DADDY DAY CARE **
DIRECTED BY Steve Carr
STARRING Eddie Murphy, Jeff Garlin, Steve Zahn, Regina King
US 2003 92 mins.
SPIRITED AWAY ****1/2
DIRECTED BY Hayao Miyazaki
WITH THE VOICES OF Daveigh Chase, Suzanne Pleshette, Jason Marsden
Japan 2001 125 mins.
By Preston Wilder
KIDS have it good these days. “They’re selling fun,” grumbles the harridan (named Miss Harridan) whose snobby day-care centre is being threatened by Eddie Murphy and pals in Daddy Day Care. “I can’t compete with fun!” Kidpics seem to operate on the same principle, carefully erasing anything that may be perceived as not-fun by the prepubescent public. Understandable, but wrong: films – despite the conventional wisdom – are the rare case where you can compete with fun.
Daddy Day Care is actually quite painless, which is the best you can say of Eddie Murphy vehicles these days; it’s very much a ‘family film’, both in the sense that it’s family-friendly – Eddie loses his job and decides to start a day-care centre with two other guys – and that it carefully targets the whole family. Kids in the audience get ‘their’ jokes (mostly to do with farting and pooping) and the long-suffering parents get theirs, in the office humour and such stray gags as the Star Trek-obsessed geek who’s good with kids because he once read Dr Spock’s Baby and Child Care by mistake (get it?). And of course everyone can laugh at jokes about a fat man getting hit by a swing, stung by bees and/or kicked in the balls. (Fat people are funny.)
Yet the film is also irresponsible. It starts off with Eddie (still working for an ad agency) trying to push a healthy cereal called ‘Veggie-Os’, only to find that kids hate it and much prefer to eat ‘Chocolatey Chocolate Balls’. The film tut-tuts at this state of affairs, giving the impression that its hero stands for something – yet his day-care centre, once under way, turns out to be the educational equivalent of ‘Chocolatey Chocolate Balls’.
What does Daddy Day Care stand for? In a word: fun! At first, Eddie and his friends just let the kids run wild, doing whatever. Then they decide they ought to “feed their minds”, which apparently means Three Stooges festivals and a wrestling match between a giant carrot and a giant broccoli. Miraculously, the tykes end up learning anyway – a bratty kid becomes polite, a kid who hides behind a Flash costume finally takes it off, etc – and the daddies learn a lesson about What Really Matters in life. Score one for laissez-faire education, as opposed to Miss Harridan’s horrid school where the kids learn ‘structure’ and become fluent in five different languages.
Here’s the deal behind Daddy Day Care: raising kids is a minefield of competing theories, and there’s no way Hollywood’s going to alienate even one paying customer by espousing one theory over another. “Selling fun” is the best way to avoid giving offence, even if it makes for mindless mush. The irony, of course, is that no one’s more obsessed with giving their kids an ‘early start’ than rich, insecure, ultra-competitive Hollywood types, who’d never in a million years send their offspring to a day-care centre with no discipline and Three Stooges festivals. Daddy Day Care is pure hypocrisy – though only if you take it at face value, as a film aimed at families. In fact it’s a bland, pleasant placebo, aimed at parents at the end of their rope looking for a 90-minute babysitter.
Spirited Away, on the other hand ¼ Full disclosure: I haven’t seen this acclaimed cartoon adventure – it won an Oscar, and shared the Golden Bear at last year’s Berlin Festival – in over a year, not since being seduced by its charms at Toronto 13 months ago. It’s not that I don’t want to (quite the reverse), but I don’t want to watch it inexpertly dubbed into Greek, and the English version – which by all accounts is pretty good – is only showing at the Pantheon in Nicosia, which still shows films with an intermission. You know you’re besotted with a movie when you start setting conditions on how and where to watch it, lest the spell be broken.
This is directed by Hayao Miyazaki, the ‘Japanese Walt Disney’, and became the top-grossing film in Japanese history (overtaking even Titanic). Miyazaki is a genius, and anyone who loves Spirited Away is urged to check out his earlier films – Kiki’s Delivery Service, Laputa: Castle in the Sky and apparently My Neighbour Totoro, though I haven’t seen that one – all of which share its wondrously-detailed animation, wicked sense of humour and (the one thing missing in most Disney product) emotional delicacy, with a vibrant generosity towards its characters.
Stereotypes are bad (and unhelpful), but there is something ‘Japanese’ about the values in a Miyazaki: independence, self-assertion and parental authority barely come into it, the emphasis being instead on kindness, community and burgeoning emotion. The heroine of Spirited Away is a young girl named Chihiro, but there’s no proto-feminism or ‘Girl Power’, nor does the film really have a villain (the closest it gets is an old crone with an irresistible hint of Margaret Thatcher). Chihiro is independent in a matter-of-fact way, having to make her own way in a magical town when her parents are turned into pigs (a chilling scene with echoes of the Odyssey, but also the boys-into-donkeys of Pinocchio); highbrow types have called the film a tale of redemption through hard work – very ‘Japanese’, again – but it’s really not the kind of film you strip-mine for themes. In fact it’s a beautiful dream, earning comparisons with Alice in Wonderland.
Only when you watch a film like this do you realise how tightly plotted most American cartoons are – everything there for a reason, as you might expect when films are machine-made. This one, on the other hand, feels home-made (though Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli is a giant much like Disney) and its rhythm is the rhythm of fairytales back when they were told rather than written, before the Brothers Grimm made them compact and intelligible: we’re on one thing, then something else turns up and we wander off in pursuit. Some have carped that it’s overlong, but it’s one of those films where you only have to adjust to the rhythm, after which it could happily go on for ever.
It would take a page just to scratch the surface of the wonders on display, but here’s a partial list. The first appearance of the monsters as night falls – shadowy wraiths filling the town, a boat arriving in the darkness, playing-card shapes emerging from its cabins, birthing bodies as they walk. The flying dragon pursued by birds, which turn out to be scraps of paper. The train ride to the witch’s lair (such colours!). Little details, like the fact that you have to hold your breath as you walk across the magic bridge separating reality from fantasy. The supporting cast of frog-headed, canary-shaped beasties. Little black soot-balls with big eyes, which dance around the heroine’s feet begging her to feed them – so she throws them handfuls of tiny, multi-coloured stars. ‘Of course!’ nods the viewer, happily ensconced in the film’s beguiling universe. ‘What else would they eat?’ Kids used to be ignored by the movie business, but no more; nowadays they’re one of its mainstays, little cash-cows waiting to be milked. It helps that they’re so undiscriminating, happy to be fobbed off with cheerful crap like Daddy Day Care – but they also, very occasionally, get a real adventure with charm and humanity, and the rapturous detail of a new world ready-minted. “Can’t compete with fun”? Spirited Away goes beyond fun, into magic.
