Spirited Away – It’s All In The Title

Since Senor Eagle asked, here’s how I interpret Spirited Away:

• A little girl and her parents stop on their way to their new house to explore a tunnel they find at a mysterious deadend. They come out of the tunnel to a deserted city block. The dad follows his nose to a beautiful buffet of food. The parents commence pigging out (pay attention, that’s important). The little girl wanders off, and find a mysterious looking bathhouse.

• The girl (I can’t remember her name for the life of me), meets a young boy who tells her to hurry back to her parents and leave before all the lamps come on and it gets dark outside.

• She races back to the restaurant only to find that her parents have been turned into pigs.

• Somehow, and I don’t remember quite how, she ends up working in the bathhouse as a way to survive and find a way to turn her parents back into themselves.

• That’s all I’m going to tell you about the “facts” of the story. It’s a movie you have to feel more than watch. You can watch it for just the gorgeous animation, which is well worth watching, or you can get into it, suspend your preconceived notions of what a movie should be, and have a great time experiencing this world of spirits (get it, Spirited Away?).

• If you want everything in a movie to make sense and a neatly tied up and spelled out ending – skip this movie. Don’t even bother. You’ll hate it.

• If you’re willing to play along and suspend your disbelief (and by suspend, I mean put it way up on a shelf and deny any temptation to bring it back out), you’ll love this movie.

Oh, and don’t forget to nominate yourself for the ugly blog redesign. No, I mean it. If you use the MT Default Templates, you qualify. Not because your site is ugly. The MT Templates are servicable, but they’re so… vanilla. Live a little and get crazy. I’ll help.