Spirited Away Review

I know that many will disagree with me, but I honestly did not like Spirited Away very much. Many compare this film to Disney’s Alice in Wonderland where a young female protagonist enters into a mystical world filled with unique and beautiful creatures. Honestly this story format just feels like an excuse to show an assortment of beautiful character designs and animations, but not much else. The characters and animations are truly and wonderfully designed, especially No-Face who was easily the most visually interesting and fun character. The scene where No-Face is eating everything and everyone in sight was a very fun and intense scene and I love the way his character was animated as he chased after Chihiro. I also enjoyed Haku’s character because his dragon design was very awesome and his character was very mysterious yet very genuine as he was always trying to protect Chihiro. But honestly, every other character annoyed me from start to finish. Many people commented on how Chihiro’s character really changed and matured by the end of the film but I honestly felt she stayed the same and the characters around her were the ones changing. Chihiro annoyed me at the beginning of the film and she annoyed me at the end. I just feel like there isn’t much of a plot, it’s just Chihiro doing a bunch of miscellaneous tasks just so she can find and save her parents from being pigs? What? The film also felt really, really long and boring. I just didn’t find the bathhouse setting to be very interesting and it felt like the characters were there forever. I really wanted to like this film, but I just…didn’t. To be fair, I’m not really a fan of Alice in Wonderland because of its character driven-story intention of, so I was mostly likely destined to not like this film. I just didn’t take much from Spirited Away and maybe with another viewing I will get more out of it, but for now I found it to be an overlong (annoying) character-driven story with beautiful characters and animations.