Grown-ups will probably detect a jab at consumerism when her parents begin to wolf down succulent dishes at an unattended food stand at this theme park that is not as abandoned as it appears. Chihiro, voiced by Rumi Hiiragi in its original Japanese and Daveigh Chase in its English-language dub, is roused from her funk when her parents stop their drive to their new suburban home to wander around an abandoned theme park. It involves conquering fears and finding oneself in situations where safety is not a given.īut what’s striking about Spirited Away is the ordinariness in the way it opens and closes, how it hides its wondrous realm in the cloak of the quotidian.
That’s been a constant in all of his filmography, but it’s particularly conspicuous here because the stakes for its young protagonist are bigger than in most of his previous features aimed at younger viewers. It’s also a fine children’s film, the kind that elicits a deepening bond across repeat viewings and the passage of time, mostly because Miyazaki refuses to talk down to younger viewers. It takes an Alice in Wonderland-style narrative as a springboard to deal with the subject head on. The tale of Chihiro, a 10-year-old girl who resents being moved away from all her friends, only to find herself working in a bathhouse for the gods, doesn’t just use its home country’s fraught relationship with deities as a backdrop. In the garden of wonderments that is the body of work by Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki, his 2001 gem Spirited Away is at once one of his most accessible films to a Western audience and the one most distinctly rooted in Japanese culture and lore.