The film is strewn with casual poetry. Its colors, often blue and green, are muted and weak, like a tear-spattered love letter.

| Jul 17, 2023

Spirited Away is no secondhand fairytale retread; it's a fully imagined universe, populated by wondrous beings and haunting landscapes.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 17, 2023

The plot starts suffering from dèjá vu before it's even half over. There are only so many octopus men, stink spirits and pig people you can take before they all start to blend together.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 17, 2023

The fairy tale adventure is a wonderful exercise in storytelling imagination.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 17, 2023

Spirited Away... should connect with almost anyone who sees it. The atmosphere is gentler and more in tune with the rhythms of universal myths and fairy tales.

| Jul 17, 2023

Spirited Away stands as a work of unparalleled genius.

| Jul 17, 2023

Its funny, inexplicable transformations are closer to vintage Fleischer Bros than Disney.

| Jul 17, 2023

An audacious viewing experience.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 8, 2021

Spirited Away is the great treasure of 21st-century animation, and we may still be saying that when the 21st century ends.

| Sep 21, 2021

The magic of this film exists well beyond simple beautiful animated artwork and a moving, well-crafted story; it is how warmly it opens up so many elements of Japanese culture and belief to an international audience

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 30, 2021

Knock me down with a feather, it turns out to be terrific; maybe not a masterpiece, but certainly aglitter with invention, excitement and a mysterious kind of wit.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 7, 2014

Vivid, amusing and genuinely awe-inspiring.

| Dec 7, 2014

Writer-director Hayao Miyazaki, who previously made the impressive Princess Mononoke, has created a wonderfully bizarre world filled with a gallery of creepy, and some not so-creepy, characters.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 7, 2014

Chihiro's escapades don't always proceed one from the other, but let yourself go and you'll be swept away as well.

| Dec 7, 2014

Artful but not arty, Spirited Away is a handcrafted cartoon, as personal as an Utamaro painting, yet its breadth and heart give it an appeal that should touch American viewers of all ages.

| Apr 23, 2014

The result is nothing less than magical, a throwback to the very best of early Disney. If I can't remember the last time I was this enchanted by an animated film, it's because I was too young.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 23, 2014

It's an amazing work, filled with a visual intelligence that's meticulously composed and obscenely clever.

| Nov 27, 2013

Miyazaki's luminescent, gorgeously realized world is relatively safe for children, but it also acknowledges blood, pain, dread, and death in ways that other animated films wouldn't dare.

| Nov 27, 2013

Spirited Away has much to say about many worthy things: the life of the spirit, materialist greed, the importance of words, the power of love.

| Nov 27, 2013

Enchanting and impressively crafted.

| Oct 25, 2011