Spirited Away

Imagine the evil cousin of Alice in Wonderland who got into heavy drugs in college and you're someway towards the haphazard nature of the Oscar-winning, animated fable 'Spirited Away'. The plot follows a sullen young girl, Chihiro, who is moving to a new area with her parents. One detour to a deserted fairground later, and Chihiro's folks have turned into pigs and she's been transported to a spectral bathhouse where humans are abhorred (it gets an awful lot zanier, trust me). A young chap called Haku gives her advice on how to survive this chaotic 'spirit world' and informs her how to get a job with the bath-house owner, Yubaba. A fairly nasty sort, Yubaba renames our heroine 'Sen' (as you do) and assigns her the worst jobs, which include washing the revolting 'Stink Spirit', and reasoning with a demon called 'No-Face' who insists on eating everything in sight. Er, yes, okay.

Easily the most hallucinatory movie that I've ever seen, 'Spirited Away' moves like a free flowing dreamscape, somehow jinking categorization or anything even resembling predictability over the course of its deeply trippy runtime. The Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki lets his imagination zip into hyper-drive as he conjures up a delightful, scary and downright freaky selection of characters and papers them with some of the craziest free-associating plot dimensions, which are bent only on colliding with ancient mysticism and moral fables. Quite frankly, 'Spirited Away' is a head wrecker of a movie, and one you've got to see. Stoners should beware, though, this one makes 'The Matrix Reloaded' look like a walk in the park.