I'm pleased to announce the publication of my new book about Hayao
Miyazaki's Spirited Away, which should be hitting British shops in the
next few days. It discusses the film's themes and explores its
production history, with plenty of quotes from Miyazaki and his
colleagues and more than sixty colour stills.
Spirited Away: BFI Film Classics is a British Film Institute book
published by Palgrave Macmillan. The RRP is =A39.99 and the author is
Andrew Osmond.
A cover image is available on this page:
http://filmstore.bfi.org.uk/acatalog/info_8070.html
(There is one inaccuary on this page; it claims the book is 96 pages
long, when it's actually 121 pages long.)
Here's the book blurb:
'Spirited Away, directed by the veteran anime film-maker Hayao
Miyazaki, is Japan=92s most successful film, and one of the top-grossing
=91foreign language=92 films ever released. The film is a wildly
imaginative fantasy, at once personal and universal. It tells the
story of a listless little girl who stumbles into a magical world
where gods relax in a palatial bathhouse, where there are giant babies
and hard-working soot sprites, and where a train runs across the
sea.
'Andrew Osmond=92s insightful study describes how Miyazaki wrote,
storyboarded and directed Spirited Away with a degree of creative
control undreamt of in most popular cinema, using the film=92s
delightful, freewheeling visual ideas to explore issues ranging from
personal agency and responsibility to what Miyazaki sees as the
lamentable state of modern Japan. Osmond unpacks the film=92s visual
language, which many Western (and some Japanese) audiences find both
beautiful and bewildering. He traces connections between Spirited
Away and Miyazaki=92s prior body of work, arguing that Spirited Away
uses the cartoon medium to create a compellingly immersive drawn
world.'
'Andrew Osmond is a freelance film journalist based in Berk****re. He
writes for a range of film publications including Sight and Sound,
Empire and SFX.'
All best,
ANDREW OSMOND
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