Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Time passes: Miyazaki’s ‘Spirited Away’ turns 20

Dan Webster

Above: Hayao Miyazaki's 2001 Oscar-winning animated film "Spirited Away" will screen three times this coming week. (Photo/Walt Disney Pictures)

Time has always been a hard concept to understand. It passes so much more differently, say, when you’re in third grade than it does when you’re an adult.

Remember watching the clock in school and thinking it was purposely slowing down as it inched toward that moment when the final bell was supposed to ring?

Compare that perception to when, years later, you had a work deadline looming sometime in the distant future … until suddenly it’s the night before the project is due and you’ve only just started to do the necessary research.

This whole pandemic has screwed up our perception of time even more so. I say “our” but what I mean is that it definitely has for me.

I was looking online this morning, for example, and discovered that the Japanese animated film “Spirited Away” is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Immediate reaction: mind=blown.

It seems as if it were only yesterday that I was sitting in AMC River Park Square, next to the teenage daughter of my friend and former colleague Leslie Kelly, watching – and immensely enjoying – Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece.

And yet here it is, two full decades later, and the Oscar-winning animated film is about to play on the big screen again.

“Spirited Away” will screen on a couple of local screens – AMC River Park Square and Regal Northtown Mall – at 3 p.m. on Sunday, at 7 p.m. the following Monday and Wednesday.

This is, of course, a good thing. And in more ways than one. Master Miyazaki’s film is a work or cinematic art, one that Financial Times critic Nigel Andrews described as “the great treasure of 21st-century animation.”

Besides being merely good, maybe the movie will serve a dual purpose. Maybe it will act as a time machine and take us back to a more – relatively speaking – innocent era.

Hey, it could happen … during the film’s 125-minute running time, at least.