Spirited Away (千と千尋の神隠し Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi) is a critically acclaimed 2001 film by the Japanese anime studio Studio Ghibli, written and directed by famed animator Hayao Miyazaki. Its original Japanese title can be translated as The Spiriting Away of Sen and Chihiro or Sen and the Spiriting Away of Chihiro.

The film received numerous awards, including the second Oscar ever awarded for Best Animated Feature and the only winner of that award to win among five nominees (all other years there were three nominees).

In the movie, Chihiro Ogino is a little girl who is moving to a new town with her parents, Akio and Yuko. She is clearly unhappy about the move and appears rather petulant. They lose their way and come across a tunnel, which they enter out of curiosity, unaware that it actually provides access into a spirit world—specifically, to a spirit bathhouse, in which spirits of the Shinto religion go to rest and relax.

The family enters what is apparently an abandoned theme park populated exclusively by restaurants, and Chihiro's parents, finding a place to eat, immediately help themselves to a meal. Chihiro is uneasy and hesitates outside, watching her parents eat voraciously. When they offer her some food, she refuses and runs off to explore more of the place by herself. She comes to a grand-looking bathhouse and approaches a bridge leading up to it. Suddenly, a mysterious boy named Haku appears on the bridge and warns Chihiro that she must leave before it gets dark. Just then the sky darkens and the lamps of the bathhouse light up. Haku creates a magical diversion and tells Chihiro to get across the river. Chihiro then runs back to the restaurant where her parents are still eating and discovers to her horror that they have been transformed into large pigs. Terrified, Chihiro screams and runs off in attempt to find the tunnel back to her parents' car. As she runs, ghostly spirits and shadows appear in the previously-deserted theme park and frighten Chihiro even more. However, she is stopped from going back to the tunnel by an ocean, which has replaced the grassy plain she originally crossed with her parents to get to the park.

When Chihiro's distress at losing her parents is compounded by discovering that she's turning transparent, Haku finds her and comforts her, giving her something to eat from the spirit world so that she does not vanish. He somehow knows her name without being told and helps her sneak into the bathhouse, which is managed by Yubaba the witch. He tells her that the only way she can safely remain long enough to rescue her parents is to find work in the spirits' bathhouse.

Chihiro follows Haku's advice, descending to the boiler room where she asks the human-looking, six-armed boilerman, Kamajii, for work. He rebuffs her, until one of the coal-carrying sprites (reminiscent of My Neighbor Totoro's soot sprites) collapses under an extra-heavy lump of coal. Chihiro picks up the coal and feeds the boiler, despite the fact that she can barely carry the fantastically heavy coal. Kamajii warms towards the girl and assists her in getting a job in the bathhouse by enlisting the help of a young woman named Lin (Rin) to take the girl to Yubaba on the top floor so that she can ask the witch for work. Lin helps Chihiro find her way through the labyrinthine palace undetected, diverting a fellow servant while Chihiro squeezes into an elevator behind a grotesque but benign radish spirit (daikon kami).

Upon arriving at Yubaba's penthouse suite, Chihiro discovers her to be a regal but monstrous lady, who dotes on an equally monstrous (and unfeasibly large) baby. Chihiro repeatedly and stubbornly asks for a job, and finally Yubaba consents, on condition that she give up her name. Yubaba expresses regret for having taken an oath to give a job to whoever asked for one. Yubaba literally takes possession of Chihiro's name, grasping the kanji from the contract in her hand and leaving Chihiro only one piece of her original 2-character name on the contract, in isolation pronounced "Sen". Sen is assigned to be Lin's assistant, since she is unwanted in most other areas of the bathhouse.

The next morning, Haku shows Sen where her parents are being kept (along with scores of other pigs). Outside, Haku gives Sen her old clothes and the card from her farewell bouquet of flowers at the beginning of the film. Reading the card, she remembers her name. Haku warns her that Yubaba controls people by stealing their names; once they forget their names, as Haku forgot his, they belong to her.

