Spirited Away at the London Coliseum – Reviews Round-up

"Studio Ghibli adaptation is three hours of relentless spectacle"

"Hayao Miyazaki’s inimitable animation is brought to the stage in a crowd-pleasing, visually ambitious reimagining"

"Spirited Away is three hours of constant, unpredictable spectacle. There are so many scenes here, so many locations and characters, all imbued with a tremendous visual flair and kineticism. The stage itself is chameleonic – mostly working around a two-tiered, hut-like edifice that swivels to imagine the bathhouse’s various rooms."

"It’s hard to overstate just how good Kamishiraishi is as Chihiro, evoking the character of a pre-teen girl entirely through movement and physicality. When she weeps, it is painful; when she triumphs, it is electrifying."

"If we must have an adaptation, it’s impossible to imagine a better one than this."

"Studio Ghibli gem becomes a theatrical feast"

"Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece is brought to life with imaginative puppetry, wondrous music and moments of delicate poetry"

"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."

"While superbly performed, it is a harder challenge to animate its emotional life because it is so dominated by action and spectacle. The love story between Chihiro and the sorceress’s apprentice, Haku (Kotaro Daigo) is delicate and heartfelt; the scene in which Haku offers Chihiro rice balls is full of plaintive tenderness."

"Caird, who co-adapted the film with Maoko Imai, is an associate director at the RSC and this has the same fluidity as Totoro across all the elements."

"The music is one of the show’s greatest strengths and brings especially wondrous effects through its percussive accompaniments, with a kabuki-like feel that heightens comic elements. But more than that, it adds sweeping emotion and an epic feel."

"There is plenty of comedy but it irons away some of the terror that Chihiro feels in this world."

"Enchanting adaptation of an animated classic"

"Ambitious staging of Hayao Miyazaki’s film comes to the London Coliseum"

"Adapted by John Caird (who also directs) and Maoko Imai, this ambitious co-production between Toho company and PW Productions streams across the stage with boundless invention, using puppetry, design and Joe Hisaishi’s music (played live) to meet the delicate palette of Hayao Miyazaki’s animation."

"On screen, the elastic capacities of animation conjure this ever-changing world. Stage brings a different asset: the imagination of the audience. So, as the action tumbles around Jon Bausor’s evocative, revolving wooden set, an army of skilled puppeteers and actors breathe life into Toby Olié’s 50 puppets, giving us froggy bathhouse workers, a vast, putrefying god and ornamental vases with attitude."

"The show’s fidelity to the film is, however, both its attraction and its weakness. There’s delight in reliving key moments, but the episodic, incident-heavy narrative begins to tell"

"... at the heart of a great ensemble, there are lovely, magnetic performances from Mone Kamishiraishi as a funny, loveable Chihiro and Kotaro Daigo as her enigmatic helper, Haku (both sharing the role with several others). In the end, for all the magic, it’s a very human story about care and compassion."

"Look no further for your next family show"

"This spectacular Studio Ghibli adaptation at the London Coliseum has the wow factor"

"Whatever the sweet spot required of an exciting stage adaptation, John Caird’s new version of the Studio Ghibli animated fantasy Spirited Away sits in the heart of it."

"This got me in a way that the film didn’t, because the sheer persistent wow factor of the staging makes the story’s strange magic too palpable to resist."

"So if you find this dark fantasy oppressive for a while, stick with it. Our plucky heroine is put to the test but never gives up, learns humility and kindness even as the huge cast and wild sets and costumes keep you rapt. I found the RSC adaptation of My Neighbour Totoro, another Ghibli animation, impressive yet slow. This one keeps ringing the changes, even as it binds you in its alien world."

"It’s just like the film. It’s also a spectacular piece of staging with an eerie magic all its own."

