ike most children, 10-year-old Chihiro is miserable and angry when her parents decide to move the family out to the country, leaving friends and familiar places behind. As the animated Japanese movie Spirited Away begins, Chihiro (voiced by Daveigh Chase) is sulking as the family drives toward their new home. Then they take a wrong turn and end up at a dead end in the woods. Though Chihiro resists, alternately angry and frightened, her father and mother (Chiklis and Holly) insist on exploring the area, and find a broken-down, abandoned theme park in a gorgeous green field. Chihiro, balking all the way, finally stalks off in disgust and runs into a boy about her age, who is clearly alarmed to see her. He commands her to leave before sundown. But it's already too late—night is falling, and the streets are filling with bizarre ghostly crowds. The field Chihiro crossed to get to the park is now a black lake, and she herself is fading away.
The boy, Haku (Marsden), calms her, comforts her and keeps her from disappearing entirely, but Chihiro is trapped in the spirit world, and in a great deal of danger from its hostile inhabitants. Haku instructs Chihiro in the risky and frightening steps she needs to take to survive. What he does not tell her is that although he has strange powers and is familiar with the spirit world and its rules, he's already further gone—and more in peril—than she is.
Soon, sullen, timid Chihiro is making selfless choices, shouldering the burdens of courage and duty, and delving into the phantasmagoric, teeming realm of a profitable spirit-bathhouse run by a giant-headed witch named Yubaba (Pleshette). Once Yubaba has Chihiro in her power, she steals the girl's name, dubbing her "Sen," and puts her to work. In the best tradition of a Grimm's fairy tale, Chihiro has to reclaim her name and the memories that go with it, befriend or impress the hostile,
contemptuous and sometimes very dangerous spirits around her, rescue her parents and her new friend Haku and find her way back home, all on her own.
Animation fans shouldn't miss this film
Disney's theatrical release of Hayao Miyazaki's last animated saga, Princess Mononoke, was a commercial failure; the film, wildly popular and profitable in Japan, was marketed and distributed minimally in the U.S., and made relatively little money. With Spirited Away, Disney's hedging its bets with a rolling release that hits big cities first and then spreads to smaller ones in October, giving word of mouth a chance to spread.
It's hard to imagine that word being anything but enthusiastic and admiring. Mononoke was a dark, grim, powerful movie that surprised Disney-weaned American audiences, but Spirited Away is far gentler without being any less serious and adult. Chihiro's adventures make great kid-fodder: Even William F. Buckley could hardly object to a film in which a child learns that honesty, courage, independence and hard work are the keys to freedom. But Spirited Away is also weirdly funny—a scene in which Chihiro befriends a crowd of enchanted soot-balls (which will be familiar to anyone who saw Miyazaki's sweet, stellar My Neighbor Totoro) is positively hilarious. And it can also be grim and frightening. Miyazaki makes it clear that Chihiro, her parents and her friend Haku are all in mortal danger, and his film doesn't shy away from depicting bloody wounds and the pain they cause. For all its lyrical beauty, Spirited Away does have its own kinds of darkness.
It also does positively breathtaking things with light, both metaphorically and literally. The film shows Miyazaki's usual love of awe-inspiring natural vistas, minutely detailed settings and eerie
fantasy creatures, which here appear in denser crowds than in any previous Miyazaki film. The scene in which night catches the frightened Chihiro unaware is visually fantastic, and it's only one of a handful of scenes that do phenomenal things with light and darkness. Spirited Away is not as terrifying and passionate as Princess Mononoke, nor as blithe and charming as My Neighbor Totoro. Instead, it takes the best of their visuals and blends the best of the emotions they evoked, and finds a unique place somewhere in the middle. This may be the last film Miyazaki personally directs—he's already threatened to retire once. If so, it's a stunning cap to a stunning career.
