I saw it in the theatres twice and loved the subtitled version while I was lukewarm on the dubbed one; this is the first movie where i've seen both and had it really matter to the feeling I got of the film.

Jed's right about the soot balls. But it was the train scene that did it for me; somehow that captured just exactly what it feels like to be alone in a strange world setting out for who-knows-where.

Hmm. It's true that I often go into movies with the wrong expectations, and that that often colors my experience of them; for example, my expectations for Princess Mononoke were impossibly high by the time it came out, and I ended up disappointed.

But partly because of that experience, I was kinda hesitant about Spirited Away, which is part of why I hadn't seen it 'til now.

So I may well have had the wrong expectations, but I'm not sure what the right ones (for me) would've been. The plot was largely more coherent than I'd expected from the preview and various people's descriptions, and the sense of nightmarish world-changing-around-you in the opening sequence was impressive, but I don't think I had particularly strong expectations about other aspects of it.

I suspect I'd have liked the subtitled version a little better; I didn't know there was one. But I suspect I wouldn't have loved that version either.

The pacing is the main thing, and the profusion of plots and subplots. I think that in the US we’ve been conditioned to have certain expectations about how films ought to make use of time, which is why most of us (myself included) have trouble with directors like Tarkovsky, and even (to a lesser extent) Kurosawa.

I’ve been watching Miyazaki’s films since I was fifteen, and my major regret with most of the ones I’ve seen — particularly the ones that involve a lot of world-building — is that they’re only two or three hours long. The box isn’t big enough for everything to fit, and the things that do fit are crammed in too tightly for each to get the attention that it deserves. (Compare the comic-book version of Nausicäa to the film version, if you can find it, and you’ll see what I mean.) Spirited Away is one of the few that actually has the leisure to dwell on moments like the train ride.

Anyway, at least, unlike most of the mainstream reviewers, you didn’t complain about the fairy-tale logic. It’s okay if you didn’t love it. At least you gave it a shot. It’s the people I can’t even convince to see it that really bug me. :)

I saw the subtitled version on a Chinese DVD, I’m afraid. One of the best things about it is unfortunately lost now that I’ve seen the dubbed version — the subtitles actually explained quite a bit less of what was going on, which I think contributes to the atmosphere. (We never find out what the Radish Spirit is, for instance — a caricature of Gardner Dozois? It’s not explained.) But when it comes out on DVD over here, at least give it a shot.