Spirited Away

Spirited Away, directed by the veteran anime film-maker Hayao Miyazaki, is Japan's most successful film, and one of the top-grossing 'foreign language' films ever released. Set in modern Japan, the film is a wildly imaginative fantasy, at once personal and universal. It tells the story of a listless little girl, Chihiro, who stumbles into a magical world where gods relax in a palatial bathhouse, where there are giant babies and hard-working soot sprites, and where a train

Chihiro and her family are on their way to their new house in the suburbs when her father decides to take a shortcut along a lonely-looking dirt road. After getting out of the car and walking along a path for a while, they discover an open-air restaurant filled with food but with no workers or customers present. Mom and Dad don't hesitate to sit down and dig in, but Chihiro senses danger and refuses. As night falls, she is terrified to see the area fill with faceless spirits, but when she runs to find her parents, she discovers that they have been turned into pigs. She is found by a mysterious boy named Haku, who promises to help her. He gets her a job working in a nearby building, which turns out to be a bathhouse for the thousands of Japan's gods and spirits. Though the work is hard and the people strange, she does as well as she can. Her parents, however, are still waiting in the hotel's stockyard…

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Film history has only provided us with a handful of filmmakers whose work can be described as a genre in and of itself. Hayao Miyazaki's animated films can be described as such, mainly because they unabashedly convey a rich, unique, often disturbing fantasy world. His most recent addition to this genre is Spirited Away, the runaway hit in Japan last year, and some would argue that it is his best so far. Appropriate to the genre, Joe Hisaishi provides a broad, evocative, often eerie score to complement the work.

Cowinner of the Golden Bear at the recent Berlin Film Festival, Spirited Away is the latest fantastical creation by animation master Hayao Miyazaki. A fabulous ghost-infested adventure full of action, suspense, bizarre creatures, and compelling human characters, it is the pinnacle of animated fantasy and depicts the transformation of a sullen little girl into a powerful being.