A breath of fresh animated air

Rating: 9/10 (20 October 2002)

I drove 200 miles with my brother just to see this movie in Kansas City, and it was worth the trip. I still don't know why Disney is expanding the release so slowly, as this is one of the best theatrical animated movies to come along in years, even in its dubbed form.
The dub is all right. I thought that Daveigh Chase did well most of the time, but I liked her better as Lilo (but then, that character was basically created around her). Lin's attitude was a bit cliche (like a hard-nosed heroine from the 1940s), but it wasn't distracting or detracting. Yubaba and her sister, though initially irritating, grew on me by the end. Haku was rather dull, like a zombie, but it turns out that maybe that had something to do with a certain plot element that I won't spoil. Anyway, at the end, he sounds like a different person, and that worked for me.
The animation is amazing, with the characters having far more to say with their body language than in any of Miyazaki's previous films. The character designs are fantastic and beautiful. I can sort of understand why everyone keeps comparing it to Alice in Wonderland, except that most there are fewer references to that book in Spirited Away than there was in My Neighbor Totoro. Besides, the gods/spirits/monsters are very Japanese (take the concept of the river spirits being dragons, or the Noh spirit ("the No Face") that eats people that was used by Rumiko Takahashi in Inu-Yasha) and have less to do with the illogic logic of Wonderland than it does with traditional Japanese folklore. I'm not Japanese, so I really can't say, but I'd just about bet that most of it makes sense to the Japanese, even whatever stuff Miyazaki made up.
Spoilers: One interesting thing I noticed were the references to Night on the Galactic Railroad by Kenji Miyazawa, especially the ride on the train with the see through spirits. This reference really helped me get a better idea about the alternate world Miyazaki created, and why it is what it is (the little girl spirit at the train station was extremely eerie for me).
Anyway, Miyazaki supposedly created this movie because he saw the young daughter of an aquaintance who seemed dispassionate about the world, but, I'm not sure how successful this movie will be about changing the minds of girls like her (I don't know who came up with the idea of "love" breaking the spells, because I seriously doubt it was Miyazaki, who generally doesn't rely on those kinds of abstract ideas (he would prefer to show, I'm sure--where in Mononoke Hime does San or Ashitaka say they love each other, yet you know they do by the end). It's interesting, though, that at the end Chihiro seems scared to be returning to her own world, holding onto her mother exactly the way she held onto her at the beginning of the movie, and there's something oddly hopeful about that.
9 out of 10 stars, for the dub version.