Japan's 'Spirited Away' has the makings of a breakthrough

Despite its growing legion of devotees in this country, Japanese fantasy animation -- anime -- remains a niche item. Even Hayao Miyazaki's 1997 "Princess Mononoke" failed to be the kind of landmark hit here that many critics predicted it would be.

MOVIE REVIEW

MIYAZAKI'S SPIRITED AWAY

DIRECTOR: Hayao Miyazaki

ANIMATED

RUNNING TIME: 125 minutes

RATING: PG for some scary scenes

WHERE: Neptune, Uptown

GRADE: B

But the Disney people, who know a thing or two about America's animation tastes, are betting that Miyazaki's follow-up, "Spirited Away," will finally do the trick -- to the point of distributing their own dubbed version of the film (supervised by Pixar's John Lasseter).

Will it be the spearhead of the long-expected anime breakthrough in mainstream America? It could be. The film has been the biggest box-office hit ever in Japan (replacing "Princess") and recently won the coveted Golden Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival to boot.

It's entertaining and engrossing, its animation is stylish and sweepingly imaginative, and its script is less complex and overtly mythological than the fanciful environmental mysticism of "Mononoke" and could therefore appeal more to small children.

The story is about a 10-year-old girl named Chihiro, whose parents are mysteriously turned into pigs when the family takes an ill-fated side trip into an abandoned amusement park while moving to a new town in a different part of Japan.

As darkness descends, the park is transformed into a strange netherworld ruled by a touchy dowager and run by a variety of frog-like and other creatures, with humans decidedly at the bottom of the pecking order. Chihiro's object is to survive, find her parents and escape.


	In "Spirited Away," 10-year-old Chihiro tries to find her parents in a strange world, where she meets magical creatures such as Haku, left, a mysterious youth who can turn into a dragon.

If there's any handicap for American audiences as she goes through these paces, it may be in the film's length. Most of Disney's animated hits have been in the 80-minute range, and the more than two full hours of bizarre critters and enigmatic plot twists do wear one out.

Despite Lasseter's Americanized dubbing, the film somehow also remains incorrigibly Japanese. Its world of wood spirits and bucolic sorcery is actually closer in spirit to folk tale films such as Kobayashi's "Kwaidan" than to the culture of Disney's "Alice in Wonderland."

But, very much in the plus column -- and reportedly one of the chief reasons for its phenomenal success in Japan and Europe -- is its spunky heroine, who could be the most charmingly resourceful girl-child protagonist to grace an animated film since "The Little Mermaid."

And there's no underestimating director/animator Hayao Miyazaki's special touch as a visual artist and storyteller.

Like all his films, this one has the power to transport us to a different place. The spark of special anime magic here is unmistakable and hard to resist.