Amazon.com The highest grossing film in Japanese box-office history (more than $234 million), Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away (Sen To Chihiro Kamikakushi) is a dazzling film that reasserts the power of drawn animation to create fantasy worlds. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and Lewis Carroll's Alice, Chihiro (voice by Daveigh Chase--Lilo in Disney's Lilo & Stitch) plunges into an alternate reality. On the way to their new home, the petulant adolescent and her parents find what they think is a deserted amusement park. Her parents stuff themselves until they turn into pigs, and Chihiro discovers they're trapped in a resort for traditional Japanese gods and spirits. An oddly familiar boy named Haku (Jason Marsden) instructs Chihiro to request a job from Yubaba (Suzanne Pleshette), the greedy witch who rules the spa. As she works, Chihiro's untapped qualities keep her from being corrupted by the greed that pervades Yubaba's mini-empire. In a series of fantastic adventures, she purges a river god suffering from human pollution, rescues the mysterious No-Face, and befriends Yubaba's kindly twin, Zeniba (Pleshette again). The resolve, bravery, and love Chihiro discovers within herself enable her to aid Haku and save her parents. The result is a moving and magical journey, told with consummate skill by one of the masters of contemporary animation. MPAA Rated: PG ("Some scary moments") --Charles Solomon --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. DVD features The most interesting extra feature on the two-disc set is the Nippon Television Special on the making of Spirited Away, not because it's significantly different from American making-of programs, but because the camera crew was allowed to film Miyazaki at work. It's fascinating to watch the visionary director explaining how individual movements should be animated, and even performing the little dance the frog-master does to welcome the No-Face to Yubaba's bath house. (Old animators describe Walt Disney giving similar performances, but no comparable footage exists.) It's also striking to see how intimate Studio Ghibli is, unencumbered by the tiers of management that burden American studios. The scene comparisons enable the viewer to study the storyboards for the film, which Miyazaki draws himself. These simple yet wonderfully vivid images capture the essence of a mood, a movement, an expression. "Behind the Microphone" offers a fairly standard behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the excellent English version of Spirited Away. --Charles Solomon
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