Suggestive dream

Rating: 8/10 (7 June 2007)

A master story - ambiguous, multi-level, fascinating and both visually and musically beautiful.
Awarded with an Oscar surrealistic story from the Japanese master of the genre ('Princess Mononoke') was likely compared with 'Alice in Wonderland'. Truly, the main character is a little girl who gets into a world populated by strange creatures and ruled by mysterious laws. However this is where similarities end.
10-year-old Chihiro - a girl, to be honest, quite spoiled and whimsical, is on her way with her parent to her new place of accommodation. At one time the father who is driving, decides to take a short-cut through the forest, drives through an odd tunnel and the whole family lands in a strange place that resembles an abandoned entertainment park. Meanwhile Chihiro ends up in an enormous bath-house which is a place of relaxation for all the ghosts of the world. She is threatened that she will be turned into an animal and eaten at the nearest ghost feast. Having that as an alternative, she decides to work in the bathhouse...
It sounds a bit eccentric and it in fact is (I must add that I really simplified the main plot of the film). "Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi" mostly resembles a dream (or a fantasy taken out of a child's mind) and it is like a suggestive dream and arbitrary in its solutions. The characters here change both shape and identity. Magical power shows up and disappears. Everything has its own soul and it lives equally in the real and the phantom world. Beauty and grotesque ugliness, or charm and fear are not opposites in here. They adjoin each other by an inch and create a feeling of that wacky world's unity. It is an exotic experience and it is rather not for babies.