Food and cooking feature prominently in the films of Studio Ghibli’s legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki. They are central to the odyssey of young Chihiro in Spirited Away (2001) as she stumbles through a portal to find her parents turned into pigs after feasting, uninvited, at a sorceress’s banquet.
There are many other meals in this lavishly imaginative surtitled adaptation from Japan, which is meticulous in its visual detail and choreography, delightful in its puppetry, both meditative and whirling in its speed, and packed full of comedy and adventure. But it does come to feel like a gargantuan meal with too many dishes, all of them delicious, but a surfeit nonetheless.
As we follow Chihiro (Mone Kamishiraishi) into the magical bathhouse of gods and spirits, it is hard not to compare John Caird’s production with the RSC’s immaculate My Neighbour Totoro. As an animation, Spirited Away is seen as the more perfect masterpiece, often branded the best animation of all time, complete with its myriad mythic creatures and Homeric questing.
While superbly performed, it is a harder challenge to animate its emotional life because it is so dominated by action and spectacle. The love story between Chihiro and the sorceress’s apprentice, Haku (Kotaro Daigo) is delicate and heartfelt; the scene in which Haku offers Chihiro rice balls is full of plaintive tenderness.
Caird, who co-adapted the film with Maoko Imai, is an associate director at the RSC and this has the same fluidity as Totoro across all the elements. There is an almost constantly reconfiguring set by Jon Bausor, including a revolve that takes us to different parts of the bathhouse, and the same spectacular addition of music and song, with a magnificent score by Joe Hisaishi (who also composed My Neighbour Totoro).
The music is one of the show’s greatest strengths and brings especially wondrous effects through its percussive accompaniments, with a kabuki-like feel that heightens comic elements. But more than that, it adds sweeping emotion and an epic feel.
The production begins and ends with a screen conjuring slanting rain or smoke in black and white, sometimes spreading its effects across the surfaces of Bausor’s set, so that it looks like a 3D graphic novel.
Sachiko Nakahara’s costumes stand out too, much more elaborate than Totoro’s, and the puppetry designed by Toby Olié is a combination of the cute, magical and comic. There is no puppet that matches the physical scale and surprise of Basil Twist’s in Totoro but they are no less imaginative – maybe more so. Sorceress Yubaba (Mari Natsuki) turns into a gigantic face held by several puppeteers, coal-man Kamaji (Tomorowo Taguchi) is a characterful arachnoid-human hybrid and No-Face (Hikaru Yamano) becomes the scariest creation of the show as a hideously engorged monster of the bath-house. The sooty coal carriers of the boiler room have an uncanny resemblance to the soot sprites in Totoro and are sweet, but not quite as lively.
The physical movement is symphonic, not only in the reconfiguring set but the quantity of parts on stage. The magical transformations and special effects are kept emphatically lo-fi – the water around the bathhouse is wavering light, the morphing of the parents to pigs is done with masks and Chihiro’s transparency when she enters the magic world is achieved deftly with a sheer sheet. When Yubaba’s twin miniaturises her sister’s attendants, they spin behind a curtain and emerge as their new selves. But the minute clever flourishes can become confusing too.
There is plenty of comedy but it irons away some of the terror that Chihiro feels in this world. The lyrical Ghibli pauses, which Miyazaki describes as “ma” or emptiness, are here in abundance, capturing some of the poetry of the film. Like Chihiro’s world, it is utterly magical but this banquet of a show also leaves you stuffed, like her parents.
• At the Coliseum, London, until 24 August
