Spirited Away
I just watched a masterpiece. I came home from a football game with my legs hurting everywhere, knowing I would be dead sore the next day, and I put it on while I ate. It is almost midnight now and I am tired, but I want to get this down while the feeling is still here, right after finishing it.
I had seen pieces of it before without knowing it. The shot of the girl on the train, I had seen that as a wallpaper somewhere, more than once, and I never knew where it came from. Part of me thinks the whole thing passed through me as a kid, four or five, the way Hunter x Hunter must have at that age and left nothing behind. I don't actually think I watched it. But it felt familiar before it had any right to. It is from 2001.
To me it is not an anime. It is a piece of art. I want to personally thank everyone who made it, because I have never watched anything, anime or film, with this much attention to detail. The small things, the parts that get no screen time anywhere else, the quiet moments other stories rush straight past, here it is all about them. That is the whole thing, and I cannot hand it to you by explaining it. You only get it when you are watching it.
No one told me to watch it. I asked an AI for something different, something outside my usual taste, because I had started to feel like everything I watch is milked, the same stories over and over, and I wanted something that would hit my brain like nothing else does anymore. This was one of those.
The voices got me in a way that almost never happens. I watched the Japanese version with Arabic subtitles and I do not understand a single word of Japanese, and my ears just loved it anyway, the speaking, the sound of it. There is a scene near the end, where the names matter, that I went back and watched a second time before I let myself move on.
The story itself is very simple and I did not care, not for a second. Normally I argue with a film while I watch it, does this make sense, does that hold up. This time that never happened, not once. The story was never the thing. It is how slow it is, how calm, how every single screen is just good. And the hero is the most ordinary kind, a normal girl, completely natural, and the film trusts that.
There is a lot in it I still do not understand, and I am going to go read about it tomorrow. It never got in the way. If anything it landed harder for the parts I could not explain.
It is one of those you are meant to see before you die, and I do not care what it won. It is unforgettable. I went looking for something new and the thing that hit hardest is twenty five years old. It is always the old ones. It is always the old ones.