What a magnificent film this is! I watch so many movies that in the end leave me exactly where I started, with nothing to show for the trip. Spirited Away leaves you feeling genuinely richer for having seen it -- it's so full and alive, it makes other movies seem downright wan in comparison.

Hayao Miyazaki has directed only eight feature-length films in his lifetime, all of them animated and all of them featuring hundreds of thousands of his own key drawings. Almost none of them have been released properly for American audiences. Imagine a director at least as important and with as big an oeuvre as, say, Stanley Kubrick, who has never been exhibited properly to English-speaking viewers (perhaps Jean-Pierre Melville, for a better parallel?), and you have a good idea of what is being missed by a whole generation of moviegoers.