07 October 2002

Speaking of trying to describe the indescribable:If you haven't seen Spirited Away, the new movie by Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki, you must. I tried to explain it to a friend recently. There are movies that I saw when I was very young, that I haven't seen since and barely remember, but the few images and scenes that I still recall are charged with an almost terrible beauty and power, because they're my earliest memories of art. Spirited Away is filled with moments like that, except they're even more mysterious because you're seeing them for the first time. (Only one other film has ever stirred those earliest memories of movies in me like that, and that's Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter. Even there, it's only one scene, and it lasts for less than a minute.) Spirited Away is like a movie glimpsed in a dream that you wish you could return to. The amazing thing is, you can.

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