Spirited Away
A young girl, Chihiro, becomes trapped in a strange new world of spirits. When her parents undergo a mysterious transformation, she must call upon the courage she never knew she had to free her family.
July 20, 2001 · Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
What's been said
Viewers and critics have received Spirited Away with near-universal acclaim, with Metacritic assigning it a score of 96 out of 100 based on 41 critics, indicating "universal acclaim," and Rotten Tomatoes carrying a 97% rating. The aspect most consistently praised is the film's visual imagination: critics call it "a fully imagined universe, populated by wondrous beings and haunting landscapes," and audiences single out the hand-drawn animation, Joe Hisaishi's musical score, and the sheer density of inventive creature and world design as extraordinary. The most common complaint, appearing in both critic and viewer reviews, is that the narrative can feel loose or arbitrary, one Rotten Tomatoes critic noted that "the plot starts suffering from déjà vu before it's even half over," and some IMDb viewers felt the story lacked conventional depth or character development. A notable detail worth knowing: Spirited Away made history as the first hand-drawn, non-English-language animated film to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and it was also a co-winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, the only animated film ever to achieve that.
Will you actually like it?
Answer a few quick questions and we'll predict how much you'll like this movie, not whether critics did. Each one targets something this film specifically leans into, where viewers tend to split. We think these are the questions that will best help predict how well it will align with you.
Where to watch
Trailer