While at work, Sen has a difficult time adjusting to the work regime but wins respect by dealing with a difficult customer, a slimy "stink spirit" whom she discovers is actually a heavily polluted yet powerful river god. The river god rewards her with an herbal cake ball, or medicine ball, which acts as an emetic. Sen succeeds only with the help of a somewhat monstrous spirit called No Face, who is attracted to her because she was kind to him, unwittingly allowing him to enter the bathhouse against policy. The bathhouse seems to bring out the worst in No Face. Able to produce gold out of thin air, he feeds off of the greed of the bathhouse's employees. Eventually he goes out of control and begins eating everything in sight, including three staff members. While No Face is keeping everyone busy, Haku returns to the bathhouse in the form of a dragon, but he is in trouble as he is being pursued and attacked by a large flock of enchanted kirigami birds. Badly injured, he makes his way to Yubaba's quarters. Recognizing him despite his dragon form, Sen goes to find him but is secretly followed by one of the paper birds.

While looking for Haku, Sen encounters Yubaba's giant baby boy, Boh, who wants to play with her. She manages to get away from him to see one of Yubaba's servants, three disembodied heads called Kashira, trying to push the dying Haku down a shaft. The paper object that followed Sen transforms into a mirage of Zeniba, Yubaba's twin sister, who was chasing Haku because he had stolen her gold seal. The seal has a spell on it so that whoever steals it will die. Zeniba transforms the baby into a little mouse-like creature because he makes too much noise, and Yubaba's hawk-like lieutenant into a tiny bird-creature. She then transforms Kashira into a clone of Boh to fool Yubaba. Haku cuts Zeniba's paper puppet in two with his tail, causing her image to split and disappear. He then tumbles down the shaft, taking Sen with him, but they land safely in Kamajii's boiler room.

Sen manages to feed Haku a piece of the River spirit's herbal cake, causing him to spit out the stolen seal. The seal has a black slug on it which Sen squashes with her foot. Resolving to help the unconscious Haku by returning Zeniba's seal and apologizing on his behalf, Sen first returns to the bathhouse to deal with the out-of-control No Face. She feeds him the remaining herbal cake, causing him to regurgitate the food and three bathhouse workers he has eaten. His pathological gluttony is cured once he follows her outside. Using a train ticket from Kamajii, Sen takes a train to Swamp Bottom where Zeniba lives, accompanied by No Face and Boh (who shares a mutually helpful relationship with the tiny bird creature).

Haku later recovers from his wounds. When Yubaba finds out that her baby is missing she is furious. Haku manages to make a deal: he will get the baby back and, in return, Yubaba must set free Sen and her parents (The plots of the Japanese- and English-language versions differ slightly here: in the original, Yubaba and Haku talk about what's necessary to break the spell on her parents). At Zeniba's simple cottage, it is revealed that the black slug Sen squished was put in Haku by Yubaba. The slug was how Yubaba controlled Haku. Zeniba states that the only way the spell on her seal can be broken is by love (Haku's illness in the boiler room was the spell of the seal, and Chihiro's love actually breaks the spell).

Haku, again a dragon, finds Sen at Zeniba's cottage. Zeniba forgives him for stealing her seal and takes No Face in as a helper before seeing Chihiro off. The two of them fly back to the bathhouse. While riding on Haku's back, Chihiro remembers that she and Haku met before: when she was young, she fell into a river and somehow got carried to shallow water. She was actually saved by Haku, who was the river spirit of the Kohaku River, near which Chihiro used to live but which has since been drained to make room for construction. Upon remembering this, Chihiro tells him that his name is 'Kohaku River'; as a result, Haku is free from the control of Yubaba. At the bathhouse, Chihiro has to perform one last task to free her parents: she has to pick them out from a group of pigs. Emboldened with her new-found courage, Chihiro firmly accepts the challenge and correctly answers that none of the pigs are her parents. As a result, she and her parents are set free and return to the human world, after Haku promises her that they will meet again one day. Chihiro is considerably more grown up from her experiences.

When they return to the human world, the viewer can see that some time has passed, as Chihiro's parents' car has many fallen leaves covering it, and the once-clean interior is now covered under a layer of dust. Her parents have no recollection whatsoever of the incident. There is proof that the "spiriting away" really did happen though, because of the leaves, and a glittering hair tie on Chihiro's head, which was given to her by Zeniba, and by the fact that when Chihiro's father asked her if she would be okay with the move, Chirhiro responded with, "I think I can manage", showing that she is much more mature now from the events in The Bathhouse.

From Wikipedia