Stairs and Huge Radish Spirits
An early moment in Hayao Miyazaki's animated feature Spirited Away capably represents the movie as a whole. Our heroine Chihiro is trying to make her way down a long, steep staircase in the dark, outdoors, the gap between each step grimacing threateningly. She proceeds gingerly, keeping a hold of her current stair as her toes feel for the next one. Then something startles Chihiro, and she stumbles headlong down the entire staircase, never missing a step and smacking face-first into a wall at the bottom. She gets up, dazed but surprised and grateful for her good luck.

Now, there's a lot in this movie I don't get. I'm not sure why the radish spirit is so huge, or why no other vegetables get a cameo. And I don't know why the villain's baby is fifteen feet tall and has a bib but no diaper. Still, as often as I felt wrong-footed watching this film, I never quite felt like it would let me fall. Spirited Away is the kind of movie that works by transforming strangeness into reassurance.

Something's Amiss
The plot's pretty simple. Chihiro and her family, on the move to a new home, wind up lost in a deserted amusement park, courtesy of Dad's "shortcut." (Nice to know that some things are true the world over. I think I grew my first beard when my Dad decided he'd find a quicker way home from my grandfather's. I was maybe eight years old when the trip started.) Chihiro senses that something's amiss right away; her parents choose to chow on the too conveniently available food, in spite of the fact that nobody's there to have cooked it. Zap, Mom and Dad are turned to pigs, and Chihiro's drawn into the haunted night-world of the park. It turns out that the site doubles as a bath-house/vacation spa for all sorts of supernatural beings. Chihiro must de-porkify her parents, and find a way back to the waking world.

No Singing!
Were this a Disney movie, she'd be rapidly equipped with A) a cute animal sidekick readily translatable into plush toy; B) some arbitrary trinket to hunt for that would solve her problems without any real explanation or exploration of them, and C) an obnoxiously catchy song that includes the kind of profoundly bland catch phrase/ moral of the day that will fit into the word search on the side of a Happy Meal box. Okay, Chihiro does get a guide in the form of a boy who's also a dragon, but he has his own thing going on that may or may not co-operate with hers. Other than that, her quest is remarkably ordinary. She has to get a job in the bath-house, work hard, remain patient, and remember who she is and where she's from. No singing. (Credit where credit is due: Disney is responsible for getting Spirited Away distributed in the United States.)

This might sound like a slim hook to hang a story on, and occasionally the film drags a bit. But what it lacks in dazzle and jingle it makes up for in intelligence and subtlety. Nearly all animated films are, at some level, about the nature of fantasy itself. Spirited Away stands out because it preserves the disconcerting unevenness of fantasy, its misgivings alongside its charms, and still manages to give this dream-stuff a coherence and consolation. It will be compared, no doubt, to Miyazaki's other masterpiece Princess Mononoke, and it can't match the previous film's epic fierceness or the brilliance of some of its character designs. But Spirited Away succeeds in two deceptively tricky and potentially opposed ways. It indulges us in a kind of lucid dreaming, and persuades us not to take it too hard when we wake up from such a beguiling venture.