{"id":1068,"date":"2003-04-13T17:25:50","date_gmt":"2003-04-14T00:25:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2003\/04\/13\/1068.html"},"modified":"2003-04-13T17:25:50","modified_gmt":"2003-04-14T00:25:50","slug":"review-spirited-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2003\/04\/13\/review-spirited-away\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Spirited Away"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Finally saw <cite><a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/Title?0245429\">Spirited Away<\/a>.<\/cite>  Sadly, I was not as enamored of it as everyone else is.<\/p>\n<p>It has, as one would expect from a Miyazaki film, gorgeous art, a wide variety of imaginative creatures, magic, sympathetic characters, an environmental message (much subtler than usual), and good animation.  But it never really engaged me, and it felt really long&#8212;too many plots and subplots stuffed into the movie.  Chihiro (the protagonist) seemed too whiny to me for the first 45 minutes or so; it made sense for the character to be scared and upset&#8212;the situation was really spooky&#8212;but I wanted the voice actor to provide slightly more range of emotion.  Given that she also did the voice for Lilo in <cite>Lilo &amp; Stitch<\/cite> (though I didn't recognize the voice 'til I looked her up in the IMDB), I know she's <em>capable<\/em> of a much wider range.<\/p>\n<p>Miyazaki in general is kinda hit-or-miss for me.  I loved the visuals and the flying parts in <cite>Nausica&auml;<\/cite> but always found the story hard to follow (though that may not be a fair assessment; I suspect it makes more sense in Japanese, and I did quite like the English-translated comic book); thought <cite>My Neighbor Totoro<\/cite> was charming (and loved the cat-bus); enjoyed <cite>Kiki's Delivery Service<\/cite> a fair bit; haven't seen more than a few minutes of <cite>Laputa<\/cite> or <cite>Lupin<\/cite> or any of the others; and I'm afraid <cite>Princess Mononoke<\/cite> didn't do much for me.<\/p>\n<p>There were things I loved about <cite>Spirited Away,<\/cite> though.  The soot-spiders were totally charming; I really liked Kamaji the boiler-room guy (visuals, character, physical body design, and the English voice acting by David Ogden Stiers); I liked the stop-the-frog effect used by Haku early on; lots of small nice\/surreal\/spooky touches throughout the movie.  Certainly not bad by any means; I just didn't fall in love with it the way pretty much everyone else seems to have.  I liked <cite>Lilo &amp; Stitch<\/cite> more.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Finally saw Spirited Away. Sadly, I was not as enamored of it as everyone else is. It has, as one&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}