Reviewed by: Becca & Jeff

Spoken Languages: Japanese, English

Directed by: N/A

Published by: Buena Vista

Hayao Miyazaki's fantastical and spiritual adventure about a young girl trapped in the world of spirits has won Japan's motion picture academy award for best film and top honors at international film festivals including Berlin and Hong Kong.

This is one of those movies that you can really only see once. After the first time I was pretty amazed by how wonderful and orginal it was. It was wonderful story telling, beautiful animation, and placing those two together made an upstoppable movie. I watched the subbed version which wasn't nearly as good as the dubbed version, which I watched later. So word of warning, if you don't speak japanese then get the english version because the subbing is horrible!

All the characters were unique and they caught your eyes from the moment they came onto the screen. None of them were dull or didn't have a purpose. The story is about how the little girl evolves from a little whiny girl into a mature person. You can see how she becomes that way, and therefore character development is wonderful. This movie is worth the time to see if, give it a chance even if the begining starts out slow.

I had the great pleasure of seeing this movie in the theatre. To tell you the truth I had no clue what it was about going in, all I knew was it was anime (which i love), and it had won a bunch of awards around the world. I was very suprised when I left. It seemed like it was written for children, however, I think it added a lot of deeper contents for adults as well. I found myself thoroughly entertained throughout this movie. The movie had a very unique and well written story. The animation was very smooth and detailed (much like Princess Monoke), and the music was gorgeous, filling all the exciting scenes with perfect music. All the characters were well thought out and incorporated well in the story, and the dubbing for all the characters was superb. The storyline is kind of lax because towards the middle you lose sight of what the main story is all about, however the little side adventures Chihiro goes on are quite enjoyable, and are almost used as filler to make this movie longer, and to allow some character devlopment with Chihiro.

I liked this movie very much. I watched both the subbed and dubbed versions and I would suggest the dubbed, because it was well done, and I found the subbed to move a little to fast.