Spirited Away (BFI Film Classics)

About this book

Spirited Away directed by the veteran anime film-maker Hayao Miyazaki is Japans 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 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 Osmonds insightful study describes how Miyazaki wrote storyboarded and directed Spirited Away with a degree of creative control undreamt of in most popular cinema using the films 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 films visual language which many Western (and some Japanese) audiences find both beautiful and sometimes bewildering. He traces connections between Spirited Away and Miyazakis prior body of work and provides an account of the films production and the creative differences between Miyazaki and his collaborators arguing that Spirited Away uses the cartoon medium to create a compellingly immersive drawn world.