Ten-year-old Chihiro and her family are moving to a new town. They become lost and come across what appears to be an abandoned theme park. But it is not really empty, but rather is the boundary between material and spirit realms. Her parents become trapped by gluttony and transformed into pigs.
At this point, Chihiro must navigate the fairy-tale logic of this spirit realm and rescue her parents. She is befriended by a young boy Haku (whose alternate form is that of a dragon) who instructs her that the realm is ruled by the witch-hag Yubaba from her magical bath house.
To succeed in her quest, she must indenture herself and yield her name to Yubaba. In the bath house, she befriends a number of spirits -- some of them rather mysterious -- and she unravels the secrets of this spirit realm, thereby freeing her parents and returning with them to the material world.
Like any fairy tale, the actual plot is bare. But the world is extravagantly imagined and so animated. But the logic it follows is that of the dream. The plot is associative, rather than strictly logical. One element leads to another, leads to another, not so much by causal necessity, but more so by stream-of-consciousness.
To my surprise, I found this movie to be, well, charming. I accepted its dream logic, rather than fighting it. And I thought it was beautifully conceived and animated. Did I want more plot? Yeah. But ultimately not to the detriment of the film and my enjoyment of it.
(It won the 2001 Academy Award for Best Animated Film.)
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