"I was enchanted by Miyazaki’s magic"

"A stage adaptation of the Studio Ghibli film is weird, stylish and wonderful"

"Director John Caird offers an adaptation that is, sensibly, highly faithful to the film"

"His production, which is constantly revolving, swooping and lifting, is colourful and inventive, deploying a range of weird and wonderful puppets from Toby Olié, celebrated for his work on War Horse. I was enchanted by the chattering gaggle of tiny soot sprites who work in the boiler room and are expertly manipulated by a team of puppeteers."

"Amid such delights, there are problems. The English captions are awkwardly projected on screens that are too far to the side of the wide stage. The grandeur of the Coliseum space also affords us no close-ups of the shifting expressions, of fear, resolve and resilience, on the face of our young heroine as she pushes indomitably on to save the grown-ups. Yet the strange and powerful magic of Miyazaki transcends everything and holds us enrapt in its spell."

"This Studio Ghibli show is relentlessly inventive but is just too long"

"The show captures scale and perspective in a way theatre rarely achieves but it’s not entirely clear who it’s aimed at"

"Although Hayao Miyazaki’s anime films for Studio Ghibli give me the ick, with their nightmare tweeness and yowling urchins, this faithful adaptation of his 2001 hit is superbly done. Live action, music and bewitching bunraku puppets – created by Toby ‘War Horse’ Olié – combine in John Caird’s production to replicate the film’s baffling dream logic, where a young girl battles adversity in the spirit world, finds love and saves her parents."

"The show captures scale and perspective in a way theatre rarely achieves. It plunges us into rivers, zooms us into the sky and is visually ravishing throughout. Jon Bausor’s sets unfold and reform like origami and Joe Hisaishi’s original score is milked for its lush sentiment."

"It’s too sappy and fairytale-ish to be entirely for adults, too discomfiting and grotesque for some children. It’s less accessible than the RSC’s similarly inventive 2023 adaptation of Miyazaki’s My Neighbour Totoro, which transfers to the Gillian Lynne Theatre later this year."

"Even the relentless inventiveness of Caird, Olié and their team starts to pall though as the story meanders through yet more bizarre twists and turns and the acting gets shoutier. The stage adaptation runs more than 180 minutes to the film’s 125. So if you ask me what Spirited Away is really about, I’d say it’s about an hour too long."

"Meticulously faithful"

"Stage version of the Oscar-winning Studio Ghibli film falls short of enchantment"

"Already a success in Japan, John Caird’s staging is meticulously faithful, almost shot by shot, to its source material, and often looks lovely. But it’s missing the emotional guts and sinewy connective tissue required to make it properly 3D, its swirling imagery and meandering narrative remaining stubbornly flat. There’s always something rich and strange to look at, always something fantastical happening; but we often don’t know exactly what, or why – and too often, crucially, we don’t much care."

"At its best – the unnerving No-Face (Hikaru Yamano), a masked, black-clad figure who haunts the edges of the colourful action, hovering and twitching like an entity from a glitching horror movie – it’s captivating. At its less inspired, it’s a bit Muppet Show, and feels frustratingly aimless. Joe Hisaishi’s music, performed by a live orchestra, veers from lushly saccharine to gorgeously plangent, while Shigehiro Ide’s choreography combines an almost martial-arts athleticism with rough-and-tumble playfulness and balletic elegance."

"It’s not quite in the same league as ‘My Neighbour Totoro’, but the West End’s other big Studio Ghibli adaptation is full of magic"

"Whereas ‘Totoro’ is a story of a limited number of supernatural creatures crossing over into a recognisable human world, ‘Spirited Away’ is about a young girl, Chihiro, who enters a fantastical realm entirely populated with wild spirit beings, from an emo dragon-boy to a colossal overgrown baby. It’s a huge ask technically and to cut to the chase, this impressive but slightly starchy Anglo-Japanese Tokyo production – directed by John Caird and co-adapted with Maoko Imai – doesn’t pull it off with the same panache and feeling of ground being broken as ‘Totoro’."

