requires reviewing

Rating: 10/10 (21 November 2003)

It is hard to review a movie, especially if it has received so many accolades prior to me seeing it. I came into this movie knowing that it just won an academy award for best-animated picture. Roger Ebert put it on his top 10 list of 2002, and the movie was one of the highest grossing films in Japan. In other words how can I be neutral? How can I give a bad review to a movie that the intelligentsia praised? If I give it a bad review, does it mean I do not have the mental capacity to understand the movie?
Spirited Away reminds me of the surrealistic movies I saw as a kid. Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi. Those movies made me uncomfortable. There was something nightmarish about talking animals with human feelings. Those movies sometimes felt like a bad dream put to film. Horror writer Clive Barker listed Pinocchio as one of the best horror movies of all time. I got the same feeling watching Spirited Away. From my viewpoint Spirited Away felt like a great horror movie and a bad dream. It felt so much like a dream because you would see things that did not make sense. For instance the three bouncing heads must have been from someone's nightmare. That is something you see in a dream, and all the next day you are trying to understand the symbolism of them in your dream. Throughout the movie I made the mistake of trying to grasp the symbolism of everything. At the end I realized that maybe it symbolizes what you want it to be. Maybe the director (Hayao Miyazaki) does not even know what it meant, but he and you are trying to grasp understanding. The whole movie I was trying to grasp understanding, and so was the main character (Chihiro/Sen). In my mind I was trying to put everything into the human world perspective, but this was not part of the human world. Reality was massively altered for Chihiro, and she could fight it or come to terms with it. Eventually she came to terms with the harsh new reality, and accepted it, and consequently she was able to escape it.
I feel this was a great movie, because it requires re-viewing over and over to gain greater understanding. I am still trying to come to grips with some of the meaning of images I saw. It was an uncomfortable movie to watch, because it felt nightmarish and surrealistic, but I will see it again because I want to gain a better comprehension of the nightmare.
Like I said this movie made me uncomfortable the same way early Disney surrealistic animation did. It was a perfect recreation of a nightmare. But this definitely falls in the `great movie' category, because I probably will watch it over and over. 10/10