Spirited Away/千と千尋の神隠し (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi) (2001) - Miyazaki's highly Japanese, enormously weird story of a girl

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A mystery-ladden poster for Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away

QUICK REVIEW:

The little girl Chihiro and her parents make a stop at a closed amusement park. In there, the parents get transformed into pigs, and Chihiro gets entangled in a plot with two twin witches, a giant baby, a dragon/boy and a slew of 'gods'.

The animation in Spirited Away is exuberantly detailed, ambitious and grand, and at times beautiful. But the film's content, - with the animalistic overtones and long row of characters, each one seemingly odder than the last, - was simply too culturally alien for me in order to understand the film.
It should be said that I am pretty alone with this rather cool experience of the film: Spirited Away won the Oscar for Best Animated Film; it has a whopping 8.6 average on IMDb, where it also rests on #36 (at the moment) in the Top 250. It is critically acclaimed and was a tremendous success in all aspects for its Japanese studio Ghibli and master director Hayao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke (1997)).
While I can't claim to understand much of the film on a level beyond its being perhaps the strangest child-centered adventure that I can think of, I was astonished by the story and its strangeness and elaborateness. I wouldn't want to have missed seeing Spirited Away.

Watch Disney's American trailer for the film here

Cost: 19 mil. $
Box office: 330 mil. $
= Huge hit
[Spirited Away's US-English-language version was undertaken by Disney and director Kirk Wise (Beauty and the Beast (1991)). Due to Ghibli withholding merchandise rights, Disney didn't market the film, which still managed to made 10 mil. $ in the US. The film was a huge hit in many other countries outside of Japan, particularly France and South Korea. It won the Berlin Golden Bear (tied with Bloody Sunday (2002)), Best Film and Best Song at the Japanese Academy Awards and Best Asian Film at the Hong Kong Film Awards. It was a colossal hit in its native Japan, where it beat Titanic (1997) as the highest-earning film of all time with a spectacular 290 mil. $.]

What do you think of Spirited Away?
Can you explain the film?