Borrowing a corpse to bring back a Spirit

Perhaps the biggest surprise at this year's Oscar ceremony was the fact that so many deserving nominees won: Eminem (the very definition of a young outsider) beat the overblown politicizing of U2; the overblown politicizing of Michael Moore didn't keep him off the stage to say something that needed to be said; Conrad Hall got posthumous props for the American beauty of Road to Perdition; and, perhaps most stunning of all, the best animated film actually won Best Animated Film.

Ogino Chihiro is a typical 10-year-old girl; grumpy, petulant and unhappy about her family's move to a new town. After her father's shortcut delivers them at the gate of a seemingly abandoned lodge, Chihiro gets separated from her parents. As night falls, however, she learns that the town isn't as empty as they thought.

Hayao Miyazaki has been called the Walt Disney of Japan, and that designation suits him - to a point. While both produce high quality animation that pushes the genre beyond what it was when they entered, Miyazaki writes his own stories rather than simply stripmining and homogenizing old fairy tales.

How popular is Miyazaki? Spirited Away (125 minutes, rated PG, Buena Vista Home Entertainment) is the #1 movie of all time in Japan (the third highest is another Miyazaki film, Princess Mononoke), and was the first film ever to earn $200 million before premiering in the United States - of course, it only grossed $7 million in the States, but that's more a product of movie theatres' mismanagement than the film itself; more on that later.

Spirited Away is an adventurous fairy tale that draws from Japanese beliefs as well as some Western media. While trying to figure out a way to rescue her parents, Sen (it's a nickname for "Chihiro," based on some ideogrammatic wordplay) finds work in a bathhouse frequented by the many kami of Japan. She is guided through this wonderland not by a rabbit, but by the boy known as Haku (whose name, appropriately enough, means "white").

Actually, "Alice in Wonderland" surfaces several times as subtle inspiration, from the multi-limbed Boilerman on his pedestal filling in for the hookah-smoking Caterpillar to the distinctly lepine radish god who provides invaluable (if unwitting) protection and guidance to the young heroine. While her semi-invisible Cheshire may be less cat and more monster, Sen could easily trace her familial roots back to Lewis Carroll.

All of Miyazaki's favorite elements are present in this film: lost children and surrogate parents; magical means of transportation, including the wonder of flight; nature and tradition versus modern sensibilities; and beasts ranging from ordinary pigs to monstrous behemoths with multiple tendril-like limbs. Above all else, though, Spirited Away is a fable (built on a frame of adventure, thrills, comedy, romance and mystery) about growing up.

There is a sense of staunch environmentalism endemic to Japanese films in general, and Miyazaki's work in particular, which makes sense coming from the only people against whom a nuclear weapon was ever employed. It was part of Princess Mononoke, it was part of Castle in the Sky, and now it's part of Spirited Away. Rather than the weepy Gaia-mysticism of Final Fantasy, however, Miyazaki keeps things in perspective: while the encroachment of civilization on the natural world isn't "good," it's also not evil; it just is. In fact, while this story has some dark moments, there is no real villain of the piece.

Spirited Away doesn't beat its audience over the head with its message, but it asks them to think: if a forest has a spirit, what happens to the spirit when the forest is destroyed? Thanks to careless damming, the Colorado River no longer flows to the Gulf of California, instead dead-ending in the desert. What happened to the spirit who lived there, and what will happen to the people who relied upon it? Miyazaki wants us to consider the consequences of our actions, but that isn't the main point of his works.

When Disney released Spirited Away on DVD in Japan, the picture had a distinct red tint throughout the entire film. Disney, corporate entity that it is, claimed that this wasn't a defect with the disc and refused to offer replacements for the 3 million copies it had already sold, prompting a class-action lawsuit against the company. Fortunately, we don't have any problems like that on the Region 1 release.

The picture is clear and sharp, and the sometimes-muted color palette looks quite natural. Disney has included both the well-produced English audio track and the original Japanese (which will make any anime snobs out there happy). The disc opens with trailers for other newly released Miyazaki works Kiki's Delivery Service and Castle in the Sky. Before the film is a brief introduction from Pixar frontman and avowed Miyazaki fan (he oversaw the English translation) John Lasseter.

Also on disc one is the Disney-produced "Art of Spirited Away," which offers a 15-minute look at the scripting and recording process, and is fun at least for the what should be stunningly embarrassing admission by one of the co-writers regarding the search for a fairly important object in the latter half of the film.

The second part of this two-disc set takes us "Behind the Microphone" for a look at the American re-recording in a bit of Disney Channel filler material hosted by sitcom and voice-over veteran Jason Marsden, the English voice of Haku. "Select Storyboard-to-Screen Comparisons" lets viewers switch between finished animation and Miyazaki's masterful art for the film's opening sequence.

The longest special feature in the set is the otherwise unnamed "Nippon Television Special," which presents the audience with a 42-minute tour of Studio Ghibli shot as the team work overtime to complete Spirited Away under a deadline that is drawing too near far too fast. The features are completed by nearly a half-hour of Japanese trailers and tv spots for the film.

When Disney released Spirited Away to American theatres, they did so without the type of marketing blitz that usually accompanies their own "in-house" films. The film had proven its wide appeal, had become the top-grossing film of all time in Japan (knocking James Cameron's Titanic out of that spot), yet Walt Disney Studios Chairman Dick Cook saw fit to put it on only 26 screens nationwide. That number was down to seven by the time Spirited Away triumphed at the Oscars.

Riding that wave of free publicity, Disney expanded the film to 711 screens. The $1.765 million dollar box office that weekend was a 35,132 percent increase from the week before. People wanted desperately to see this Best Animated Feature, but it just wasn't out there, wasn't available. Disney is partly to blame, but so are the movie theatres; there are real audiences who want to see something besides the latest Adam Sandler suckfest. If theatre owners don't take the initiative to request films like this, they will continue to deny their customers and audiences will miss out on great films.