The film received many awards, including the second Oscar ever awarded for Best Animated Feature, the first anime film to win an Academy Award, and the only winner of that award to be traditionally animated or win among five nominees (in every other year there were three nominees). The film also won the Golden Bear at the 2002 Berlin International Film Festival (tied with Bloody Sunday).

Plot

Chihiro and her parents are moving to a new town. Whilst driving, her father gets lost, stumbling across what appears to be an abandoned theme park. The family crosses a tunnel and explores the park, finding the stalls are full of freshly-cooked food. While Chihiro’s parents are eating, Chihiro wanders off and meets a boy named Haku. Haku seems to be familiar with Chihiro and warns her urgently to escape with her parents; she returns to find her parents have turned to pigs and that the way back has become a deep river. Spirits appear and go about celebrating in the park. Haku secretly takes Chihiro to a large bathhouse, careful to avoid alerting the spirits to the presence of a human. Haku then tells her that she must get a job from the witch Yubaba, the owner of the park’s bathhouse, until he can help her recover her parents and escape.

With the help of the boiler room master Kamajii and a bathhouse servant girl Lin, Chihiro is able to convince Yubaba to give her a job; in exchange, Chihiro is forced to give up her name so that Yubaba may keep her in her service forever and is subsequently given the name “Sen”. Chihiro eventually learns that Haku is similarly indebted to Yubaba. Chihiro is put to work alongside Lin, helping to bathe and serve the most difficult spirits in the bathhouse. Chihiro is able to successfully bathe a “stink spirit”, in fact revealed to be a river spirit who awards Chihiro with a magic, healing, cake made from special weeds, as well as with gold. Later, Chihiro discovers Haku’s true form, a dragon, as he is attacked by paper birds controlled by Zeniba, Yubaba’s twin sister. Haku had stolen Zeniba’s sigil under orders from Yubaba. Chihiro tries to help Haku recover using the cake given to her by the river spirit, which acts as an emetic to the dragon, thus recovering Zeniba’s sigil, but Haku remains comatose and Chihiro decides to travel to Zeniba’s home to return the sigil, hoping to break her curse. Chihiro sets out on a lonely train ride across the spirit world – along with a wraith-like spirit called No Face who terrorized the bathhouse and tried to earn the affection of Chihiro, and Boh, Yubaba’s gigantic infant son that Zeniba has transformed into a mouse.

The group arrives at Zeniba’s house to find that Zeniba is friendlier than expected, and that the curse on Haku was placed on him by Yubaba, but Chihiro’s love and caring has broken the spell. Zeniba makes Chihiro a special hairband to show her that her friends are with her, and for protection, and No Face is offered to stay at Zeniba’s home as her assistant. Haku, now recovered, shows up to return Chihiro to the bathhouse, explaining that Yubaba will return Chihiro’s parents to normal and allow all three of them to leave in exchange for returning Boh. As they travel on Haku’s dragon form, Chihiro realizes that Haku is the same river spirit that saved her as a child when she fell into the Kohaku River, and the realization helps to completely break Yubaba’s control on Haku. At the bathhouse, Yubaba reveals that Chihiro must pass one more task as part of Haku’s deal: to identify which pigs out of several are her parents. Chihiro passes the test and Yubaba is forced to let her and her family go. Haku escorts her to the entrance of the spirit world, telling her that her parents are waiting on the other side, but to not look back or else the deal will be broken. Chihiro rejoins her parents, not once looking back; the family returns to their car to continue to their new home. Zeniba’s hairband is still in Chihiro’s hair.

Other Information

• Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
• Produced by Toshio Suzuki
• Written by Hayao Miyazaki
• Music by Joe Hisaishi
• Cinematography Atsushi Okui
• Editing by Takeshi Seyama

One of the big titles in anime, “Bebop” is set in a time when “astral gates” make interstellar travel possible. Humanity, decimated by a lunar explosion resulting from a gate accident, has spread out across the solar system, as has crime, giving rise to the use of bounty hunters.

Reeves would play Spike Spiegel, a bounty hunter and former member of a crime syndicate. Spiegel and Jet Black, a fellow bounty hunter and former cop, are the pilots of the spaceship Bebop.

Peter Craig is writing the script.

The show, which first aired on Tokyo TV and satcaster Wowow during the late ’90s, was influenced strongly by American music, featuring action sequences — both space battles and mano a mano fights — timed to U.S. melodies.

Reeves’ association with the project leaked in the summer when Fox and 3 Arts Entertainment began the process of acquiring the rights from Sunrise Studios.

“Bebop” marks a return to Fox for Reeves, who starred in the studio’s December release “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

Reeves leads cast of futuristic Bebop