Weird Japanese nightmare of epic proportions...not a charmer...

Rating: Null/10 (2 July 2003)

I watched the English language version of this nightmarish film and I can't understand the lavish praise bestowed on this Japanese animated fantasy. Its colors have a muted, washed-out look as it tells at great length the murky story of a little girl (with a screechingly high-pitched voice that gets on the nerves) who gets separated from her parents and enters the dark world of an abandoned amusement park. None of it makes any sense--at least not to American minds--so there must be something either lost in the translation or lost in the vast differences between American and Japanese culture. If this is a picture kids can relate to, I can only suppose that more kids than I thought are living in a nightmarish world ruled by adults.
The story goes on for two hours without presenting anything except turning the girl's world into a nightmare of dead spirits and mean-spirited elders against which she is supposed to eventually be reunited with parents who have been turned into pigs.
It's all so weirdly incomprehensible to adults and let me say firmly that there is no enchantment here. Perhaps you have to have the imagination of a ten-year old to see what's fun about this strange and fearsome world. Instead of entertaining us in the manner Lewis Carroll did with ALICE IN WONDERLAND and his cast of weird characters, it is much too dark and intense to be called anything but a Japanese nightmare of epic proportions with elements of other famous fairy-tales working their way through the tale.
The dubbing for the English version should have used a different voice than the grating one used for the little girl. Definitely not a charmer.