Spirited Away Reviews

This was the first movie I got addicted with thanks to my sis. The director, Hayao Miyazaki directed a lot of movies and this is my favorite. I dunno why maybe because I used to watch this with everyone all the time. My friends, family, anyone! I watch this movie like very day! Well I dont but I do watch it often. When I watch it alone my sisters get all worried and try to make me happy. i dunno why but then again I never watch this movie without anyone so *shrugs*

"Once you do something, you never forget. Even if you can't remember."

Spirited Away is a breathtaking, incredible anime experience. The whole movie is a highly imaginative, wonderful, fantastical children's anime feature that could be the greatest piece of animation to come out of Japan.

A young girl named Chihiro (voiced by Hîragi in the Japanese dub, and Chase in the English dub) is travelling to her new home with her parents. Before arriving at their new house, Chihiro's father takes a wrong turn and ends up stopping in front of a mysterious building. Soon Chihiro finds herself venturing into a secret world where her parents undergo a mysterious transformation.

Chihiro is left disorientated, and is now trapped in a world where she must face strange spirits, groups of creatures and a pissed off sorceress who seeks to prevent her from saving her parents from the spell and returning to their rightful place in the human world.

The animation looks gorgeous. Each character - each location - has been beautifully detailed for best effect. Without limited itself to one audience, the movie extends beyond the regular anime lovers. I, myself, am not the biggest fan of anime - and I never will be - but Spirited Away was an amazing experience unlike any anime I've ever viewed before. The story is unique and innovative, with characters who are both strange and creative. It's not often that one would find giant frogs in a feature such as this, but this only heightens the creativity of the filmmaking team.

The director, Hayao Miyazaki, is a name that towers above most other names in the anime world. Many would recognise his work, and this could be his best yet. The whole experience is uniquely strange and interesting, and in a sense groundbreaking. Because of the miraculous voice cast, the audience can easily get into the story. The whole voice cast is amazing, be it English or Japanese. It's obvious that the English dub was of high priority, and is outstanding despite a very limited number of lip-synching issues.

The captivating animation sucks you in - keeping you fascinated, wondering what will happen next. At the end of the day, the experience is engaging and incredibly creative. It's no wonder that Spirited Away walked away with an Oscar for Best Animated Feature of 2002.

Admittedly, the film does tend to drag on extensively - but the animation and techniques keep us sucked in despite this tendency. Spirited Away is a breathtaking production, and one of the greatest anime films that has come to fruition in recent years. It's not for all tastes, but I would recommend the film highly.

An original and enchanting storyline and film.

En route to their new home a sulky 10 year old Chihiro and her family unwisely decide to take a short cut and duly arrive lost, at an abandoned theme park. All soon turns out not to be what it seems as Chihiro’s glutinous parents are transformed into pigs after eating the food of the spirits which reside in the park, which after sunset serves as a bath house for the spirits of their realm.
Chihiro is then faced with the dilemma of running free and escaping this unfamiliar and terrifying world which she has fallen into, or staying and finding a way to free her parents.

The characters are unique and refreshingly unobvious, stubborn, sulky and rude, bending away form the norm of other fairytales and animated films. The plot takes on very surreal twists but unlike others of Miyazaki’s films, remains easy to follow and comprehend.
The scenery and inter-character relations are beautiful and moving. The film is wrapped up very nicely with a great sense of the child Chihiro’s growth and maturity.

There are so many magical beings in Spirited Away, directed by Japanese animation master, Hayao Miyazaki, that sometimes, even the creatures seen in the story scare each other. Although, don't be misled: even if it's set in a fantasy world and have an infinity of fantastic characters, the film could hardly be considered a 'children's film'. For the contrary, filled with pauses in the action and contemplative silences, this production certainly will please much more adults than the youngest audience, that might even be scared at certain points.

Written by Miyazaki himself, Spirited Away is about a little girl, Chihiro, whose parents decide to move. During their trip to their new home, the girl's family gets lost, and they end up finding a tunnel in the middle of the woods. Courious, the two adults decide to find out what's in the other side of the tunnel for Chihiro's desperation, who can feel there's something wrong in the air. Convinced that they found the ruins (very well conserved) of an abandoned theme park, Chihiro's parents are quite surprised when they see a big table filled with food, which they must taste. Refusing to share the mysterious meal, the girl walks away and finds a boy, Haku, who warns her about the danger of remaining in that place after sunset. Unfortunately, the warn is a bit too late, and Chihiro finds out that her parents have been turned into pigs and the 'theme park' is actually, a bath house frequented by gods. Now, she must adapt to that scary world and try to find, with Haku's help, some way to bring her parents back to normal.

As it can be noticed, the plot of Spirited Away is a real nightmare for children, all alone in the world, without counting on her parents, the girl gets inside a strange place inhabited by ghosts. Determined to make her journey a real terror, Miyazaki creates huge and scary scenaries, such as the long wooden stairs, that has no handrails, is miles from the ground, which makes Chihiro go step by step sitting down. It was not by chance, that during the 125 minutes of film, the one word that came to my mind the most was 'scary'.

It's not that Spirited Away doesn't have their moments of humor, but, when the laughter come, they're caused, most of the time, by a sentiment of weirdness or by relief after a more tense moment. This tendency, by the way, is mirrored by the visual of the characters themselves, that, in the other hand of most animations, have no trace of 'cute' in them, except of course, the little mouse and the bird who follow Chihiro towards the end of the film. A good example of those weird characters, the scary (ther it its, 'scary' again) Yubaba: wrinkled, with a soar voice, giant head, who owns the bath house, enters the film in a very particular and remarkable way, smoking and blowing out a thick smoke through her huge nose. But, Miyazaki also teaches a great lesson about the mistake of judging people (or in the case of this film, creatures) by how they look like, by introducing Kamajii, a character whose several arms remind a spider, but in fact, has a great heart.

With a tone clearly episodic, the script has many different challenges for her hero, what, in certain moments, compromises a bit the focus of the story: one important character, Zeniba, for example, is just introduced in the story after half way through the film, which usually is a big narrative mistake. Besides, not all 'episodes' are equally interesting: although the sight of the muddy spirit of the river (another beautiful lesson from the director) is fascinating, the same can't be said by the incidents related to another character, the 'No-Face', whose motivations are never clearly revealed, in spite of the importance of the character in the plot. Why his mood changes depending on the place he's at? And what was his destiny anyway?

Chihiro is an amazing lead role. Initially, shown as a bored child, the girl gradually becomes more mature and braver, growing (emotionally) in front of our eyes. Besides, Miyazaki's carefully detailed animation adds even more details to the personality of the character, for example, the way the girl crosses her arms and squeeze them against her body in a moment of higher anxiety, or how she leaps of distress towards their parents' stubborness. And notice, also, the subtelty in which she puts on her shoes, kicking the floor, to adjust them on her feet. Particularities such as those make the director one of the most respected on the area of animation.

Though is one bit too long, Spirited Away is one of the most interesting animations in recent years, only compared to the Pixar productions.

*It's also curious to see that just like the Pixar productions themselves, this film was also distributed by Disney in the US, whose animation department, constantly disappoints us with their most recent works. It seems that Mickey's enterprise is following the old saying: if you can't beat them, join them.