"Spirited Away"

If there was a tunnel you could walk through to get teleported straight into one of your favourite movies, which one would it be?

Walking straight into a fantasy world through a tunnel. This of course is a reference to the beginning of the movie Spirited Away. The protagonist, a little girl called Chihiro, is making a stop at a mysterious-looking tunnel with her parents. They decide to enter it, and on the other side are these vast green meadows and a mysterious-looking abandoned theme park. They decide to investigate, but they are not prepared for what's about to come... Of course, I'm not going to spoil the movie. If you haven't seen it, I highly suggest that you do. It's on Netflix and has an IMDB rating of 8,6.

I remember seeing it when I was 15 years old. I wasn't necessarily paying attention to it. I just thought that it was such a weird movie, and I didn't quite understand much of what was happening. When I was a little bit older I watched it again, and I learned that it was made by the director Hayao Miyazaki from Studio Ghibli. I got curious, so I watched some other movies he had made: My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and Ponyo. These are all great movies in the same style, and they really spoke to me. They're literally worlds you want to step into. Every time I feel creatively drained, I go see a Miyazaki film. I find them highly inspirational.

I also saw the documentary "The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness". The documentary shows how Miyazaki has a pretty old skool opinion on how to make movies. He really wants to take his time to make his films, and the studio isn't some mass-producing behemoth of a company, so it can sometimes take them years to complete it. When you watch one of the Ghibli movies, you can really feel a sense of depth, because of the attention to detail from the people who worked on it. I'm always amazed at the countless hours it must've taken them to draw all those separate frames by hand and then end up with this meaningful end product: a movie that we watch in only 2 hours. All that energy and attention to detail compressed in such a short time.