film Home > Movie Reviews

Like the best so-called children's entertainment, Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away takes a simple plot (young girl must escape a terrifying situation, in this case a bathhouse for ghosts and demons, and rejoin her parents) and makes it unique and wonderful through the surrounding details. Frightening, beautiful creatures from both Japanese mythology and the mind of Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro) constantly cross the screen. And the settings--a train that eerily glides over shallow water, a Brothers Grimm-style cottage in the woods, and that amazing bathhouse, lorded over by a great movie villain, the witch Yubaba (voiced by Suzanne Pleshette)--provide even more candy for the mind. The heroine, the plucky yet fully believable Chihiro (Daveigh Chase), endures hardship after hardship after hardship (the director has an oblique view of plot, and his movie lags some in the final third) before finding her way. She begins the movie with your sympathy, but ends it with your respect.