magical realism

A girl's parents undergo a transformation she cannot undo and she is left in a world of spirits to win them back, and nobody in Spirited Away treats any of this as impossible. That is the rule of the mode: the supernatural turns up without explanation and without anyone in the frame acting surprised. The word was coined in 1925 by the critic Franz Roh for a style of German painting, then reached Latin American fiction and cinema worldwide with no founding film behind it. The camera holds the impossible in the same static shot as everything ordinary, no score underneath to flag the moment. The same flatness runs through the rest of the shelf. Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water pairs a mute cleaner with an amphibious man in the same Cold War laboratory, no more remarked on than any other workplace complication. Emir Kusturica's Time of the Gypsies hands its young Rom telekinesis and moves straight on to the petty crime it pulls him into, without pausing on the power itself. Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo sends a goldfish who wants to be a girl up onto a clifftop, causing chaos around the house while her sorcerer father schemes, just as ordinarily, to take her back to the sea. Because the magic is ordinary, it is the people you watch.

Distinguish from Surrealist Cinema pursues the unconscious and dream logic; magical realism maintains narrative coherence and treats the impossible as simply part of how the world works. Fantasy (not a movement in our taxonomy) builds alternate worlds; magical realism keeps one foot in the real.