Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1869 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-03-29
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Number of discs: 2
• Formats: Animated, PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 116 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
The highest grossing film in Japanese box-office history, Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away (Sen To Chihiro Kamikakushi) is a dazzling film that reasserts the power of drawn animation to create fantasy worlds. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and Lewis Carroll's Alice, Chihiro plunges into an alternate reality. On the way to their new home, the petulant adolescent and her parents find what they think is a deserted amusement park. Her parents stuff themselves until they turn into pigs, and Chihiro discovers they're trapped in a resort for traditional Japanese gods and spirits. An oddly familiar boy named Haku instructs Chihiro to request a job from Yubaba, the greedy witch who rules the spa. As she works, Chihiro's untapped qualities keep her from being corrupted by the greed that pervades Yubaba's mini-empire. In a series of fantastic adventures, she purges a river god suffering from human pollution, rescues the mysterious No-Face, and befriends Yubaba's kindly twin, Zeniba. The resolve, bravery and love Chihiro discovers within herself enable her to aid Haku and save her parents. The result is a moving and magical journey, told with consummate skill by one of the masters of contemporary animation. --Charles Solomon

Special Features

• Full feature storyboard to finished film comparison
  
• The Making Of Spirited Away Nippon TV special
  
• Japanese trailers and TV spots (with English subtitles)
  
• Exclusive trailer for The Cat's Return
  
• Interactive menu
  
• Scene access

DVD Technical Information:

• Language: Japanese
  
• Subtitles English
  
• Audio: Dolby Digital 5.1
  
• Running Time: 2 hours approx.

Synopsis
Directed by animation legend Hayao Miyazaki, SPIRITED AWAY is the tale of Chihiro (voiced by Daveigh Chase), a young girl who is taken down an unusual road by her parents while moving to a new home in an unfamiliar town. The curiosity of Chihiro's mother (Lauren Holly) and father (Michael Chiklis) leads the reluctant child into what appears to be an abandoned amusement park. Soon her parents are greedily feasting on various delights from an enticing food stand and are literally turned into pigs. The frightened and bewildered girl then encounters a young man named Haku (Jason Marsden), who explains what she must do to navigate this strange and magical realm. Finding employment in a hotel for spirits and other odd characters--including kimono-wearing frogs, lumbering tentacled monsters, and a mysterious apparition named No Face--Chihiro attempts to figure out how she can free her parents from the clutches of the resort's owner, a powerful witch named Yubaba (Suzanne Pleshette). In the process, she makes some very eccentric friends--and has to deal with some notoriously stinky customers.
A surreal adventure reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's ALICE IN WONDERLAND, SPIRITED AWAY continues Miyazaki's streak of groundbreaking animated films that also includes PRINCESS MONONOKE and MY NEIGHBOUR TOTORO. Succeeding MONONOKE as the most successful film in Japanese cinema history, this charming movie follows its own bizarre yet engaging logic as it reveals a cast of fascinating characters and jaw-dropping settings through stunningly beautiful hand-crafted animation. A movie experience like no other, SPIRITED AWAY is sure to enchant audiences of all ages, leaving viewers grinning with a giddy sense of wonderment.

Customer Reviews

kids love it
My 7 & 10 year olds love this and watch it lots. I was pleasantly surprised as it is not the usual box office, Disney wonder. I first heard of it when Jonathon Ross raved about it. He was right - the animation is great and the story is quite interesting (to me) and fascinating (to my children). Nice to see eastern cartoons that are not just kungfu rubbish, but are well thought-out.

I Liked It, But Not As Much As I Thought I Would
There are plenty of reviews on here saying how great this film is and explaining it's story so I won't do any of that here. I watched this film dubbed in English, so it may have lost some of the magic that certain films only have in their original language, but that still couldn't take away from the actual story in front of me which, if I'm honest, I didn't think was great enough to deserve all these 5 stars. Once you get passed the sheer absurdness of the whole thing, the film is enjoyable and very funny, but that's about it, I wasn't left with any feeling of enlightenement, or that i'd just witnessed one of the greatest films ever made. It's a cute film but that's it really. I'd like to see it again, because I really do wonder whether I've missed something that all these reviewers seem to have seen, but I can't really recomend this film as one of the greatest I've ever seen, because it just isn't. Good for fans of anime. For everyone else, approach with caution.

Extraordinary, beautiful, haunting and unforgettable
My young nephews and nieces settled me down with them over the August Bank Holidays to watch `Spirited Away', which I duly did to humour them, not having ever watched an Anime film before. As the film rolled I became increasingly transfixed and mesmerised.

This was no cutesy Disney cartoon but a deeply complex and beautifully intricately woven web of extraordinarily beautiful images with deep, dramatic undertones, resonances and subtexts. The image of `No Face' in particular stays in my mind and decorates my dreams (in the nicest way possible), such was its vividness and dramatic reverberation, as does the journey of the train through the swampy everglades by night.

I recommend this film unreservedly to all, adults and children alike, and truly envy all those who will be watching it for the very first time. The quality of the imagery is unsurpassed and the storyline utterly compelling. The film received many awards, including the second Oscar ever awarded for Best Animated Feature, the first Anime film to win an Academy Award, also winning the Golden Bear at the 2002 Berlin International Film Festival. Oh, you lucky, lucky people, to be watching this extraordinary film for the first time!