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.
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Reviews
✦ AI-generated review
The Space Between the Clapping
What I love most about *Spirited Away* is that it opens on a bad mood. Big fantasy films usually arrive with trumpets; Hayao Miyazaki starts his 2001 masterpiece with a ten-year-old sprawled sulkily in the back of an Audi, clutching a wilting bouquet of sweet peas. Chihiro is moving, and she hates it. That opening has always felt honest to me because it refuses to crown her as special. No prophecy, no hidden gift, no chosen-child glow. Just a kid whose whole body is folded into resentment.
When her father takes that idiotic shortcut into the abandoned amusement park that turns out to be a bathhouse for spirits, Miyazaki doesn’t frame it like a grand portal-crossing. It feels accidental, almost embarrassing, like the kind of mistake you can’t undo once darkness falls. And once the lanterns start glowing and the shadows stretch, the fear becomes intensely physical. The way Chihiro moves is half the point: shoulders jammed to her ears, knees locked, scrambling backward on her hands and feet like some panicked crab. Rumi Hiiragi, about thirteen when she voiced the role, gives Chihiro this wonderfully rough texture. She’s breathless, annoyed, scared—never polished, never heroic. That’s what makes the whole surreal world feel grounded.
People usually talk first about the imagery, and fair enough—it’s astonishing—but the deeper magic of *Spirited Away* is the rhythm. Roger Ebert once wrote about Miyazaki explaining "ma," or emptiness, by clapping his hands and pointing to the silence between them. That idea is everywhere in the film. After the frenzy of the polluted river spirit vomiting out a mountain of human trash—a scene Miyazaki drew from his own experience hauling a bicycle out of a river—the movie simply breathes. Then comes that train ride over the shallow endless sea, one of the loveliest stretches in modern cinema. No chatter, no push to explain. Just the soft rattle of the train, neon reflections trembling on the water, and those shadowy passengers stepping off at isolated platforms. The quiet carries an ache all by itself.
Yubaba’s bathhouse is also a strangely sharp version of the world we already live in: endless work, rigid hierarchy, greed everywhere. When No-Face starts spitting up gold, the workers lose themselves immediately, reduced to groveling around the promise of more. It’s a pointed take on materialism, but Miyazaki coats it in such weird bodily comedy that it never hardens into a sermon. Donald Richie wrote in the *International Herald Tribune* that Miyazaki’s animation "comes from the world we know - it offers us an interpretation." Exactly. The movie keeps asking what gets lost when names disappear, rivers are forgotten, and roots are cut away. And still it isn’t bleak. Chihiro makes it through not by overpowering anything, but by working, staying kind, and remembering who she is. That’s a much quieter kind of courage, and it feels closer to real life.
What I love most about *Spirited Away* is that it opens on a bad mood. Big fantasy films usually arrive with trumpets; Hayao Miyazaki starts his 2001 masterpiece with a ten-year-old sprawled sulkily in the back of an Audi, clutching a wilting bouquet of sweet peas. Chihiro is moving, and she hates it. That opening has always felt honest to me because it refuses to crown her as special. No prophecy, no hidden gift, no chosen-child glow. Just a kid whose whole body is folded into resentment.
When her father takes that idiotic shortcut into the abandoned amusement park that turns out to be a bathhouse for spirits, Miyazaki doesn’t frame it like a grand portal-crossing. It feels accidental, almost embarrassing, like the kind of mistake you can’t undo once darkness falls. And once the lanterns start glowing and the shadows stretch, the fear becomes intensely physical. The way Chihiro moves is half the point: shoulders jammed to her ears, knees locked, scrambling backward on her hands and feet like some panicked crab. Rumi Hiiragi, about thirteen when she voiced the role, gives Chihiro this wonderfully rough texture. She’s breathless, annoyed, scared—never polished, never heroic. That’s what makes the whole surreal world feel grounded.
People usually talk first about the imagery, and fair enough—it’s astonishing—but the deeper magic of *Spirited Away* is the rhythm. Roger Ebert once wrote about Miyazaki explaining "ma," or emptiness, by clapping his hands and pointing to the silence between them. That idea is everywhere in the film. After the frenzy of the polluted river spirit vomiting out a mountain of human trash—a scene Miyazaki drew from his own experience hauling a bicycle out of a river—the movie simply breathes. Then comes that train ride over the shallow endless sea, one of the loveliest stretches in modern cinema. No chatter, no push to explain. Just the soft rattle of the train, neon reflections trembling on the water, and those shadowy passengers stepping off at isolated platforms. The quiet carries an ache all by itself.
Yubaba’s bathhouse is also a strangely sharp version of the world we already live in: endless work, rigid hierarchy, greed everywhere. When No-Face starts spitting up gold, the workers lose themselves immediately, reduced to groveling around the promise of more. It’s a pointed take on materialism, but Miyazaki coats it in such weird bodily comedy that it never hardens into a sermon. Donald Richie wrote in the *International Herald Tribune* that Miyazaki’s animation "comes from the world we know - it offers us an interpretation." Exactly. The movie keeps asking what gets lost when names disappear, rivers are forgotten, and roots are cut away. And still it isn’t bleak. Chihiro makes it through not by overpowering anything, but by working, staying kind, and remembering who she is. That’s a much quieter kind of courage, and it feels closer to real life.