Consider this an entry for Studio Ghibli's entire output. But, since I have to pick a single example from Hayao Miyazaki & Co.'s truly remarkable catalogue, it would have to be the explosion of imagination that is Spirited Away. It's one of those rare instances where the poster's tag line perfectly captures the essence of the film it's advertising.

Spirited Away is the story of Chihiro, a young, self-centred girl who begins the film bitter at her parents for moving to a new town for her father's work and away from her friends and the life she knew. Making a wrong turn onto an overgrown forest path, they stumble across an abandoned, crumbling theme park and her parents, ignoring Chihiro's protests, decided to look around. They come across a stall laden with delicious food and start chowing down but when Chihiro tries to pull them away, she finds they've been turned into pigs. She flees, encountering a whole range of extraordinary spirits and creatures until she's found by Haku, a young boy working for the witch Yubaba, who tells her what she needs to do to get her parents back and return to her own world. By the end, Chihiro will turn from a self-centred, moody ten-year-old to a girl who "learns to honour her friends and her family by valuing herself." (Film Freak Central review).

Spirited Away also marks a stylistic departure for Miyazaki. His film prior to this, the excellent Princess Mononoke, featured many very well integrated CG components and a dense visual style, but nothing on the scale of Spirited Away. Once Chihiro enters the magical world of Yubaba's Bathhouse, the colours and sheer detail on display is extraordinary (remember, of course, that the vast majority of the film is still hand-drawn). While Miyazaki has always had a fantastic imagination and conjured up many original scenarios and interpretations on classic material, it's the sheer scale of imaginative force that makes Spirited Away a stand out. It's a quality the director would follow through with on Howl’s Moving Castle and even in the more sedately paced Ponyo (see my review for that one here).

In the hands of a lesser director, the entire thing would be overwhelming and the story would collapse under the weight, but not with Miyazaki, who is rightfully considered the world's foremost animated film director for exactly this reason. He moves the film from brisk, exciting sequences, to moments of contemplative calm and covers a lot of emotional ground that a lot of filmmakers would be too scared to go near for fear of giving in to sentimentality. Not so with Miyazaki, who, as I've written about before, always allows his characters to rise above sentimentality to a space where the same emotion becomes genuine and heartfelt. Just take the sequence where Chihiro helps Haku remember his real name as an example.

There's the wonderfully gooey stink-spirit sequence; Haku in his dragon form being chased by paper birds; the final test Yubaba sets for Chihiro – so many scenes that you don't mind giving in to the wonderfulness of it all and find yourself smiling like a kid. Miyazaki's regular composer Joe Hisaishi also delivers another excellent theme ('The Dragon Boy' on the soundtrack release), as strong as anything he's written for Laputa: Castle in the Sky or My Neighbour Totoro.

Miyazaki and Ghibli consistently achieve the sense of wonder and delight that inspires the likes of John Lasseter and Pixar to continually scale new heights, and Spirited Away is probably the best example of this amongst their many achievements. It was also the first anime film I'd seen after a long hiatus from the genre and it immediately inspired me to make up for lost time. Don't let it pass you by.

If you're already a fan, then this news will be more than welcome.