Spirited Away

Chihiro is ten years old, moving to a new town, and sulking about it when her parents stop at what appears to be an abandoned theme park and eat food that does not belong to them. By nightfall her parents have been turned into pigs and Chihiro is employed at a bathhouse for spirits, learning the name of a boy she knew before she forgot, negotiating with a witch who holds contracts over everyone in the building.

Miyazaki's most sustained act of world-building: the bathhouse is a complete ecology. Every background character has a function. The rules of the spirit world are internally consistent without ever being explained, because Chihiro learns them the same way the audience does, by moving through them, making mistakes, surviving. The film trusts its audience to keep up and they do.

Spirited Away won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2003 and remains the only anime film to have done so. It was the highest-grossing film in Japanese history for nearly two decades. The fansub community had it years before Disney's theatrical release. They understood what they had. The rest of the world arrived later and arrived at the same conclusion.