Watching 'Spirited Away' Again, and Again

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.