Spirited Away

I have recently watch for the second time Miyazaki's Spirited Away, I was struck instantly by how beautiful the visuals are in the film and I think the first time I watched it I didn't pay enough attention to the films visuals and instead just catagorized it with all the anime films I had seen previously. This was a huge mistake, for two reasons first of all the drawings and scenes of Spirited Away are truely spectacular in their own right and secondly is the clever but very subtle use of cgi within this animated film.

I have also just watch Origin-Spirits of the Past on a recommendation and I it useful to compare both films. Particularly on the use of cgi within them. Both choose to animate certain areas of the film with cgi, in Origin it is the huge industrial and war machines of Ragnar wheres Spirited Away purposefully kept the cgi lower key so that it "didn't steal the show" using it for hte large expences of water and other areas. Its not just the way that its used for two different areas in the films that interests me, it is how in Spirited Away it is so well blended into the handrawn animation. You can hardly tell which bits of the film are done with cgi programs, to the point that the first time I watched the film I don't think i noticed it at all.

These two films share a lot of similarities particularly in their message. Studio Ghibli always have quite environmentally themed messages in their films, notabley Princess Monoko along with Spirited Away. I felt it was particularly well illustrated in Spirited Away in the scene when Gehiro is washing the sludge spirit and pulls the handle of a bicycle out of the spirit drawing out a huge pile of rubbish revealing that it was in fact a river spirit that had been polluted by humans. This expressed the message about humans mistreating the environment perfectly. Origins does similarly in its entire backstory and takes this as the setting for the film, the forest took the abuse of humanity until it decided to save itself by becoming hostile towards humity. The role reversal almost of humanity destroying the environment I found really portrayed the message that it should be treated with more respect.