Empire Magazine Greatest Movies List

Empire Magazine Greatest Movies List - #339: Spirited Away

The United-States has Pixar and Disney, but Japan has Studio Ghibli. Its founder Hayao Miyazaki has directed many of its most successful titles, including 2001’s “Spirited Away” which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and became the highest grossing film in Japan. Like many of the studio’s greatest hits, it uses hand-drawn animation to create a fantasy world filled with creatures you can only dream of and then animate. The title is appropriate, as “Spirited Away” takes you for a ride into a spirit world.

I first saw this Ghibli creation in January of 2012, as my brother had received it for Christmas. That’s pretty much how it has been going during Christmastime for the past few years in my family: we buy each other movies or TV shows, watch a few in the days after December 25 and then we move on into the new year. It’s nice to take a few hours out of the busy holiday season to just sit in front of the television and watch a movie as a family, even if we don’t always have the same taste in movies. I am pretty sure our mom had never seen a Japanese animated movie, but it was one of the most family friendly titles on my brother’s Christmas list: we could have ended up watching the first season of Robot Chicken.

Set in a less crude environment, “Spirited Away” opens in modern-day Japan as ten-year-old Chihiro Ogino (voice of Daveigh Chase) and her parents (Michael Chiklis and Lauren Holly) are travelling to their new home. Like most kids her age, Chihiro is not looking forward to adapting to a new home. Her trip takes an extended hiatus when her father makes a wrong turn and they end up at what they think is an abandoned amusement park. Starving, Chihiro’s parents eat at an empty restaurant stall. While they are busy stuffing their faces, Chihiro meets Haku (Jason Marsden) a young boy who warns her to leave before the sun sets.

Unfortunately for her it is too late. By the time she finds her parents the have been transformed into two pigs stuffing their faces and they are all trapped in the park. In order to help her survive in this world, Haku helps Chihiro get a job at the bathhouse, a massive building run by the witch Yubaba (Suzanne Pleshette). It is there that the animators go wild. The bathhouse is filled with ghosts, spiders, frogs, dragons and other assorted creatures. One of the most intriguing looking is Kamaji (David Ogden Stiers) a six-armed engineer who operates the bathhouse’s boiler room.

While working at the bathhouse, Chihiro learns the rules of the game. Yubaba controls both her and Haku through their names. Once she forgets her name, she will be stuck there forever. As she helps certain spirits and explores the world of the bathhouse, she forms a plan to free both herself and her parents.

This makes for a simple a strong storyline. A young heroine is stuck in a magical world and must embark on a quest to save herself and her family. All along she of course forges a friendship with Haku who ends up needing her as much as she needs him.

Then there is the story’s villain. You see a witch called Yubaba who can transform into a giant bird and holds a ten-year-old prisoner, and you immediately think this old crone is nothing but pure evil. Yet she is an interesting character who does care for at least one person in the bathhouse: her gigantic son, whom she keeps inside a room filled with toys and pillows.

All of these characters, creatures and spirits are brought to life thanks to gorgeous hand-drawn animation Studio Ghibli is known for. While most American animation studios have gone the way of computer generated imagery, Ghibli’s pencils remain firmly on paper. They still manage to create gorgeous backgrounds and creatures. One not-so gorgeous creature is a spirit of a polluted river that is carrying so much grim and filth it sends the bathhouse into a panic. Seeing all of the creatures in the bathhouse trying to wash that filthy spirit is one of the most impressive sequences in the entire movie.

This movie is a feat for the imagination for its story, characters and the animation that brought it all to life. If you like Japanese anime, or animated movies in general, it makes for a great Christmas present.

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #147: Notorious

Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) has many of the master director’s signature elements: spies, lies, a handsome leading man, a domineering mother, and of course a MacGuffin. As it is set after World War II the villains are logically former Nazis, but the plot is so tense in many scenes that it remains an effective thriller to this day. It also bears a huge influence on John Woo’s Mission Impossible 2 , which retains plot elements and similar dialogue, but of course has more explosions than all of Hitchcock’s films put together. Notorious is so well-made it can be studies in film classes, which is exactly what I did while taking a course on Hollywood Cinema 1930-1960 during the summer of 2009 at the University of British Columbia. As this is Hitchcock we are talking about here, there are subtler things to analyze than explosions in Notorious , no offense to the skills of Mr. John Woo. Famously there is a kissing scene between stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman that seemingly las...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #91: Return of the Jedi

If you want someone to give you death stares, tell a die-hard Star Wars fan the original trilogy is not perfect. I am however going to take a risk and write that if there is one major flaw with Return of the Jedi (1983) is a lack of imagination when it comes to the central plot. After the good guys blow up the Death Star in the first movie, the bad guys are almost done building a brand new one, which of course needs to be destroyed again in more or less the same way. Richard Marquand may be directing this time, but it was still George Lucas writing. Plot hole aside, as a kid you can’t help but have fun as the good guys join forces with a tribe of living teddy bears to get the job done. Like many people in their early 30s, I was introduced to the first Star Wars trilogy by my parents who had recorded the movies, commercials included, when they were showing one night on TV. Upon first viewing, a few things stick out in the mind of a young boy watching Return of the Jedi such as:...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #85: Blue Velvet

Exactly how do you describe a David Lynch movie? He is one of the few directors whose style is so distinctive that his last name has become an adjective. According to Urban Dictionary, the definition of Lynchian is: “having the same balance between the macabre and the mundane found in the works of filmmaker David Lynch.” To see a prime example of that adjective film lovers need look no further than Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), which does indeed begin in the mundane before slowly sinking in macabre violence. My first introduction to the world of David Lynch was through his ground breaking, but unfortunately interrupted, early 1990s TV series Twin Peaks . This was one of the first television shows to grab viewers with a series-long mystery: who killed Laura Palmer? A mix of soap opera, police procedural, and the supernatural, it is a unique show that showed the darkness hidden in suburbia and remains influential to this day. Featuring Kyle MacLachlan as an FBI investigator with a l...

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