Alex Garland names his favourite animated movie
When it comes to the narrative arts, it’s fair to say that Alex Garland has pretty much seen it all. From novels to movies to video games – throughout his career, if there’s a story to be told in a given medium, chances are that Garland has at least tried his hand at telling one.
Garland first came to the public’s attention in 1996 when his debut novel, The Beach, was published. The book was later made into a film adaptation starring Leonardo DiCaprio by Danny Boyle, who Garland would work with again as the screenwriter for the director’s 2002 horror film 28 Days Later and his 2007 sci-fi project Sunshine.
Garland has also written for the video games Enslaved: Odyssey to the West and DmC: Devil May Cry, but one work that’s never been released with Garland’s name on it is an animated movie or TV show, which is interesting because the director and writer has previously expressed his love for the medium.
In a feature with Rotten Tomatoes, Garland once named his five favourite films of all time and said that Hayao Miyazaki’s 2001 gem Spirited Away is right up there. “I really love animation. Like with all of the films on this list, I don’t think at any point in Spirited Away, I was able to anticipate the next thing that would happen,” he said. “It’s got probably close to among the most striking imagery I’ve ever seen in a film.”
Spirited Away is widely considered one of the greatest animated movies of all time, so Garland’s admiration for it is more than understandable. The Studio Ghibli masterpiece tells of a young girl, Chihiro Ogino, who inadvertently enters the world of the Japanese spirits when he parents are turned into pigs by a witch for displaying greed. She must then take a job in a spirit bathhouse in order to find a way for them to regain their human form.
“It got under my skin in a particular way,” Garland added. “As sheer pleasure, it’s probably the film on this list I’ve enjoyed the most, and on some instinctive level, felt the most right, that I felt like I would like to walk into that world and be part of that world, which is the kind of thing I used to feel about films when I was a kid.”
Check out the trailer for Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, Alex Garland’s favourite animated movie of all time, below.
