"Spirited Away" is another good film proclaimed to be a masterpiece

Rating: 6/10 (7 July 2006)

Chihiro, a little girl, is sitting in a car driven by her parents. They are moving to a new town, but on their way they enter into a strange town through a tunnel. There mom and dad transform into pigs because they ate the forbidden food and Chihiro has to take a job in the local spa, run by the old lady Yubaba, in order to transform them back. She gets a new name, Sen, and meets a nice boy Haku...
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"Spirited Away", Hayao Miyazaki's 8th feature length anime film, is an interesting fantasy parable. It does have poetry ( a magical scene in which Chihiro is falling from the sky, making her tears fall up ) and some analysts claim that the story is actually a symbol of child prostitution or child slavery in Asia, but as a whole the overlong movie doesn't always work perfectly and it seems as if the critics are finding more meanings which they want to find than the ones that are really there. If Miyazaki's earlier films were less ambitious ( with which I strongly disagree - i. e. "Kiki's delivery service" was a wonderful tale about growing up ), then his new ones are less fun and coherent. Miyazaki finally won an Oscar for this, but more thanks to his previous reputation than thanks to the good, but somewhat over-hyped anime "Spirited Away".
Grade: 6/10