Brain Food #532
The film makes itself
Thoughts of the day
I recently (and finally) made the time to watch the sublime Spirited Away, Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece, and the first non-English film in history to receive an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
Miyazaki wanted to make a young female lead that broke the stereotypes of what a pre-teen girl should look and behave like. Chihiro is a normal girl, with no superhero powers, and she is all the more memorable as a character because of that. Finally, young girls had someone to look up to that was exactly like them.
Surprisingly, Chihiro’s character was not entirely defined when the production of the film began. In fact, the film did not have a script at all, a usual practice for Miyazaki, who develops the storyline as the production unfolds. His methods offer a strange sense of reassurance about life itself, that everything falls into place in the end, even if it may not be as we had originally imagined:
"Yes, there is an internal order, the demands of the story itself, which lead me to the conclusion. There are 1415 different shots in Spirited Away. When starting the project, I had envisioned about 1200, but the film told me no, it had to be more than 1200. It's not me who makes the film. The film makes itself and I have no choice but to follow.”
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