We caught pieces of this Hayao Miyazaki masterpiece recently on the Cartoon Network and then promptly moved it to the top of the Netflix queue. Miyazaki has been described as a cross between Spielberg and Dr. Seuss. That doesn't really adequately describe the boundlessness and playfulness of his imagination, but it gives you a clue.

Here's my clumsy attempt to describe the film: After mistakenly entering a mysterious spirit world, our hero, a ten-year old girl named Chihiro, sees her parents turned into pigs and then gets a job in a bathhouse that caters to ghosts and other spirits where she befriends a magical young boy, helps a free a sludge monster, matches wits with the witch Yubaba, and learns to believe in herself in the process. As you can see, it's hard to explain, but it's enchanting and uplifting just the same.

We've since started plowing through the rest of Miyazaki's oeuvre, which Disney has been kind enough to dub into English for US release along with other releases from the animé Studio Ghibli. (See more above.)