A wrong turn on moving day leaves a family standing in an amusement park that has no customers and no staff. The parents help themselves to food laid out in an empty restaurant, the offended spirits of the place put the two of them into the bodies of pigs, and ten-year-old Chihiro Ogino is left standing on her own.
The place was never abandoned. Spirits sleep there through the daylight hours and fill the streets once the sun is down, and a broad sea now lies between that world and the one the family came from. Released on 20 July 2001, the Studio Ghibli feature carries Hayao Miyazaki’s name on the original story, the script and the direction alike. Joe Hisaishi sat at the piano for the score and took the conductor’s stand as well.
Haku, Kaonashi, Makkuro-Kurosuke. The names that cross Chihiro’s path arrive with nobody on hand to say what they are. Adventure, fantasy, drama and the supernatural sit on top of one another instead of taking turns, so an audience picks up the rules of the night world at exactly the speed a ten-year-old does.
