The audience is even more interesting than the film

Rating: 10/10 (24 January 2005)

That "Spirited Away" is a masterpiece would seem to any sane person to be beyond dispute. This is the first of Miyazaki's films I've seen and had it recommended to me by a friend who's into anime. I'm really not keen on Manga at all, so I delayed seeing "Spirited Away" for a few months. I finally got around to seeing the subtitled version - never, never waste your time with dubbed versions of foreign movies - over the weekend and I loved every frame of it. The imagination and creativity blew me away and I'd put the film alongside other "children's" masterpieces like "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe", Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy and Ray Bradbury's poetic "Something Wicked this Way Comes"..
However, in reading through the other comments for "Spirited Away" here I was struck by the huge chasm between the views of those who love the film and (the appropriately small minority of) those who don't.
Even more striking is the strident hostility of those who don't like the film towards those who do. Critics here have called fans of the movie, "liars to yourselves", "gushing", "flat-out wrong" and the movie itself, "inane", "unwatchable bilge", "muddled", "nonsensical", "gibberish".
Now I'd be scratching my head in puzzlement even if these commentators had blandly stated that this film wasn't for them, but this outpouring of venom had me completely perplexed.
Another viewer states, "The girl basically had to suffer for something even her parents didn't do wrong, they just wanted to explore things." And here lies a glimpse of some possible explanations of why some folks don't get this movie.
The whole point is the parents *did* do something wrong. They greedily ate food that wasn't theirs. Apart from being just plain rude, it's stealing. As another commentator here pointed out, you have to look at "Spirited Away" against the context of the culture that produced it. The Japanese are very concerned about the erosion of their traditional values, the lack of respect kids have for their elders, the breakdown of family cohesion and other "negative" "Western" influences on their traditional, polite, family-oriented culture. Perhaps we in the West have trouble with the concepts in "Spirited Away" because the influences that the Japanese audiences fear are the Western "values" that are being thrust upon them, values that we've grown up with and forgotten how to fear.
Another critic commented "I cannot see why this film is such a masterpiece to some people ... (though) my brother and I had a few good laughs, especially when Sen runs down the stairs and smacks into the wall. That was pretty funny, I must say." This made me think back to when The Simpsons first started on TV - my daughter was three years old and she thought the funniest joke ever was when Maggie fell over. Now my daughter's a (very bright) 14 year old and these days it's the razor sharp satire of dysfunctional family life that makes her laugh out loud. QED.
If someone isn't sensitive to the morals that are being examined in this film, then of course the film is going to seem pointless. However, as the film plainly does have more than one good point to make, perhaps it's just that these critics aren't capable of grasping any of them.
But really guys (and you know who you are) don't take your frustration at not understanding "Spirited Away" out on those of us who do. It's not our fault you don't get it.