One of the most extraordinary animated features ever made

Rating: 10/10 (22 September 2003)

This is one movie that I really must insist that you go and see.

Beautifully animated, very funny and consistently surprising, it is -
along with the brilliant Belleville Rendevous - the best animated
feature of the year. I also really valued the fact that it comes from a
completely different cultural sensibility from the U.S, which
produces the majority of animated films we see in the U.K.
Everything - its plot arc, character development, visual style, pacing
and the characters' value system - is different, sometimes a little,
sometimes a lot.
I loved the mutliplicity of weird and wonderful characters that the
protagonist Chihiro encounters and the alternative universe that
they inhabit. Like Belleville Rendevous, there's some scenes in
this film that simply leave you aghast at their strangeness, beauty
or inventiveness. Definitely see this film at the cinema as soon as
you can.
P.S DON'T be put off by the fact that it's being distributed by the evil
mega-corporation Disney. This film's a dragon, not a mouse.