It’s the baggage Spirited Away carries as a Miyazaki film that may bewilder British audiences. Not that Spirited Away is humourless – it has some splendid gags – but it’s deeply recursive, uniting themes and images from across the director’s past work. Spirited Away is not a sequel or spin-off, yet it’s part of a one-man brand some western critics gloss as that exoticising standby, inscrutable orientalism. Spirited Away (2001)Then again, the film’s opening demonstrates the cross-cultural universality of fairy tales. Spirited Away has a similarly offbeat work regime with Chihiro tending Japanese gods and learning responsibility and purpose.