Spirited Away Review by Mark Morford

Some excerpts from a review found here.

Cartoons To Ignite Your Id
Can animated gems like "Spirited Away" save the ravaged American imagination?

And then along comes one of those extraordinarily rare and shimmering hunks of gorgeous pop-culture art/entertainment to make you rethink everything you thought you believed and about which you were sort of comfortably sad and bitter and resigned.

You know the ones. Those astonishing unexpected gems that somehow manage to break through your thick wall of bitter media-numbed ennui and slip right around your fine-meshed bullshit filter and hit you right in the solar plexus of hope and enchantment and maybe humankind isn't so utterly savagely doomed after all even though it probably is, but oh well.

Because this is when you finally catch the animated Japanese masterpiece "Spirited Away" on DVD. This is when you finally find a pop-culture art piece that speaks to multiple levels of human creativity and divine imaginative power, which you want to champion and cheer and exalt and bow humbly before and say to the jaded world hey, you know what?

And if you are anything like me, you see this movie and you are completely taken aback, dazzled and humbled and impressed, at once enthralled and encouraged and also realizing in one sad sighing punch how utterly and embarrassingly bereft American popular culture is of any sort of fresh and ingenious mythmaking.
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