Miyazaki's unique visual style is rich and complex when compared to other animated movies. All images © 2002 Nibariki. TGNDDTM. All rights reserved.

Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away starts off with a very large detour. Ten-year-old Chihiro is in the back of a car, driven by her parents, traveling toward a new home in a new town. On the way, they are strangely drawn to a beguiling, and apparently deserted, town. Chihiro is creeped out by the place, but her parents insist on exploring, and they eventually find a restaurant with platefuls of delicious food lying about. Chihiro has no interest in eating any of it, but her parents dig in, and turn into pigs. Not figuratively, either. They sprout snouts and curlicue tails, and chop-sticks become useless: mom and dad slouch to the ground, suddenly quadrupedal. Night falls, and the inhabitants of the town slow come into focus: a grand parade of spirits, gods and witches, crystallizing out of the air.

It’s here, in the exploration of the spirit world, that Spirited Away spreads out into one of the most visually baroque films ever made. Its look and density are so unique, rather than comparing it to other films, I found myself comparing it to paintings: intricate Byzantine art, or ancient Buddhist frescoes of the universe — religious art suggesting transparent skyscrapers or towering hives honeycombed with buzzing spirits — windows opening onto fantastic figures, each one particular and strange, each inhabiting its own individual corner of the vast cosmological blueprint.

Director Hayao Miyazaki's work always contains a nurturing sense of humanity and kindness, even when the world is dark and full of malevolence.

A World of Terror
It would be easy to get lost in the thicket of detail, as Chihiro herself feels lost, but Miyazaki understands that one can give free reign to the imagination, so long as there is one primary hinge, one central conceit, that the fantasy swings on. As well as being an inventive fantasy in the mold of Alice in Wonderland, Spirited Away is also, surprisingly, one of the best films made about entering the work force. In order to free her parents from their porcine slavery (and to divert them from their eventual destination of some spirit-figure’s dinner plate), Chihiro has to throw herself on the scant mercy of Mistress Yubaba. Yubaba is a witch who runs the town, and more particularly its bathhouse, where the Shinto-like gods of the surrounding countryside come to get washed. Chihiro must work in the bathhouse to win her parents’ freedom.