Spirited Away by a Familiar Melody Giles Chan is not a weeb.
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Long stretches of meadow, emerald-green grass, a deep sky of azure. Geriatric mills made of crumbling bricks – barely standing. Pigeons. Deer. Rushing past from left to right. Your eyes try to find a steady point on the horizon to hold onto as the scene brushes past the frame of the window. You remember that you’re on a train – on your way somewhere. The sunlight seemingly switches off as you enter a tunnel.
Chihiro searches for answers from familiar characters in a half-remembered setting. She loses herself in this self-contained world of whimsical creatures and spirits. It could be a dream or it could even be a memory. The music doesn’t seem to want to give us an answer. Sweeping melodies carry us through the air, further and further away from reality – from any semblance of clarity – as if we had been rescued from danger. And indeed we have.
Evasive. Fleeting. What does age do to us? Where does she keep our memories? Memories of green taken away from us, leaving us in our fever dream of cars and skyscrapers. Vast digital corridors. Turn your back for a moment and the world has shifted around you. There is no respite in the future, only an ever-changing bridge that assembles itself with each forward step you take. We turn our heads to find the island that we have fled so far away from.
The composer of the film Spirited Away Joe Hisaishi has written music for nearly every Studio Ghibli film to date, compiling an impressive library of tunes to accompany the magical images put to screen, and this one is no exception. Spirited Away was made in 2001, twenty years ago – and the author of this article is willing to bet that a large majority of this magazine’s readership came into the world around that time and would have spent some time with Chihiro and her friends not long after.
Due to structural deficits, we are cutting the rest of the Pelly Facts...
