Spirited Away by a Familiar Melody

Spirited Away by a Familiar Melody

Giles Chan is not a weeb.

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.

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. 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.

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.

Trying to recount this film now feels anecdotal because it was such a formative childhood memory (at least for this ailing millennial). Listening to the soundtrack is like flipping through a family photo album, coated in dust and worn down by time. Fortunately, however, the digital age brings with it certain caveats - one of which is the ability to perfectly preserve audio and to be able to listen to it anywhere. It’s like carrying a piece of childhood with us wherever we go and, in a way, this is the sentiment at the heart of Hisaishi’s music.

I tried to analyse the harmony in ‘One Summer Day’, the piece that introduces the film’s leitmotif, and I really struggled (despite my aptitude as a C- student in Year Ten music). But I think this is sort of the point. Hisaishi shies away from typical chordal structures that involve major, minor, or even dirtier seventh chords. He uses a whole mix of notes that make them sound somewhat indistinguishable. Ambiguous. They create a feeling of tension that is often never resolved. His music takes us on a soaring journey through the sky, except the clouds get in the way and they block our view – our destination is a mystery. Like Chihiro, we are left in a somewhat liminal space. We aren’t sure what we came here to do or even where we are.

But the music does not intend to disorient or confuse us - quite the opposite. It wants us to remember. It paints a familiar portrait of childhood when things were simpler. When life was a game to be played and not a game to be won. For the time we spend watching the film we are spirited away to a place where we can look back fondly on a memory. Despite the melancholy, the feeling that things can never be the way they once were, we can always stop for a moment to cherish those memories that will always be with us.

Spirited Away by a Familiar Melody