Magical spirits

The world Hayao Miyazaki conjures up in the Japanese animated feature Spirited Away is so exotic and in a state of such constant metamorphosis that you may have the impression, as you stagger out of the theater, that you've watched the entire movie with your mouth open. Spirited Away runs close to two hours, and there isn't a banal image in it.

Miyazaki came to the consciousness of American audiences with the magnificent Princess Mononoke (1997), an ecological fable in which the archetypal set-up--a young hero is wounded by a maddened beast and must begin a long journey to seek the cure--leads, unpredictably, to a struggle to resurrect the forest spirit whose life force has been devastated by the thoughtless assaults of humankind. It's a fairy tale with a Hans Christian Andersen imprint: a tone of mournful wonder.

Spirited Away is even more remarkable. The heroine is a young girl named Chihiro (voiced by Daveigh Chase). As the picture begins, she is moving with her parents into a new neighborhood. When her dad misses the turn-off and chances an improvised shortcut, they dead-end at a peeling archway. As they stand at this entrance to a long, dark tunnel, the girl has the distinct impression that the wind is drawing them in.