Strange, but true; Disney have never yet won the Academy Award for Best Animated Film, and that’s unlikely to change this year if there’s any justice in the world. For even the impressive box-office swagger of the House of Mouse’s Finding Nemo will surely be no match for the eccentric beauty of Sylvain Chomet’s Belleville Rendez-Vous, if form is anything to go by. The animation categories have always seemed significantly less suspect than regular Oscars. Hence, Nick Park’s Wallace & Gromit won out over Mickey Mouse’s comeback bizillion dollar CGI/3D outing with bells on it, and last year’s worthy winner of the big gong was the sublime Spirited Away, from Japanese manga master Miyakzaki.
A hallucinogenic affair with shades of of Lewis Carroll and Mervyn Peake, Spirited sees it’s displaced ten-year old heroine wander into a haunted themepark only to become enslaved, while her parents are turned into pigs. Before she can contrive to escape, she undergoes a series of surreal encounters with shape-shifting creatures. In this place soot can become a group of workaholic spiders; Okutaresama, (a lumbering shit-monster that would put Prometheus off his dinner) transforms into a magical river sprite; her friend Haku is also a white dragon and the puppyish monster No Face becomes a psychopathic cannibal.
The aesthetic will be familiar to anime fans, but the hand-drawn images are considerably more pleasing than the average episode of Pokemon. There’s a wonderful dreamscape quality to the film – it’s ghostly railways, intangible beings and swiftly shifting realities make you feel like you’re consuming the competing interpretations of Alice In Wonderland by Carroll, Disney and Svankmajer all at once.
Even a piano score that sounds like it was banged out by a drunken Richard Clayderman wannabe doesn’t detract from this extravagantly enchanting and oceanic indulgence.