Word: chihiro
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...backseat of the family car, Chihiro, 10, thinks her life's job is to parry her parents' every wish. On a detour, the three discover what Dad calls "an abandoned theme park." He and his wife stop at a desolate restaurant to scarf down some food, while Chihiro goes wandering in the park. When she returns, she is shocked to find her parents have turned into swine. (We later learn they were bewitched because "they ate like pigs"; at this theme park, you are how you eat.) The frightened Chihiro realizes she is a prisoner in a sort of ghost...
Like Alice in Wonderland or Dorothy Gale in Oz, Chihiro is both amazed and troubled by the kingdom in which she is a captive. The bathhouse, which welcomes tired ghosts from the far reaches of the spirit world, is run by Yubaba, a wicked queen with a huge head; she seems inspired by Tenniel's drawings for the Alice books. Her dauphin is a gargantuan baby boy ("Play with me, or I'll break your arm!" he squalls to Chihiro); her enforcers are three severed heads that follow her like bowling balls with a grudge. But as in the best...
...case in point. Set in modern-day Japan, the film begins with a family's wrong turn during a move to a mountainside town. Passing through a tunnel, they arrive in a strange land where a spell turns the parents into pigs. That leaves their 10-year-old daughter, Chihiro, to save them. Nothing is as it seems here?a boy turns into a flying dragon, a paper bird into a witch, a sludge-covered bathhouse customer into a river god. But Chihiro learns the value of courage and determination and is transformed from a petulant coward into a triumphant...