Watching <em>Spirited Away </em>Again, and Again<em> </em>
Spirited Away came out in 2001, when I was 8. After watching it in a Japanese cineplex, I stumbled out into a wall of late-summer heat, shaken by what I had just seen: the grotesque transformation of parents into pigs, the vomiting faceless monsters, the evolution of a sniveling girl to a brave heroine. The way a dragon could be a boy magician and also a river, how the story seemed held together by association and magic. Yet I also felt the compulsion to return to the cool dark, to plop down in the upholstered seat and submerge myself in the director Hayao Miyazaki’s world, taking it in again and again.
That summer was my first time back in Japan since my family had moved to the United States earlier that year. Everything felt, I shifted my anxiety onto the film, somehow certain that I’d never watch it again, at least not in the U.S. This was an era before Netflix, when we were lucky to find a battered VHS copy of Studio Ghibli’s at the local rural-Illinois Blockbuster, Anna Paquin’s twang dubbed over Sheeta’s voice.
