Food and cooking feature prominently in the films of Studio Ghibli’s legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki. They are central to the odyssey of young Chihiro in Spirited Away (2001) as she stumbles through a portal to find her parents turned into pigs after feasting, uninvited, at a sorceress’s banquet.
There are many other meals in this lavishly imaginative surtitled adaptation from Japan, which is meticulous in its visual detail and choreography, delightful in its puppetry, both meditative and whirling in its speed, and packed full of comedy and adventure. But it does come to feel like a gargantuan meal with too many dishes, all of them delicious, but a surfeit nonetheless.
