Movie Reviews

This may very well be the weirdest movie I've ever seen.

Spirited Away is an animated movie from Japan, and tells the story of a young girl who becomes lost in an abandoned Japanese "theme park" while on a trip with her parents. It turns out that the theme park is not really abandoned -- rather, it's some kind of vacation get-away/resort for weary spirits and ghosts, and it's no place for humans.

I really enjoyed how inventive and bizarre a lot of the characters and situations seemed. At first, the movie sort of threw me for a loop, as a lot of things really seemed to happen for no reason at all. After a while, though, I accepted it as a sort of surrealism, and really enjoyed it. Apparently, much of the "weird" stuff that happens in Spirited Away is very much steeped in Japanese culture and beliefs, and if I were familiar with these, the whole movie would've made a lot more sense. Still, that didn't really take away from my enjoyment of it (I guess I just enjoyed it on a different 'level', if that makes any sense).

Two other things really stood out for me: first, the look of the film is really beautiful. I can't really say the animation was all that great, as it's more-or-less standard slightly-jerky anime movement. The backgrounds, however, are really amazing. It's obvious that the animators spent a lot more time on the backgrounds and scenery than a lot of American animators do. Also, for what is essentially a children's movie (hmm, that might even be stretching it a bit. It's probably not really a "children's" movie), many of the characters are quite a bit more complex than would normally be expected. Most of them are not clear-cut "good" and "bad," but somewhere in between.

Anyway, for the first anime movie I've ever seen, I was pretty impressed, and will definitely make an effort to see more (probably starting with Princess Mononoke, which was written and directed by the same guy that did this movie).