Films of the 00s: Spirited Away

A shame about Ponyo, which is often (surprise!) a kick to look at but is so lacking in narrative cohesion or persuasive emotion, and is so dully voiced by the dubbed cast of Anglo celebrities and, in two instances, their squealy younger siblings. Miyazaki really misses on this one, I think, even if my expectations were inevitably raised by the preceding weekend's return to Spirited Away. I have only seen Miyazaki's last three films, but isn't there a pretty general consensus that this is his masterpiece? It's not without its tiny flaws, but it's such a sumptuous work of imagination. Where you can see the demographic that he's trying to please with Ponyo, there's no way he made Spirited Away for anyone but himself, with all the weirdness and ambiguity that implies. From my new review:

"Chihiro's tasks are trickily superimposed: finding her parents and changing them back into humans, finding their way home, learning a new job, making sense of her companions and fairweather friends, assuaging the fiery Yubaba, working through a proto-attraction to the mysterious and changeable Haku. Because Miyazaki entitles each of these figures and plotlines to their own healthy measure of non-transparency, young Chihiro has an exaggerated but nonetheless a fully persuasive experience of adolescent confusion on multiple fronts. She herself is more rounded than the petulant but slightly blank and compulsory Ofelia of Pan's Labyrinth, and I appreciate that Miyazaki insists for so long and in such detail on the ornate workings of the bathhouse—has a center of relaxation ever demanded so much dizzying organization and helter-skelter commotion?—that it has a freestanding and magisterial integrity beyond its contingent role as a test of Chihiro's mettle. You have a sense that she has truly entered a perplexing, maddening, and magical world, rather than a hunch that an inventive filmmaker has devised some fancy tableaux for her to fumble through on her way to certain triumph. (keep reading...)