Spirited Away

Spirited Away is Hayao Miyazaki's masterpiece — Studio Ghibli's most successful film, the winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and one of the greatest films ever made in any medium or format. Ten-year-old Chihiro stumbles into a spirit world while moving to a new town, and must find work in Yubaba's enormous bathhouse to survive and rescue her parents who have been transformed into pigs. What unfolds is a bildungsroman of extraordinary richness and visual imagination — a world of spirits, gods, witches, and fantastical creatures rendered with the incomparable hand-drawn craft of Studio Ghibli's peak. Miyazaki's worldbuilding creates an entire cosmology of Japanese spiritual tradition filtered through his imaginative genius. The bathhouse itself is a dense, living environment of unforgettable detail. No Face, the radish spirit, the Stink God's transformation — every scene is iconic. Spirited Away is what cinema is capable of at its absolute best.