Spirited Away
Ten-year-old Chihiro wanders into a spirit world ruled by the witch Yubaba after her parents are transformed into pigs. To free them, she must work in Yubaba's bathhouse — a surreal establishment that serves the gods and spirits of Japan — while navigating a world of shifting loyalties, masked monsters, and ancient spirits whose logic she must learn to read. The film is a meditation on work, identity, and the necessity of remembering who you are when the world is actively trying to make you forget.
Spirited Away is the highest-grossing anime film of all time, the winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and the Berlin Golden Bear, and the top-rated film on nearly every list of the greatest animated movies ever made. It demonstrated that the Studio Ghibli aesthetic — hand-drawn backgrounds of extraordinary detail, emotionally complex child protagonists, morally ambiguous adults — could achieve global commercial success on the scale of Disney's largest productions.
Miyazaki created Spirited Away for the ten-year-old daughters of his friends, who he felt had no films made specifically for their experience as girls navigating a world run by adults. The bathhouse setting was inspired by traditional Japanese inns, while the spirit world drew on Shinto mythology and folk tales. Miyazaki has said the film was also a response to what he saw as Japan's culture of passive consumption.
The replacement of physical paint and cel with digital tools transformed animation production economics and creative possibilities. CAPS — the Computer Animation Production System developed jointly by Disney and Pixar — eliminated the cel-and-paint workflow in 1990. Toy Story in 1995 demonstrated that these tools could produce genuine narrative cinema rather than technical demonstrations, and the transition to CGI was complete within a decade.