Miyazaki's "Spirited Away"

Terrific. Problem was, we thought we were going to the dubbed-to-English version, supervised by John Lassiter (of "Toy Story", "Monster's Inc.", etc.), but when we got to the theater, it was the Japanese language version with subtitles. That's kinda OK with me, but the kids were a little over their heads, bandwidth-wise. Especially since, as the reviewer below notes, it's a pretty complex story for a kid's movie.

The good news is that they're releasing it on DVD this coming Tuesday (dubbed version, of course). At the same time, they're releasing "Kiki" and "Laputa". Gonna be an expensive Tuesday for me, and not only because it's tax day.

It won the "Best Animated Film" Academy Award last month -- beating Disney's "Lilo and Stitch" and "Treasure Planet", and Fox's computer-generated comedy "Ice Age". I think I read that the other three had earned over $100 million each, while the US release of "Spirited Away" had only made $5.5 mil. I can't tell if the US releases of Miyazaki movies don't make money because they're marketed badly (on small budgets), or if they're marketed badly because they don't make money.