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Walt Disney Studios presents the Academy Award winning animated feature film, Spirited Away.
The film tells the story of Chihiro, a ten-year-old girl who gets separated from her parents in an abandoned theme park. The park seems abandoned during the day, but in reality is a bathhouse for a spirit world. Chihiro’s parents undergo a strange transformation, and she must escape the spirit bathhouse and rescue her parents. In order to escape spirit world, she must first get a job at the bathhouse. Along the way, she meets a variety of fantastic spirits — some of whom are helpful and some who are less so. The first spirit she meets is Haku, a kind of guardian angel who turns out to have a secret that is revealed at the end of the film.
If you think I must be crazy and are starting to wonder what I had for breakfast — Disney doesn’t produce movies with characters like Chihiro and Haku. I assure you that I am crazy (I have a certificate on my wall). And you’re right. Disney doesn’t produce a movie like this. It’s a product of Studio Ghibli and was written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, “one of the most celebrated filmmakers in the history of animated cinema.” It was originally intended for a Japanese audience. Disney decided to do an English translation and release the movie to the United States and Canada; in fact, they bought the rights to all of the Studio Ghibli films.
I loved this movie — and I would recommend it to anyone who asked. However, I do have one complaint. The producers wanted to create a translation that fit with the existing film. This creates some problems, since languages don’t translate word for word — so some things had to be changed to fit with the animation. Also included on the DVD is a Japanese audio track, but they don’t say if this is the original audio from the movie. Anyway, one of the themes that was taken out of the film to make room for the translation is this: Chihiro is trapped in the spirit world because, in order to get a job in the bathhouse, she must give up her name. She must fight to remember her name in order to escape the spirit world.
If you’re watching this film with children, watching it with the English audio will give you and the kids a film experience you will want to see over and over. For a more enriching experience, watch this film as a foreign film and read the English subtitles. There is a lot of interesting information on the two-disc DVD set, including a subtitled special from Japanese television. I enjoyed watching and learning from these specials on the DVD.
