Just Seen: Spirited Away
2003-09-15 21:13![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blufive[IMDB]
While driving the family to their new home, Chihiro's father takes a wrong turn down a dead-end lane. At the end of it is a tunnel, which the family decides to explore, and they find themselves in an abandoned theme park. However, all is not as it seems - soon Chihiro finds her parents transformed into pigs and the way back to the car blocked. As night falls and things start to arrive, she must find a way to survive and rescue her parents.
Spirited Away won this years' Oscar for best animated feature, and is the current holder of the record for highest box-office takings in Japan. It's not hard to see why. The technical quality of the animation is generally superb - more importantly, so is the story, which does a good job of conveying Chihiro's growth from a whiny little brat into a stronger, more self-confident person. It's also dark enough in places to earn its PG certificate - the scenes of Chihiro trying to escape as night falls are downright spooky, and would probably scare the living daylights out of many small children.
While I had some niggles with the translation (some of the dialogue was rather clunky, and I had an occasional feeling of something else lurking behind the chosen words) it was mostly good. Note that we saw the dubbed version - there are subtitled prints doing the rounds too, which will probably have a different translation.
Magical.
While driving the family to their new home, Chihiro's father takes a wrong turn down a dead-end lane. At the end of it is a tunnel, which the family decides to explore, and they find themselves in an abandoned theme park. However, all is not as it seems - soon Chihiro finds her parents transformed into pigs and the way back to the car blocked. As night falls and things start to arrive, she must find a way to survive and rescue her parents.
Spirited Away won this years' Oscar for best animated feature, and is the current holder of the record for highest box-office takings in Japan. It's not hard to see why. The technical quality of the animation is generally superb - more importantly, so is the story, which does a good job of conveying Chihiro's growth from a whiny little brat into a stronger, more self-confident person. It's also dark enough in places to earn its PG certificate - the scenes of Chihiro trying to escape as night falls are downright spooky, and would probably scare the living daylights out of many small children.
While I had some niggles with the translation (some of the dialogue was rather clunky, and I had an occasional feeling of something else lurking behind the chosen words) it was mostly good. Note that we saw the dubbed version - there are subtitled prints doing the rounds too, which will probably have a different translation.
Magical.