Strange, but fun trip through a spirit world bath house.

Rating: 7/10 (2 March 2009)

I saw the movie "Re-Cycle" not that long ago and people on boards for that film talked about two scenes that resembled each other so I wanted to see this one. I have seen another film made by this company "Nausica" and I could tell there were similarities in music and animation style. Well the bridge scene was a bit similar, but my girlfriend says there are a lot of tales in Asian culture of holding your breath so the spirits can not see you so it really was not to a like. Actually, I found this movie while a bit flawed here and there for my tastes more entertaining than that other film and much more whimsical. A girl and her parents are driving to their new home and get detoured along the way and end up at what appears to be the entrance to a long abandoned theme park. Well the daughter, named Chihiro has a bad feeling about this place, but her parents just have to explore. Suffice to say the daughter's bad premonition about this place turns out to be correct as the parents stumble upon a lot of food in one of the buildings in this place and proceed to eat the food like Goku eats in Dragonball Z. In the end the girl ends up trapped in what is the spirit world, and this theme park which is actually a bath house for the spirits. The girl ends up getting employed by the witch who runs the bath house and has her name basically stolen by her as she goes from Chihiro to Sen, a boy named Haku at times seems to want to help her and at others seems cold to her. Her parents are pigs, a strange creature seems to really like her and she gets to meet all sorts of interesting new chaps. The problems I found with the piece you ask? Well despite a rather lengthy runtime of 125 minutes it still feels like it needed more. Many interesting plot points wrapped up with not enough development, like No-Face. The twin sister's strange turnaround in they way she acted and treated the girl. The way she gets back seems a tad rushed too, however for the most part this movie was simply a delight.