A stage adaptation of the Studio Ghibli film is weird, stylish and wonderful
in 2022 and now we have this stylish Japanese-language version of Miyazaki’s 2001 Oscar winner, a film widely considered to be one of the best animated pictures of all time.
Those unfamiliar with the film will be benignly baffled by goings-on here – but that said, I have seen the movie and I was gently puzzled by some of that, too. Forpresents a magical, dystopian, Wonderland-like world which, exactly as Alice found when she hurtled down that famous rabbit hole, abides by the rules of its own highly idiosyncratic interior logic.
Chihiro, meanwhile, stumbles on, into what turns out to be a bathhouse for the gods, presided over by a witch named Yubaba . The episodic narrative delights in wrongfooting Chihiro ; each new encounter compels her to decide who, if anyone, she should trust.Director John Caird offers an adaptation that is, sensibly, highly faithful to the film; those paying an eye-watering £225 for stalls tickets are not going to stand for much deviation.
Amid such delights, there are problems. The English captions are awkwardly projected on screens that are too far to the side of the wide stage. The grandeur of the Coliseum space also affords us no close-ups of the shifting expressions, of fear, resolve and resilience, on the face of our young heroine as she pushes indomitably on to save the grown-ups. Yet the strange and powerful magic of Miyazaki transcends everything and holds us enrapt in its spell.
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