Movie: Spirited Away

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Genre: Japanese Anime (dubbed)

Year: 2001

Japanese hand-drawn anime film about a fantastical journey of a girl who finds herself in an earthly spirit filled world from which she has become hostage.

The allegorical plot contends with good and evil, and the characters’ ability to make choices, good and bad.

The movie opens with Chihiro, renamed Sen, inside a car with a girl lamenting the loss of her life and the changes ahead in the forced relocation to this new town they are entering. The family gets lost and finds themselves in a defunct amusement park that mysteriously offers a food feast from which the parents partake and the stage is set for Chihiro to save her parents from the slaughterhouse. Chihiro makes friends and sacrifices in order to achieve this goal, but she would not be able to do anything without the help of Master Haku, who tells her all she must do to survive and to escape the clutches of this sinister place.

The Academy Award winner took home the Best Animated Film award and was the highest grossing Japanese film in history with box office receipts of $305 million US dollars. This film held the title up until last year, 2020. That’s 19 years as the money maker!

As fairy tales go, this has the components of a good tale. Girl has dilemma, girl meets boy, boy saves girl after girl saves boy. It is a fairly common formula, but offers so much more to this basic canon. The protagonist is likeable, one to cheer on, plus villains to boo. Its plot is among the more unique, but harkens back to Grimm’s moral darkness with a Disneyesque animated beauty. It’s a fun watch, especially twins Yubaba and Zeniba.