12 Movies In The IMDB Top 250 You've Probably Never Seen
3. Howl's Moving Castle
Howl's Moving Castle is another Studio Ghibli production, and as such, shares an animation style and a similarly emotional story with Spirited Away.
It also shares that delightful oddness. There's a walking castle, witches, magic, people transforming into birds and a scarecrow called "Turnip Head" - it's got that signature Ghibli weirdness, but at the centre of it all is a young woman, Sophie, a character with problems and flaws that we can all identify with.
That's Ghibli's magic formula. Take the odd and the strange and ground it with real-world emotion. Howl's Moving Castle is just as overlooked as Spirited Away - maybe even more so, since it made less at the box-office - probably because Japanese animation just isn't as widely appealing as Western animation.
But look past that and you'll find a tale that's as good as any that Pixar, DreamWorks or other major animation studios have put out.