Describe a Movie You Enjoyed

The movie I'd like to talk about is a Japanese animated film called Spirited Away, which I first watched years ago but only really fell in love with when I rewatched it at the cinema a couple of years back, during a special re-release. I'm choosing it over more recent films because it's one of the very few I could happily watch once a year for the rest of my life.

That cinema screening is part of why it sticks in my memory. A friend dragged me along on a rainy weekday evening — I remember thinking I was too tired and nearly cancelling — and the theatre was full of people my age who'd clearly grown up with the film. There's something special about watching a childhood film on a huge screen as an adult; you catch all the details and darker undertones that sailed straight past you at nine years old. Half the audience was quietly wiping their eyes by the end, which was oddly comforting — there's a strange solidarity in discovering that a cartoon has emotionally dismantled an entire room full of adults.

In terms of the story, it follows a sullen ten-year-old girl called Chihiro whose parents take a wrong turn while moving house, and the family stumbles into an abandoned theme park that turns out to be a bathhouse for spirits. Her parents are transformed into pigs — as parents in these stories tend to be — and Chihiro has to work in the bathhouse, navigate a world of bizarre spirits and a witch called Yubaba, and essentially grow a spine in order to rescue them. Summarised like that it sounds absurd, but on screen it has this dreamlike internal logic that just carries you along.

What I enjoyed most, watching it as an adult, is that it refuses to behave like a normal children's film. There's no villain in the usual sense — even the frightening characters turn out to be lonely or misunderstood — and the film is happy to slow down for quiet, wordless moments, like a train ride across a flooded landscape that says more about melancholy than most scripts manage with dialogue. The hand-drawn animation is staggering, the music is gorgeous, and the whole thing treats children as capable of handling ambiguity, which I find weirdly respectful.

But the main reason it means so much to me is what it's about underneath: an ordinary, whiny kid who becomes brave not through magic powers but through work, kindness and remembering who she is. Watching it at twenty-something, at a moment when I was feeling fairly lost myself, that message landed harder than it ever could have when I was nine. I walked out of the cinema feeling lighter, and honestly, how many films actually do that?