No face, but lots of character

Rating: Null/10 (3 April 2009)

Hayao Miyazaki's 'Spirited Away' was an unexpected international hit, but not an undeserved one. A charming Japanese fantasy story, the film is beautifully animated, full of delightful, original details and mercifully free of the universal Disney narrative of self-improvement and consequent reward, it deserves the praise lavished upon it. And I loved the doleful no-face, a most unlikely monster. At first, you do notice the static backgrounds of a traditional animation (compared with what computer animation can produce), but soon one is lost inside the magical world. One thing surprised me, though: how un-Japanese it felt, except for the tendency of the characters to bow, there was very little explicitly eastern about the story.