Spirited Away

An animated film in which a girl gets lost. Chihiro is ten and not at all pleased about moving house. Driving to the new one, the family takes a wrong turn and passes through an abandoned gate. On the other side there is an empty town. Her parents eat the food at a stall and turn into pigs. Chihiro is left alone. A boy finds her and says the only remedy is to get work there. The work is at a bathhouse. A vast building where gods come to wash, run by a witch. When she signs the contract her name is taken from her and she becomes Sen. From there the film is a story about labour. Boilers, salt water, a filthy god, a spider of a man, and shifts that run all night. What the narrative is interested in is not magic but names: whoever forgets their name cannot leave, and every rescue in the film depends on remembering. The faceless character hands out gold in the bathhouse and everyone gathers around him; the film's plainest criticism is there. The journey by train is the quietest section and almost nothing happens in it. There is no wicked villain. Even the witch keeps her word, and the film draws nobody as entirely bad. The director said he made the film for the ten year old daughters of people he knew. It won the Golden Bear in Berlin and the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, the first film made in a language other than English to win it. It remained the highest-grossing film in Japan for about twenty years. Hayao Miyazaki wrote and directed. Who it is for: any age; the narrative is slow but the imagery is always working. Who it is not for: anyone who wants a clear plot; the film does not explain its rules and some sections connect to nothing.