"Indeed there are so many performers doing so many things at once that I found Mone Kamishiraishi’s child heroine a bit muted. Her Chihiro gets lost in the noise and dazzle of the world in which she’s stranded. The simpler, more human story of ‘Totoro’ allowed for bigger individual performances."

"The highlight for me was Hikaru Yamano as the sort-of villain No Face; it’s probably the single most important character to get right, and they get it right."

"A proper West End spectacle and it is really very cool that a foreign language production is taking up residence in London’s biggest theatre for four months. I’ve gone on about a certain other show a lot here, but maybe the real take home message is that these films really work on the stage – bring on ‘Princess Mononoke’, ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ and all the rest…"

"A lavish if over-stretched take on the classic Japanese animation"

"This adaptation of the much-loved 2001 Studio Ghibli film doesn’t quite have its magic, but the stunning costumes go some way to compensate"

"... given the huge success for the RSC of My Neighbour Totoro, there’s also now a palpable commercial logic to whisking Ghibli’s best-known titles from one medium to another."

"At least you can see where your main outlay (up to £225 a ticket) has gone: this sumptuous production features a vast cast, lush orchestra and Jon Bausor’s imposing set which, with its shadowy nooks, walkways and temple-like structures affords a kaleidoscopic sense of terra incognita."

"Totoro has a simplicity and strangeness that works like a charm on stage. Here, the film’s shimmery sense of wonder has undergone a rather dutiful theatrical solidification – the approach is authentic-feeling in its use of masks and puppets (Toby Olié), yet a whiff of the inorganic persists."

"At three hours, the dream-like narrative can feel at once stretched and too knotty, and less substantial than it initially appears – like Alice in Wonderland, without the detail and depth."

"Faithful but muted Studio Ghibli adaptation"

"Already a hit in Japan, this lavishly produced show at the London Coliseum has moments of magic but is hampered by an anodyne score and distracting surtitles"

"It’s the kind of dreamlike spectacle that’s supposed to connect with your inner child, but I have to admit that during this meandering journey through the spirit world my inner youngster kept muttering: “Are we there yet?”"

"Still, it’s an epic — directed by the Les Mis veteran John Caird — which, despite its intelligent use of traditional Japanese imagery, grinds you into submission."

"Toby Olié’s puppets are handsome, and so is Jon Bausor’s revolving set, which takes inspiration from Noh stage design. But the colours and lighting are muted, and you miss the fluidity of the animated film. There’s an eye-catching moment when the giant face of the sorceress and proprietor Yubaba is assembled part by part, as well as a rousing ensemble number towards the end of the first act. Otherwise, there are moments when the actors seem dwarfed by the London Coliseum’s vast stage."

"Stage Version of the Oscar-Winning Animated Film Is Less Than the Sum of Its Impressive Parts"

"... what this giant, three-hour spectacle proves above all is that while being faithful is wholly admirable in a relationship, it’s not the most theatrical answer to the question of how to adapt a masterpiece."

"It was Disney who cornered the market in staging animated classics, initially with “Beauty and the Beast” but then, in a shrewd move, with the considerably more uniquely theatrical “The Lion King” which is far more than simply a copy. There are moments where you feel “Spirited Away” wants to be more like the latter. But for all the flair of the vast design team delivering “wow” moments, for much of the three-hour show — 45 minutes longer than the film plus intermission — it feels closer to the doggedly literal, copycat nature of the former."

"... the show’s biggest problem crystallizes when almost everyone is on stage for the nearest this adaptation gets to a production number. Suddenly, instead of a succession of effects, almost the entire company is working in cohesion both singing and dancing, and the emotional temperature rises. It’s understandable that director John Caird hasn’t wanted to break the action of the notably fluid film, but putting a button on the number with the audience breaking into applause makes you realize that this is the first time that the show has been not just a reproduction but theatrical on its own terms. The trouble is, it’s about five minutes before the intermission, 85 minutes into the show."