12 Movies In The IMDB Top 250 You've Probably Never Seen

3. Howl's Moving Castle

Howls Moving Castle
Studio Ghibli

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.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!