Top 250 Challenge: 138

Sen To Chihiro No Kamikakushi (2001)
Number 175 on IMDb's Top 250

Nominated by Me

Chihiro and her family are on their way to their new house in the suburbs when her father decides to take a shortcut along a lonely-looking dirt road. After getting out of the car and walking along a path for a while, they discover an open-air restaurant filled with food but with no workers or customers present. Mom and Dad don't hesitate to sit down and dig in, but Chihiro senses danger and refuses. As night falls, she is terrified to see the area fill with faceless spirits, but when she runs to find her parents, she discovers that they have been turned into pigs. She is found by a mysterious boy named Haku, who promises to help her. He gets her a job working in a nearby building, which turns out to be a bathhouse for the thousands of Japan's gods and spirits. Though the work is hard and the people strange, she does as well as she can. Her parents, however, are still waiting in the hotel's stockyard, and Chihiro must find a way to break the spell on them before they end up as the main course of some guest's dinner. Hilarity ensues.

Trivia: This is the highest grossing film in Japanese history.

The thing that makes this movie so cool is that unlike American animated films, this movie was created by one man, Hayao Miyazaki, he wrote, directed, and drew almost everything, so the whole movie keeps to one vision, instead of having a director, a writer, and chief animator, and so on and trying to make a consistant movie. Miyazaki is a master of the genre placing two movies in the IMDB top 250 list. The other one is Princess Mononoke, but he has also given us Howl's Moving Castle that was nominated for an Oscar. This was a very good movie.