods relax in a palatial bathhouse, where there are giant babies and hard-working soot sprites, and where a train
runs across the sea.

Andrew Osmond’s insightful study describes how Miyazaki directed Spirited Away with a degree of creative control undreamt of in most popular cinema, using the film’s delightful, freewheeling visual ideas to explore issues ranging from personal agency and responsibility to what Miyazaki sees as the lamentable state of modern Japan.

Osmond unpacks the film’s visual language, which many Western (and some Japanese) audiences find both beautiful and bewildering. He traces connections between Spirited Away and Miyazaki’s prior body of work, arguing that Spirited Away uses the cartoon medium to create a compellingly immersive drawn world.

This edition includes a new foreword by the author in which he considers the world of animated cinema post-Spirited Away, considering its influence on films ranging from del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth to Pixar’s Inside Out.

Spirited Away, BFI Film Classics, Andrew Osmond, reviewed

Perhaps the most well known movie from the Studio Ghibli stable, to quote Wikipedia. “It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 75th Academy Awards, making it the first and only hand-drawn and non-English-language animated film to win that award.” It certainly helped to bring the Ghibli style to a much wider audience.

As a westerner the first time we watched Studio Ghibli movies we were blown away by the artwork, it was a beautiful, visual experience. The kids engaged with the characters, but sometimes, as the adult you were just enjoying the visual parade of colours and images. In some ways Spirited Away would have been much less of a favourite in our household. It was only watched once, whereas Totoro was a repeat view classic, along with Ponyo, Howl’s Moving Castle, Lupin the 3rd, and most of the others too. In this context Osmond’s book is a refreshing way to reconsider the value of Spirited Away and the impact that it had globally.

Osmond covers a wide range of ground in terms of the movie, it’s production and the team that created it. This all makes for a good read, while still coming in at under 100 pages, making it long enough to geek out, without it becoming too long or too obsessive. The updated foreward also factors in the positive influence of John Lassater in helping the Studio Ghibli movies to a wider US and global audience.

Overall Osmond showcases the joy, quirkiness and difference that the Studio Ghibli movies have brought to the world.

More about Irish Tech News and Business Showcase here.

FYI the ROI for you is => Irish Tech News now gets over 1.5 million monthly views, and up to 900k monthly unique visitors, from over 160 countries. We have over 860,000 relevant followers on Twitter on our various accounts & were recently described as Ireland’s leading online tech news site and Ireland’s answer to TechCrunch, so we can offer you a good audience!

Since introducing desktop notifications a short time ago, which notify readers directly in their browser of new articles being published, over 50,000 people have now signed up to receive them ensuring they are instantly kept up to date on all our latest content. Desktop notifications offer a unique method of serving content directly to verified readers and bypass the issue of content getting lost in people’s crowded news feeds.

Drop us a line if you want to be featured, guest post, suggest a possible interview or just let us know what you would like to see more of in our future articles. We’re always open to new and interesting suggestions for informative and different articles.

If you would like to be featured in our podcast series drop us a line & don’t forget to sign up for notifications for our latest episodes and follow us on Twitter, Linkedin, SoundCloud, iTunes or your own favourite podcast platform.

Contact us, by email, twitter or whatever social media works for you and hopefully, we can share your story too and reach our global audience. We are agile, responsive, quick and talented, we look forward to working with you!

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at Simon@IrishTechNews.ie or on Twitter: @SimonCocking