It has long been my custom to send out lists of good things of the year with my Christmas cards. I thought it might be nice to set this out one by one in my weblog. They are not in any particular order. Here is the twelfth.
12. The cartoon movie, Spirited Away (2001), directed by Hayao Miyazaki, has great charm and spookiness, though it begins better than it ends, $22.49.
I took the whole family to see it in a university classroom in Japanese with English subtitles last night. It seemed different than on video in dubbed English, but maybe I just noticed more details on the bigger screen and seeing it for the third or so time. I noticed that the Boilerman said "Good luck" in English to the little girl Chihiro, and that what was subtitled "gods" was dubbed as "spirits", and that even in the Japanese version the title is the English, "Spirited Away". Both versions are excellent. The movie started at 7:30. For the first part, Benjamin, aged 19 months, sat by himself quietly. Then he moved to my lap and sat there quietly till we left at about 9:20, not too far from the end. Amelia (4) and Elizabeth (3) stayed awake too, to our surprise, but they were ready enough to go home that we left early, saving on carrying effort. (I should mention that they'd all seen the video, so not being able to read subtitles was not as great a hindrance as it might have been.) By the time we got home, the girls were fast asleep. But not Benjamin, though he was eager enough for bed that he actually tried climbing into his crib.
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