Self
Bella Ramsey
Self
Soccer Aid
6.9
2006
14 Seasons • 24 Episodes
Overview
Soccer Aid is a biennial British charity event that has raised £6.5 million in aid of UNICEF UK through ticket sales and donations. The event is a football match between two teams of celebrities and former professional players, representing England and the Rest of the World. Television coverage began on ITV on 22 May 2006 in a show presented by Ant & Dec. Soccer Aid was initiated by Robbie Williams and Jonathan Wilkes. The event returned on 7 September 2008 and again on 6 June 2010. England beat Rest of the World in 2012.
Cast
Reviews
✦ AI-generated review
The Architecture of Names
In the modern lexicon of cinema, few films understand the terror of childhood quite like Hayao Miyazaki’s *Spirited Away* (2001). It is a film that begins not with a bang, but with a whine—a sullen ten-year-old girl named Chihiro, clutching a wilting bouquet in the backseat of a car, mourning the loss of her familiar world. This opening is crucial because it frames the fantastical journey that follows not as an escape, but as a confrontation. Miyazaki does not offer us a wonderland to retreat into; he presents a spiritual bureaucracy that demands labor, strips away identity, and asks a terrifyingly adult question: Who are you when your name is stolen?
Visually, the film is a masterclass in overwhelming the senses to evoke the sublime. The bathhouse, the film’s central set piece, is a towering, steam-choked monument to greed and excess. Miyazaki’s visual language here is dense and suffocating; every frame is packed with spirits, food, gold, and grime. The grotesquerie of the "Stink Spirit" sequence—where a river god is purged of decades of human refuse, from bicycles to fishing line—is rendered with a tactile viscosity that makes the viewer feel the weight of pollution. Yet, Miyazaki juxtaposes this chaotic maximalism with moments of profound stillness, or *ma*. The celebrated train sequence, where Chihiro travels across a flooded landscape in silence, is the film’s visual thesis. It is a pause in the narrative breath, a melancholic reflection on the spaces between where we were and where we are going. The shadows of passengers on the train, featureless and quiet, suggest a world of weary commuters that exists parallel to the magic, grounding the fantasy in a somber reality.
At the heart of this spectacle is a radical subversion of the coming-of-age narrative. Chihiro is not a "chosen one." She possesses no secret magic, no hidden lineage, and no weapon. Her power lies entirely in her capacity for empathy and her resilience in the face of labor. When her parents succumb to a gluttonous stupor—a sharp critique of the mindless consumption of Japan’s bubble economy—Chihiro survives by getting a job. The film treats labor not as a punishment, but as a grounding force. By scrubbing floors and serving spirits, she earns her place in a hostile world. Her interactions with No-Face, a lonely entity who consumes others to fill his own void, further underscore this theme. While the rest of the bathhouse operates on a transactional basis, bowing to No-Face’s gold, Chihiro rejects the transaction entirely. She offers him help not for reward, but because she recognizes his hollowness.
*Spirited Away* remains a towering achievement because it refuses to condescend to its audience. It acknowledges that the transition from childhood to adulthood is a form of violence—a shedding of the old self (quite literally, in the loss of Chihiro’s name to become "Sen"). It suggests that in a world driven by consumption and greed, the most radical act of rebellion is to remember who you are and to extend kindness without the expectation of profit. Miyazaki has not just animated a fairytale; he has drawn a map for navigating the spiritual perils of the modern world.
In the modern lexicon of cinema, few films understand the terror of childhood quite like Hayao Miyazaki’s *Spirited Away* (2001). It is a film that begins not with a bang, but with a whine—a sullen ten-year-old girl named Chihiro, clutching a wilting bouquet in the backseat of a car, mourning the loss of her familiar world. This opening is crucial because it frames the fantastical journey that follows not as an escape, but as a confrontation. Miyazaki does not offer us a wonderland to retreat into; he presents a spiritual bureaucracy that demands labor, strips away identity, and asks a terrifyingly adult question: Who are you when your name is stolen?
Visually, the film is a masterclass in overwhelming the senses to evoke the sublime. The bathhouse, the film’s central set piece, is a towering, steam-choked monument to greed and excess. Miyazaki’s visual language here is dense and suffocating; every frame is packed with spirits, food, gold, and grime. The grotesquerie of the "Stink Spirit" sequence—where a river god is purged of decades of human refuse, from bicycles to fishing line—is rendered with a tactile viscosity that makes the viewer feel the weight of pollution. Yet, Miyazaki juxtaposes this chaotic maximalism with moments of profound stillness, or *ma*. The celebrated train sequence, where Chihiro travels across a flooded landscape in silence, is the film’s visual thesis. It is a pause in the narrative breath, a melancholic reflection on the spaces between where we were and where we are going. The shadows of passengers on the train, featureless and quiet, suggest a world of weary commuters that exists parallel to the magic, grounding the fantasy in a somber reality.
At the heart of this spectacle is a radical subversion of the coming-of-age narrative. Chihiro is not a "chosen one." She possesses no secret magic, no hidden lineage, and no weapon. Her power lies entirely in her capacity for empathy and her resilience in the face of labor. When her parents succumb to a gluttonous stupor—a sharp critique of the mindless consumption of Japan’s bubble economy—Chihiro survives by getting a job. The film treats labor not as a punishment, but as a grounding force. By scrubbing floors and serving spirits, she earns her place in a hostile world. Her interactions with No-Face, a lonely entity who consumes others to fill his own void, further underscore this theme. While the rest of the bathhouse operates on a transactional basis, bowing to No-Face’s gold, Chihiro rejects the transaction entirely. She offers him help not for reward, but because she recognizes his hollowness.
*Spirited Away* remains a towering achievement because it refuses to condescend to its audience. It acknowledges that the transition from childhood to adulthood is a form of violence—a shedding of the old self (quite literally, in the loss of Chihiro’s name to become "Sen"). It suggests that in a world driven by consumption and greed, the most radical act of rebellion is to remember who you are and to extend kindness without the expectation of profit. Miyazaki has not just animated a fairytale; he has drawn a map for navigating the spiritual perils of the modern world.