![]() ![]() ![]() “Spirited Away” is one of several Miyazaki masterpieces screening this spring as part of TIFF Bell Lightbox’s POP Japan series, which also includes spotlights on the jazzy, surrealistic crime films of the director’s countryman Seijun Suzuki and a survey of several seminal anime titles aimed primarily at adolescent audiences.īoth “Spirited Away” and 1988’s “My Neighbor Totoro” arrive at TIFF festooned with unlikely laurels, having recently cracked the British Film Institute’s decennial poll of the top 100 movies of all time - the only animated titles on the list, and each in their way sterling examples of Miyazaki’s ability to filter elements of native culture through larger, global fairy-tale archetypes. It’s an instantly indelible tableau conjoining weightless enchantment with a precise and everyday sense of boredom: it’s somehow familiar and mysterious, like the memory of a dream. If Miyazaki’s work has a signature image it may be that of 10-year-old Chihiro, the intrepid heroine of 2002’s sublime coming-of-age fable “Spirited Away,” seated silently next to a hooded, benign spirit on a seaside ghost train headed into some other, ephemeral realm. ![]() While Ghibli’s films have often performed like blockbusters, they’re artworks, not product, reaching beyond formula toward something ineffable. At best, “Mario” is a victory lap around a sprawling stretch of intellectual property. ![]()
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