The great thing about anime is that the movies don’t follow the traditional fairy tale story arc that many Disney/DreamWorks features adhere to. The stories are, well, just different and go off in wildly unexpected directions. You can watch one of the big corporate-made American animated features and figure out where it’s going pretty quickly. You can’t do that with most anime, and certainly not with the work of Hayao Miyazaki. In “Spirited Away,” Chihiro is a ten-year-old girl whose family is moving to a new town. On the way, they find an abandoned theme park that still somehow serves food. Without realizing it, the family has entered a “Twilight Zone”-ish spirit world. Quickly, the parents scarf down as much food as they can eat and are turned into pigs. Chihiro learns the only way she can remain in the spirit world and rescue her parents is to get a job. And that’s just the beginning. It gets weirder and wilder, scarier and sillier as it goes along. This is a magical fantasy adventure that may not be for everyone, but that everyone should still experience.
