Spirited Away

Please join us for a FREE movie nigh on Wednesday Feb 24th at at the Digital Media Center at LSU. We will be featuring award winning anime Spirited Away.

Our guest speaker tonight will be LSU's own Jason Buch.

"After writing and directing the 1997 animated epic Princess Mononoke, Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki announced that he was planning to retire. Thank goodness he changed his mind. His new Spirited Away is a wonderful encore, marked by the painstaking attention to detail and artful balance between terror and joy that make his work unique…

Miyazaki's luminescent, gorgeously realized world is relatively safe for children (good beats out evil and love conquers all, though it's more important that honesty, courage, and personal integrity are always eventually rewarded), but it also acknowledges blood, pain, dread, and death in ways that other animated films wouldn't dare. Spirited Away is nowhere near as grim and despairing as Princess Mononoke, but neither does it take place in the effervescent, sunny worlds of Miyazaki classics like My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service, where there are no bad guys, only bad moments. It occupies a more adult place, where life lessons are frightening and hard-won. But it implies—with passion, humor, heartbreakingly lovely animation, and no preaching—that the hurdles make those lessons all the more worth learning." ~ Tasha Robinson, A.V. Club