The Master's Masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (26 November 2002)

First of all, I must say that I grew up with the works of Hayao Miyazaki. "Future Boy Conan" has been at the #1 spot in my Top 10 of anime series for a long time, and I also enjoyed movies like Kiki's Delivery Service, My Neighbour Totoro and Princess Mononoke, which means that my expectations of Spirited Away were very high, almost to the point that I started to fear that the movie wouldn't be able to match them.
This said, I must admit that I almost fell off my chair while watching Spirited Away for the first time... Totoro is maybe a little too childish and slow paced, and you may say that there is too much graphic violence in Mononoke, you could even protest that there is too little magic in Kiki, but Spirited Away is almost pure perfection. There is action, love, magic, and fun. The story is well paced (when it ended it seemed much shorter than 2 hours), the graphics are great, the characters, even the secondary ones, are well developed.
The movie itself is a wonderful fairytale, one that can be watched by children and adults alike, not difficult to follow, but elaborated enough to keep a grown-up interested in it.
As I said, perfection is *almost* reached here. Almost, because a few (very few) things could have been done better, in my opinion. First of all the CGI. Generally very good, but not so good in some scenes. Second, I personally would have liked to know a little more about the relation between Yubaba and Zeniba, but I watched the japanese version with english subtitles, so maybe some parts of the dialogue haven't been fully translated...
This is really a great movie, no wonder it won a Golden Bear in Berlin. You can't miss this one if you love anime. And if you don't love anime watch it anyway, you might discover you *do* love them after all...