It's hard to define best, as someone who watched a lot of it as a kid. For a pre-teen audience, Nausicaä of the valley of the wind, Castle in the Sky, Totoro,

It's hard to define best, as someone who watched a lot of it as a kid. For a pre-teen audience, Nausicaä of the valley of the wind, Castle in the Sky, Totoro, basically all the stuff before Princess Mononoke are great films. I see Princess Mononoke to be a film for people coming of age, where it's time to realize the binary view of the world is overly simplistic. Just don't bother with the dubs. Hollywood just couldn't get the right voice actors to act with the right voice to fit the setting and the theme. For example, the main characters dub for Castle in the Sky felt older than the original (or Cantonese dub, which was my first introduction). Pazu was supposed to be an orphan, a child worker in a frigging mine. While the film doesn't directly call attention to that much, it hints at it by having the original voice to be too young to even crack yet.